[Mb-civic] Stealing A Nation

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-10/13pilger.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Stealing A Nation October 13, 2004
By John Pilger 

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 Defence 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 eighteenth 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, 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 "sanitise" 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, a thousand 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
Ofice, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the
exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. (ours in italics).
There will be no indigenous pipulation except seagulls." At the end of
this is a hand-written note by D H 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 re-classify 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, governor of the Seychelles who had been put in charge of the
"sanitising", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed.
Almost a thousand 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," said 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 fertiliser. 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 recalled. 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 behaviour of the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In
2000, the islanders won an historic victory in the High Court, which ruled
their expulsion illegal. Within hours of the judgement, 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 re-settled. 

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
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 judgement. 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
authorise 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 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 Olivier Bancoult, "will not let this great
crime stand. The world is changing; we will win."


John Pilger's documentary, "Stealing a Nation", was shown on the ITV
Network in Britain.

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