Earlier this month, there was a small but hugely significant demonstration outside Number 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
A group of islanders from the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean asked the government to stop preventing them from returning home. It is something they have been asking the British for forty years.
It was in 1966 that that the British started forcibly removing some 2000 islanders from their beautiful homeland of coral atolls that lies midway between Africa and Asia.
The British had just done a secret deal with the Americans, letting them use the main island, Diego Garcia, as a strategically-positioned airbase to counter the perceived Soviet threat for a period of fifty years. In return the British got access to American nuclear missiles at a greatly reduced cost. A non-negotiable part of the deal was the eviction of the local population at whatever the human cost.
So began yet another disgraceful episode in British foreign policy – an injustice that burns brightly to this day. Veteran investigative journalist, John Pilger, writing in his book “Freedom Next Time” which was published last year, describes how “Not only was their homeland stolen from them, they were taken out of history. Until recently, the [British] Foreign Office website denied their very existence”.
Documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from the time show the deceit the British planned. Internal FCO documents described how any deportations should be “timed to attract the least attention and should have some logical cover where possible worked out in advance [otherwise] they will arouse suspicion as to their purpose”.
Other documents argued that once the local population had been removed, the British would present to the outside world “a scenario in which there were no permanent inhabitants on the archipelago”. This they did. The FCO wrote to the British Representative at the UN asking him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagros Islands were “uninhabited when the United Kingdom first acquired them”. This he subsequently did too.
One document, written by a legal advisor to the FCO in 1968, was called “Maintaining the Fiction”. The “fiction was that the local people were “only a floating population” because this would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population”. This was despite the fact that the local population had lived there for generations.
Over a number of years, the islanders were removed and barred from returning. Their story is absolutely heart-breaking. The islanders were literally just dumped in the capitol of Mauritius, St. Luis. They received no help from the British in resettling them. For a people who had lived and survived peacefully by fishing and practicing subsidence agriculture, they suddenly had nothing: no homes, no jobs, no way of making a living. Moreover, much worse, is that they had no way of returning to their beloved homeland.
Over the following years, the exiled islanders died of neglect, poverty, or suicide. One islander, Lizette Talate’s two children died within days of each other. They “died of sadness” she recalls.
It is a story that is repeated. Another islander, Loius Onezime lives in cramped appalling conditions in St Louis, with a leaking roof, and no kitchen. His family often goes hungry. His young wife died of a heart attack. “She died of sadness”, he told John Pilger last year.
It is a reoccurring theme of the islanders. Sadness is killing them, one by one. The lawyer representing the islanders in London, Richard Gifford, told the Times newspaper earlier this month. “I’ve lost count of the old folk I’ve met who have subsequently died broken-hearted at the fact they couldn’t see their beloved homeland.”
So far it has been a forty-year fruitless fight for the islanders to realize their dream of going home. In 1975, the islanders petitioned the British High Commission, complaining how they used to “live free” and how “we were not dying of hunger”… “Here in Mauritius we, being mini-slaves, don’t get anybody to help us. We are at a loss not knowing what to do.”
In 1982, a group of the most impoverished islanders accepted a “full and final” settlement from the British of £4 million, which equates to less than £3,000 a head, in compensation. Many of the illiterate islanders signed the document, unable to read what they had just signed and not knowing that they had just renounced their right to return home.
John Pilger points out the bitter irony at the time. In 1982, whilst the British government offered a paltry amount of money to the 2000 black Chagossians it had illegally evicted from their homeland, it was spending £2 billion protecting some 2000 white islanders of the Falklands Islands against the invading Argentineans.
Three times in the last few years the islanders have won their legal case in the courts, only to be rebuked again by the British. In 2000, the High Court in London ruled that the islanders’ “wholesale removal was an “abject legal failure”. After the verdict, the British government accepted the Chagossians’ right to return to any of the islands except Diego Garcia.
