The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

J U N E 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 title of a Foreign Office memo to Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s gov- ernment in the late 1960s. Ever since, governments from all major political parties on both sides of the Atlantic have upheld it. As recently as April, the Times of London detailed how expert recom- mendations in 2002 supporting Chagos- sian resettlement on outer islands had been dropped from British govern- ment reports. Meanwhile, in the In- dian Ocean, the Ilois have led lives of desperate poverty on the outskirts of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. For another heartrending account of how the British and American gov- ernments cleansed the Chagos Islands of their population, see John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Em- pire (Nation Books, 2007). Pilger, a prolific Australian docu- mentary filmmaker, covered similar territory in his 2004 movie, “Stealing a Nation.” He speaks of the “vandalized lives” of the islanders, whose extreme “sadness” has been cited as a leading cause of death after their exile to dis- tant Mauritius. “The Footprint of Freedom” — re- ferring to the atoll’s approximate shape — is what the U.S. Navy has dubbed its support facility at Diego Garcia. The Navy people have even included an “Is- land History” on their Web site, with vintage black-and-white photos of the islanders who were expelled in “Oper- ation Stampede” to make room for the base. While there is no mention of their fate on the baseWeb site, a 1980s- vintage “Welcome Aboard” publication shows a photo, circa 1967, captioned “The end of an era, plantation work- ers ...” — backhanded recognition of a civilian presence prior to the Naval Support Facility. For his 2007 book, Pilger tracked down the late British ForeignMinister Robin Cook, who admits that “the episode was one of the most sordid and morally indefensible I have ever known.” And in 1972, during the ex- pulsions, then-U.S. Ambassador to Mauritius William Brewer wrote to Washington: “It is absurd to state that Diego Garcia has no fixed population. There is no question that the island has been inhabited since the 18th century.” Why the insistence on removing this small population? Had the Amer- ican and British governments wanted to secure the Diego facilities and its outlying islands years ago, what better way than to enlist the islanders as workers and security guards? One Foreign Office functionary asked at the time, “I don’t see why the Ameri- cans shouldn’t allow some to stay. Could they not be useful?” White Space and “Mini-Slaves” I have an old diplomatic passport that was stamped “BIOT” (British In- dian Ocean Territory; i.e., Diego Gar- cia) when I traveled there in 1989 from the U.S. embassy in Mauritius, where I served from1987 to 1990. The trip was related to that country’s longstanding arrangement with the British authori- ties and the U.S. Navy to employ hun- dreds of civilian workers for main- tenance and housekeeping chores on the base. No one from the Chagos refugee community, which from time to time delivered protest letters to Embassy Port Louis, was recruited for work on Diego Garcia. Mauritians, yes, and Filipinos, too. But no Chagos- sians, who might deem themselves “going home.” Mark Gillem, a professor of archi- tecture and an Air Force reserve offi- cer, reports in his study of overseas U.S. military bases, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 2007), that American planners have traditionally sought unoccupied “white space” around their perimeter maps. In the case of Diego Garcia, this quest was carried to absurd lengths: even islands more than a hundred miles away from the site were cleared of human habita- tion. Despite successive rulings by Brit- ish courts citing the Magna Carta and its proscription of “exile from the realm,” in October 2008 the Law Lords narrowly upheld the govern- ment’s exile of these forgotten “mini- slaves” — as the mixed-race descend- ants of African slaves, Indian inden- tured workers, and French and Eng- lish planters mordantly call themselves. As Pilger explains, both London and Washington have long played “pingpong” over responsibility for the plight of the Chagossians, pointing to respective concerns over British sover- eignty and American security require- ments. Writing the minority opinion in the Law Lords’ judgment, Lord Bing- ham cited “highly imaginative letters written by American officials,” which S P E A K I N G O U T Repatriating the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia would go a long way toward showing that the U.S. military can coexist with civilians.