Paradise cleansed:
Deportation of the people of Diego Garcia
is a crime that cannot stand

John Pilger

There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole 
system works behind its democratic fagade 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 18th century. At least 
2000 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.

"Camp Justice"

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 2000 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 "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, 1000 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.

"Sanitising" the island

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 "sanitising", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego 
Garcia to be killed. Almost 1000 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 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 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 
($7,500) each, which did not cover their debts.

Justice denied

The behaviour 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 
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 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 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 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."

* * *

Stealing a Nation, John Pilger's documentary 
investigating the expulsion of the Chagos islanders recently 
debuted on UK television; his new book, Tell Me No Lies: 
Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs, is published by 
Random House and will be availablein November.