However, then came September 11th and the islands of Diego Garcia increased in importance to the Americans due to its strategic geographical location in the new “War on Terror”. It is from Diego Garcia that B52 bomber launch bombing raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is there also that it is rumoured the CIA has secretly been holding Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders at a secret prison camp. The Americans do not want anyone living even remotely close to their secret base. So now even the outlying islands –once the proposed place the islanders could return to – is off limits to the islanders.
In 2004 the British government once again removed the right of the islanders to return home. In 2006 the High Court ruled that the Government’s move was unlawful and “repugnant”. In May this year the Court of Appeal agreed. It concluded that Britain’s actions had negated “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings, the freedom to return to one’s homeland”.
But still the British government refused to allow the islanders to return. The government had until this month to decide whether they would fight the latest legal judgment. Days before the deadline, a selection of British MPs urged Gordon Brown to accept “the right of the Chagossians to return to their islands”. The letter argued that any further action by the British government “would waste more public funds, delay justice for the Chagossians” and “expose” Gordon Brown’s words on the right to liberty as “hollow”.
Just days later, just as they had forty years earlier, the British government used political events to cover up its continuing abuse of the Chagossians. On the same day as one of the most important events in the British political calendar – where the Queen opens the new session of parliament - the government quietly let slip that it intended to appeal again and continue the islanders’ plight.
It is difficult to overestimate the cynical nature of this move. The British government knows that many of the islanders are getting older and dying. Of the 2,000 evicted only 700 are still alive. It could well be another year before the islanders receive the next legal judgment by which time more will have died. After that there could be two or three more years of legal wranglings as to who is going to pay the meager cost of re-housing the islanders.
Standing outside Downing Street last weekend was Hengride Permal, of the Chagossian Islands Community Association. Standing dignified and tall he said simply: “We want the government to pay us compensation for 40 years of pain and suffering, and 40 years of exile. We want Gordon Brown to take action and withdraw the appeal. We want to go home to our island.”
Come on Gordon. Give up the fight. Let them go home to live in peace. Before another islander dies of a broken heart.
Earlier this month, there was a small but hugely significant demonstration outside Number 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
A group of islanders from the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean asked the government to stop preventing them from returning home. It is something they have been asking the British for forty years.
It was in 1966 that that the British started forcibly removing some 2000 islanders from their beautiful homeland of coral atolls that lies midway between Africa and Asia.
The British had just done a secret deal with the Americans, letting them use the main island, Diego Garcia, as a strategically-positioned airbase to counter the perceived Soviet threat for a period of fifty years. In return the British got access to American nuclear missiles at a greatly reduced cost. A non-negotiable part of the deal was the eviction of the local population at whatever the human cost.
So began yet another disgraceful episode in British foreign policy – an injustice that burns brightly to this day. Veteran investigative journalist, John Pilger, writing in his book “Freedom Next Time” which was published last year, describes how “Not only was their homeland stolen from them, they were taken out of history. Until recently, the [British] Foreign Office website denied their very existence”.
Documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from the time show the deceit the British planned. Internal FCO documents described how any deportations should be “timed to attract the least attention and should have some logical cover where possible worked out in advance [otherwise] they will arouse suspicion as to their purpose”.
Other documents argued that once the local population had been removed, the British would present to the outside world “a scenario in which there were no permanent inhabitants on the archipelago”. This they did. The FCO wrote to the British Representative at the UN asking him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagros Islands were “uninhabited when the United Kingdom first acquired them”. This he subsequently did too.
One document, written by a legal advisor to the FCO in 1968, was called “Maintaining the Fiction”. The “fiction was that the local people were “only a floating population” because this would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population”. This was despite the fact that the local population had lived there for generations.
Over a number of years, the islanders were removed and barred from returning. Their story is absolutely heart-breaking. The islanders were literally just dumped in the capitol of Mauritius, St. Luis. They received no help from the British in resettling them. For a people who had lived and survived peacefully by fishing and practicing subsidence agriculture, they suddenly had nothing: no homes, no jobs, no way of making a living. Moreover, much worse, is that they had no way of returning to their beloved homeland.
