Located in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia has often been used for strikes on Iraq and Afghanistan and played a critical role in the US extraordinary rendition program. Unlike Guam, Diego Garcia has no inhabitants resisting the US military.All of the island’s residents were forcibly removed in the early 1970s by the British as part of an agreement with the United States. Most of the former residents of Diego Garcia were shipped to Mauritius, located over a thousand miles away. For the last four decades, former residents of Diego Garcia and their descendants have been fighting for the right to return.
The military analyst John Pike recently described Diego Garcia as the most important facility the US has. According to Pike, the military’s goal is to be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.
From the beginning it was a US plan. The US identified Diego Garcia as the site for a military base beginning in the late 1950s and approached the British to gain access to the islands and to remove the Chagossians. And with the help of a $14 million secret payment that we made to the British government, we secured their agreement to give us access to the island and then to forcibly remove all the Chagossians, which was ultimately done, again, on our orders.
It remains a British colony, actually the last created British colony. But the base is firmly a US base. It’s a massive Air Force and Navy base.
Diego Garcia so important largely because of its proximity to a large swath of the globe, from southern Africa through, and especially, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, all the way to South and Southeast Asia. But it’s been the control that the United States has been able to exert over the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and its oil and natural gas supplies, in particular, that have made Diego Garcia so strategically important.
Actually, members of Congress were not told at all about the base until the end of the 1960s, when the Navy went to Congress asking for an appropriation for the construction of what they called an “austere communications facility,” although, from the beginning, they had plans for a much larger base. But members of Congress were simply not informed about the expulsion of the Chagossians and were lied to, in fact.
At the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, when they asked about local inhabitants, they were simply told that the island was home to a few transient laborers. This was part of a public relations plan that the British helped craft, where they would, “maintain the fiction,” and those were the words they used—“maintain the fiction” that the islands were inhabited by transient laborers, rather than an indigenous people that the Chagossians are, who had been living there for more than five generations, since the time of the American Revolution.
“Before the military came, Life was very good. Everyone was enjoying life in harmony and peace, because we have our culture, we have our tradition. We all have a house. We all have a job. We used to work in a coconut plantation, where just after working our work, we used to go to the sea to fish. And there is an idea of share between each other. We all live as one family. And we have our culture, like our special meal, like our music, which had been taken [inaudible], because everyone wants to promote culture, but what about our culture? They just want to destroy it. This is why it’s so important for us to have our dignity and our fundamental rights back as all human beings to be able to live in our birthplace”, Olivier Bancoult said.
In the past six years or so, the Chagossians, as a result of the struggle that Olivier described, that they’ve been waging for more than four decades now, the Chagossians won the right to full British citizenship, which includes the right of a vote in Britain. So we’ve seen in the past several years about a thousand or more Chagossians moving to Britain, where some have been able to improve their lives a bit. Many are actually working in low-wage jobs at places like Gatwick Airport. But the diaspora has spread, while they continue their struggle to return to their homeland and receive proper compensation for what they’ve suffered in exile.
Since the very early 1980s, essentially no journalist has been allowed to go. And journalists have effectively been barred there for more than two decades.
Discussion with Olivier Bancoult and David Vine
Olivier Bancoult, is a leader of the exiled people of Diego Garcia and president of the Chagos Refugees Group. He was expelled from his native Diego Garcia when he was four years old.
David Vine, author of the book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia.
– from democracynow.org