The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

12 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 0 D uring the last decades of the previous century, two iso- lated archipelagos continued to fly the Union Jack thousands of miles from the mother country, out- posts for a handful of British citizens. Located near strategic territory, these repositories of precious resources re- mained prized possessions even as the sun was setting on the rest of the em- pire. In one of the archipelagos, the Falkland Islands, Britain went to war to eject enemy forces that claimed the territory. In the other, the Chagos Is- lands, the U.K. welcomed friendly for- eign troops, but exiled the islands’ inhabitants. Admittedly, the foreign troops only became the enemy in 1982, when a dictatorship sent them to grab the Malvinas, as Argentina still calls the Falklands. And in the case of Diego Garcia (the principal island in the Cha- gos chain), the United Kingdom was a full partner in making its territory avail- able to the forces of its closest ally, the United States. Even so, pressing the analogy, as has been done in the British press and courts, leads one to a very disturbing kernel of truth. In the Falklands, the inhabitants are white, with implicit rights to protection as British citizens —while the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, descendants of African slaves, were black, and weren’t even told that they were British citizens when they were summarily removed from their homeland. Why were they evicted? Because the United States wanted all the islands depopulated. A Lie Comes to Life We think of Diego Garcia — if we think of this remote mid-Indian Ocean outpost at all — as a reassuring sandy aircraft carrier of an archipelago, ready to launch planes on missions to the Middle East or to Southwest Asia. That role was conceived in the 1960s, when London agreed to lease Diego Garcia toWashington. And if both par- ties are amenable to a renewal of the lease prior to 2016, Diego Garcia might well continue to serve this strategic role for the rest of the 21st century. But the original agreement was based on a lie that wrecked the lives of the families who had been living on the islands for generations: namely, that the islands were uninhabited. To make this fiction a reality, the inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Is- lands within the British Indian Ocean Territory — known as Chagossians or Ilois — had to go. British writer Mark Curtis devotes a chapter (“The Depopulation of the Chagos Islands, 1965-1973”) to this shameful episode in his aptly titled book, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World (Vintage, 2003). Citing declassified documents in the U.S. Na- tional Archives — in which words like “sanitize,” “swept,” “sterile” and, yes, “cleansed” crop up regularly—among other sources, he details how the Chagossians were rounded up and ex- iled to islands over a thousand miles away. By 1973, the islands had indeed become “uninhabited,” except for U.S. Navy Seabee construction crews. Over the years, a number of Amer- ican officials — from Foreign Service officers in Mauritius and Pentagon planners to members of Congress — have been aware of this injustice, but have largely chosen to let Her Majesty’s Government deal with the legal challenges by this group of people who live on society’s margins inMauri- tius and Seychelles. Journalist David Ottaway’s reporting in the Washington Post did prompt the late Senator Ted Kennedy to conduct hearings in 1975. But virtually nothing has been done since then to raise awareness in the U.S. of the Chagossians’ plight. “Maintaining the fiction” of the sup- posedly uninhabited islands was the Diego Garcia: Freedom’s Footprint, or Enduring Injustice? B Y G ERALD L OFTUS S PEAKING O UT The U.S. lease of the territory is based on a lie: that the islands were never inhabited.