Over the following years, the exiled islanders died of neglect, poverty, or suicide. One islander, Lizette Talate’s two children died within days of each other. They “died of sadness” she recalls.
It is a story that is repeated. Another islander, Loius Onezime lives in cramped appalling conditions in St Louis, with a leaking roof, and no kitchen. His family often goes hungry. His young wife died of a heart attack. “She died of sadness”, he told John Pilger last year.
It is a reoccurring theme of the islanders. Sadness is killing them, one by one. The lawyer representing the islanders in London, Richard Gifford, told the Times newspaper earlier this month. “I’ve lost count of the old folk I’ve met who have subsequently died broken-hearted at the fact they couldn’t see their beloved homeland.”
So far it has been a forty-year fruitless fight for the islanders to realize their dream of going home. In 1975, the islanders petitioned the British High Commission, complaining how they used to “live free” and how “we were not dying of hunger”… “Here in Mauritius we, being mini-slaves, don’t get anybody to help us. We are at a loss not knowing what to do.”
In 1982, a group of the most impoverished islanders accepted a “full and final” settlement from the British of £4 million, which equates to less than £3,000 a head, in compensation. Many of the illiterate islanders signed the document, unable to read what they had just signed and not knowing that they had just renounced their right to return home.
John Pilger points out the bitter irony at the time. In 1982, whilst the British government offered a paltry amount of money to the 2000 black Chagossians it had illegally evicted from their homeland, it was spending £2 billion protecting some 2000 white islanders of the Falklands Islands against the invading Argentineans.
Three times in the last few years the islanders have won their legal case in the courts, only to be rebuked again by the British. In 2000, the High Court in London ruled that the islanders’ “wholesale removal was an “abject legal failure”. After the verdict, the British government accepted the Chagossians’ right to return to any of the islands except Diego Garcia.
However, then came September 11th and the islands of Diego Garcia increased in importance to the Americans due to its strategic geographical location in the new “War on Terror”. It is from Diego Garcia that B52 bomber launch bombing raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is there also that it is rumoured the CIA has secretly been holding Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders at a secret prison camp. The Americans do not want anyone living even remotely close to their secret base. So now even the outlying islands –once the proposed place the islanders could return to – is off limits to the islanders.
In 2004 the British government once again removed the right of the islanders to return home. In 2006 the High Court ruled that the Government’s move was unlawful and “repugnant”. In May this year the Court of Appeal agreed. It concluded that Britain’s actions had negated “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings, the freedom to return to one’s homeland”.
But still the British government refused to allow the islanders to return. The government had until this month to decide whether they would fight the latest legal judgment. Days before the deadline, a selection of British MPs urged Gordon Brown to accept “the right of the Chagossians to return to their islands”. The letter argued that any further action by the British government “would waste more public funds, delay justice for the Chagossians” and “expose” Gordon Brown’s words on the right to liberty as “hollow”.
Just days later, just as they had forty years earlier, the British government used political events to cover up its continuing abuse of the Chagossians. On the same day as one of the most important events in the British political calendar – where the Queen opens the new session of parliament - the government quietly let slip that it intended to appeal again and continue the islanders’ plight.
It is difficult to overestimate the cynical nature of this move. The British government knows that many of the islanders are getting older and dying. Of the 2,000 evicted only 700 are still alive. It could well be another year before the islanders receive the next legal judgment by which time more will have died. After that there could be two or three more years of legal wranglings as to who is going to pay the meager cost of re-housing the islanders.
Standing outside Downing Street last weekend was Hengride Permal, of the Chagossian Islands Community Association. Standing dignified and tall he said simply: “We want the government to pay us compensation for 40 years of pain and suffering, and 40 years of exile. We want Gordon Brown to take action and withdraw the appeal. We want to go home to our island.”
Come on Gordon. Give up the fight. Let them go home to live in peace. Before another islander dies of a broken heart.