Paradise Cleansed
By John Pilger
11 October , 2004
The
Guardian
There
are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works
behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of
the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments
lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs
along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no
further than Diego Garcia.
The story of Diego
Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway
between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64
unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon
of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing:
"American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the
uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)."
It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror
of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London
produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a
population and an evacuation."
Diego Garcia was
first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived
there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital,
a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a
film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos
islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where
the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed
lagoon, catching fish.
All this began to
end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia
was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American
bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage
for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls,
bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call
it.
During the 1960s,
in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with
two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize"
the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the
National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London
provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar
to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.
To get rid of the
population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders
were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned"
to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their
ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The
aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert
all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."
What the files also
reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul
Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote:
"We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise
was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous
population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten
note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds
go some Tarzans or Men Fridays ..." Under the heading, "Maintaining
the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify
the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make
up the rules as we go along".
There is not a word
of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about
being caught, writing that it was "fairly unsatisfactory"
that "we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently,
as belonging somewhere else". The documents leave no doubt that
the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet
ministers.
At first, the islanders
were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius
for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans
began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor
of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the "sanitizing",
ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000
pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American
military vehicles. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people
worked," says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s," ... and when
their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and
cried."
The islanders took
this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships,
allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and
furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra
company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced
to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles,
they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until
they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks.
In the first months
of their exile, as they fought to survive, suicides and child deaths
were common. Lizette lost two children. "The doctor said he cannot
treat sadness," she recalls. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters
and a son; she told me that when her husband was told the family could
never return home, he suffered a stroke and died. Unemployment, drugs
and prostitution, all of which had been alien to their society, ravaged
them. Only after more than a decade did they receive any compensation
from the British government: less than £3,000 each, which did
not cover their debts.
The behavior of
the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In 2000, the islanders
won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion
illegal. Within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced
that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because
of a "treaty" with Washington - in truth, a deal concealed
from parliament and the US Congress. As for the other islands in the
group, a "feasibility study" would determine whether these
could be resettled. This has been described by Professor David Stoddart,
a world authority on the Chagos, as "worthless" and "an
elaborate charade". The "study" consulted not a single
islander; it found that the islands were "sinking", which
was news to the Americans who are building more and more base facilities;
the US navy describes the living conditions as so outstanding that they
are "unbelievable".
In 2003, in a now
notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation,
with government counsel allowed by the judge to attack and humiliate
them in the witness box, and with Justice Ousley referring to "we"
as if the court and the Foreign Office were on the same side. Last June,
the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush
the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned
forever from returning home. These were the same totalitarian powers
used to expel them in secret 40 years ago; Blair used them to authorize
his illegal attack on Iraq.
Led by a remarkable
man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious
and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going
to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7
of the statute of the international criminal court describes the "deportation
or forcible transfer of population ... by expulsion or other coercive
acts" as a crime against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from
their paradise, the Chagos islanders, says Bancoult, "will not
let this great crime stand. The world is changing; we will win."