Chagos Islands were peopled by some 2,000 islanders—more than there were in the Falkland Islands at the same time, as many as there were on Tristan da Cunha, Ascension and Pitcairn put together, half as many as on the island of Anguilla. They worked for a French-run copra and coconut oil company known as Chagos Agalega, and their little oil factories were fairly prosperous. ‘There were touches of old-fashioned ostentation’ a visitor reported in the late 1950s. ‘There was a château …whitewashed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages clustered around the green…lamp standards and parked motor launches…’
And the inhabitants were all of them British subjects, citizens of a Crown colony, entitled to the protection and assistance of the Crown and, in the early days of their new status, governed on behalf of the Queen by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, the colony’s first Commissioner.
But they were to be given no protection, and no assistance, by the Earl, the Crown, or anybody else. Instead the British Government, obeying with craven servility the wishes of the Pentagon—by now the formal lessees of the island group—physically removed every man, woman and child from the islands, and placed them, bewildered and frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. The British officials did not consult the islanders. They did not tell them what was happening to them. They did not tell anyone else what they planned to do. They just went right ahead and uprooted an entire community, ordered people from their jobs and their homes, crammed them on to ships, and sailed them away to a new life in a new and foreign country. They trampled on two centuries of community and two centuries of history, and dumped the detritus into prison cells and on to quaysides in Victoria and Port Louis, and proceeded, with all the arrogant attitudes that seemed peculiar to this Imperial rump, promptly to forget all about them.
Or would have done, had not David Ottaway, an enterprising reporter from the Washington Post , travelled to Mauritius in September 1975 and discovered, in a slum close to the Port Louis docks, an abject and indigent group of more than a thousand islanders from the Chagos Archipelago. They called themselves the Ilois, and they told a horrifying story: they had been kidnapped, en masse , and turned out of their homes, to make way for the American forces who, they understood, now had control of their islands.
Only a few months before the United States Senate, which had been inquiring into the need for establishing so costly a base (or ‘facility’ as the British insisted on calling it: even today the Foreign Office refuses to acknowledge that there is a base), was assured by a senior official of the State Department that ‘there are no inhabitants on Diego Garcia’. He was right. Such inhabitants as there had been had all been shipped out, were now a good 1,200 miles away, and had been strictly forbidden from ever trying to return home.
The process had started almost before the ink on the BIOT Order in Council had dried. In late 1965—after BIOT had been created, but before Lord Chalfont had agreed to allow the Americans to use such islands as they wished for defence purposes—a smallgroup of islanders arrived in Port Louis. They often went: a little cargo boat, the SS Nordvaer , and a smaller craft called the Isle of Farquhar used to make three-monthly voyages around all the atolls, and the Chagos islanders, whenever they could afford it, would make the four-day trip to the Mauritian capital to buy clothes and radio sets and fresh vegetables and toys for their children.
But on this occasion the islanders were given a piece of unexpected and shattering news. They were told they could not go back home. No ship, it was said, was available to take them back to Chagos. They would have to remain in Port Louis, and fare for themselves as best they could. They had been turned into
And the inhabitants were all of them British subjects, citizens of a Crown colony, entitled to the protection and assistance of the Crown and, in the early days of their new status, governed on behalf of the Queen by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, the colony’s first Commissioner.
But they were to be given no protection, and no assistance, by the Earl, the Crown, or anybody else. Instead the British Government, obeying with craven servility the wishes of the Pentagon—by now the formal lessees of the island group—physically removed every man, woman and child from the islands, and placed them, bewildered and frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. The British officials did not consult the islanders. They did not tell them what was happening to them. They did not tell anyone else what they planned to do. They just went right ahead and uprooted an entire community, ordered people from their jobs and their homes, crammed them on to ships, and sailed them away to a new life in a new and foreign country. They trampled on two centuries of community and two centuries of history, and dumped the detritus into prison cells and on to quaysides in Victoria and Port Louis, and proceeded, with all the arrogant attitudes that seemed peculiar to this Imperial rump, promptly to forget all about them.
Or would have done, had not David Ottaway, an enterprising reporter from the Washington Post , travelled to Mauritius in September 1975 and discovered, in a slum close to the Port Louis docks, an abject and indigent group of more than a thousand islanders from the Chagos Archipelago. They called themselves the Ilois, and they told a horrifying story: they had been kidnapped, en masse , and turned out of their homes, to make way for the American forces who, they understood, now had control of their islands.
Only a few months before the United States Senate, which had been inquiring into the need for establishing so costly a base (or ‘facility’ as the British insisted on calling it: even today the Foreign Office refuses to acknowledge that there is a base), was assured by a senior official of the State Department that ‘there are no inhabitants on Diego Garcia’. He was right. Such inhabitants as there had been had all been shipped out, were now a good 1,200 miles away, and had been strictly forbidden from ever trying to return home.
The process had started almost before the ink on the BIOT Order in Council had dried. In late 1965—after BIOT had been created, but before Lord Chalfont had agreed to allow the Americans to use such islands as they wished for defence purposes—a smallgroup of islanders arrived in Port Louis. They often went: a little cargo boat, the SS Nordvaer , and a smaller craft called the Isle of Farquhar used to make three-monthly voyages around all the atolls, and the Chagos islanders, whenever they could afford it, would make the four-day trip to the Mauritian capital to buy clothes and radio sets and fresh vegetables and toys for their children.
But on this occasion the islanders were given a piece of unexpected and shattering news. They were told they could not go back home. No ship, it was said, was available to take them back to Chagos. They would have to remain in Port Louis, and fare for themselves as best they could. They had been turned into
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