The deal to transfer the Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, home to a military base used by the UK and the US that plays a crucial role in the region’s stability and international security.
Under the agreement, the base will remain under UK and US jurisdiction for at least the next 99 years.
The UK government said that the treaty would “address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare” of Chagossians - the native people of the islands.
Several leading Conservatives have called the decision “weak”, with former securities minister Tom Tugendhat saying it is a “shameful retreat undermining our security and leaving our allies exposed”.
Since 1971, only Diego Garcia has been inhabited - by US military employees - after the UK expelled the Chagossians at the request of the US. Some moved to Mauritius and some have lived in the UK, in Crawley, West Sussex, since 2002.
The islands had been a dependency of Mauritius when it was a French colony, but both were handed to the UK in 1845. Mauritius gained independence from the UK in 1968 and has since claimed the Chagos archipelago as Mauritian.
The same diego garcia us and UK ethnically cleanseased and then polluted?
The same where they tortured all the animals to death?
From That’s When the Nightmare Started…
The next stage in the expulsion, once the US decided to proceed with the construction of the military base, involved the BIOT administrators telling the remaining population of Diego Garcia, in January 1971, that they had to leave. British officials emphasized the point by ordering the killing of the Chagossians’ dogs.
The same year, Greatbatch ordered all the dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed, an order that was carried out by company manager Marcel Moulinie. Moulinie described later how he first tried shooting the dogs, then poisoning them. Eventually more than 1,000 dogs, including pets, were gassed with exhaust fumes, from pipes attached to the exhaust pipes of US military vehicles. Talate Louis said her family’s dog was killed; they felt it was done to make them leave.
Great Behind the Bastards podcast on this whole story if you prefer audio.
Torturing the dogs isn’t the same as torturing “all the animals.” Obviously it’s bad, but eliminating a non-native species is not nearly as bad as if they had, IDK, pulled an Enewetak and nuked all the coconut crabs or something like that.
Perhaps if the island was already abandoned and they were clearing solely feral dogs by humane means, that would be one thing.
The dogs were the most egregious killings as they were killed to terrorize the local population to leave “voluntarily.” They were not the only animals killed, as the island was self sufficient before the militaries came. The livestock was also killed, as part of the process of getting people to leave was to starve them and letting them die of disease. The actual “marine protected area” was protected not to save animals, but to ban the locals from fishing. The islanders also had some of the dogs trained to help them catch fish.
First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate.
By starving them and denying medical care, they would eventually ask to be taken to the mainland, where no one was allowed to return. They weren’t able to take anything with them, and as the island had no outside communication, no one could send word back they were barred from returning home. Relatives had no clue what happened to anyone that left. The abandoned people were left in a country they had no familiarity, and left with only the clothes on their backs and no means to return home or even tell anyone they were alive or where to find them. They were former enslaved Africans and Indians who had won freedom and had a free society in a tropical paradise where they relied on no one but themselves, and they were kicked out of their second homeland to basically just have an old IOU cancelled.
In confidential minutes, the United States agreed to secretly wipe out a $14 million British military debt, circumventing the need to ask Congress for funding. In exchange, the British agreed to take the “administrative measures” necessary for “resettling the inhabitants.”
Those measures meant that, after 1967, any Chagossians who left home for medical treatment or a routine vacation in Mauritius were barred from returning. Soon, British officials began restricting the flow of food and medical supplies to Chagos. As conditions deteriorated, more islanders began leaving.
The authorities soon ordered the remaining Chagossians — generally allowed no more than a single box of belongings and a sleeping mat — onto overcrowded cargo ships destined for Mauritius and the Seychelles. By 1973, the last Chagossians were gone.
The rounding up and killing of the animals in front of the residents could definitely be taken as implying “you’re next” to former enslaved people.
Yes, I know they rounded up and killed people’s pets and abused the people and whatnot, and it’s been a terrible abusive travesty. I’ve actually been aware of what happened to the Chagossians for years now, long before reading your comment.
My point was just that it was already plenty egregious and inhumane enough without exaggerating. When you say “all the animals” it makes it sound like they annihilated the entire ecosystem, which was within the realm of possibility (again: see Pacific nuclear testing) and therefore possible for someone to misinterpret as literal instead of hyperbole, but not actually what happened.
The solution to this always seemed so obvious (allow the return of the people) that I’ve always wondered why the Americans requested the removal of the locals In the first place.
Because the security of Diego Garcia is that much easier to enforce when only the people you have vetted are allowed to be there. If no one lives on the islands, then any unidentified boat is an obvious security threat. But with the islands inhabited, that boat could just be a local fisherman slightly off course.
Also, it’s a lot easier to do sketchy shit in your top secret military base in the middle of the ocean if there’s no one within ~1000 miles that isn’t already involved.
Probably up to some dodgy shit there and didn’t want any onlookers hanging about.
Nobody’s talking about the real cost, cool tech startups that made their name around a fancy
.iodomain name!If you haven’t already, watch John Pilger’s documentary ‘Stealing a Nation’. I think it is available on YouTube.
Finally.
I really hope that this doesn’t affect the ocean nature reserves around them.
While I also hope the wildlife is cared for, the protected zone was not established for altruistic reasons, but rather UK asserting control of natural resources of Mauritius and/or the inhabitants of Chagos to remove them from their homes.
A US diplomatic cable dated May 2009, disclosed by WikiLeaks, revealed that a Foreign Office official had told the Americans that a decision to set up a “marine protected area” would “effectively end the islanders’ resettlement claims”. The official, identified as Colin Roberts, is quoted as saying that “according to the HMG’s [Her Majesty’s government’s] current thinking on the reserve, there would be ‘no human footprints’ or ‘Man Fridays’” on the British Indian Ocean Territory uninhabited islands."
A US state department official commented: “Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed, as the FCO’s Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT.”
I am not well informed about Mauritius’s record on the environment, but I’m not a fan of what the UK and US militaries did to establish this zone.
You’ve conflated the military control of the area with the setting up of the conservation areas. Charles Clover, a reporter and conservationist, writes a detailed account of getting these areas set up in his (frankly brilliant) book Rewilding the Sea, by badgering and leveraging contacts within the admiralty, coming to agreements with local fishermen to ensure their livelihood and financial security, and generally fighting an up-hill battle to set up a world-first conservation area. He addresses the controversies around the Chagos island in his book, and states that while he wholeheartedly disagrees with what is essentially a military occupation of the islands, he’s not above using that situation to achieve the environmental protection he was aiming for.
