Diego Garcia | ukwatch.net

Diego Garcia: the UK's shame

JamieSW — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:27:35 +0000

The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote: "In war, truth is the first casualty." These words are particularly apt in relation to the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia, leased to the United States in 1971, where the truth – that a secret "War on Terror" prison existed from 2002 until as recently as 2006 – has been persistently denied by both the British and American governments.

Yesterday, Time magazine reported that a "senior American official" (now retired), who was "a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings" after the 9/11 attacks, stated that "a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island" in 2002, and possibly 2003. This is the highest-level admission to date that a secret prison existed on Diego Garcia, but it is by no means the first time that the prison's existence has been revealed.

In 2003, Time reported that Hambali, an Indonesian "high-value detainee", who was transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, was being held on Diego Garcia, and in May this year, El Pais [in Spanish] reported that Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a joint Syrian-Spanish national who was seized in Pakistan in October 2005, was held on the island in the months after his capture. Unlike Hambali, Nasar's current whereabouts are completely unknown; he is, in effect, one of "America's disappeared."

The reality of Diego Garcia's secret prison has also been confirmed by retired US general Barry McCaffrey in 2004 and 2006, in a report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe and in a statement made to the Observer in March this year by Manfred Novak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture. In contrast, the position taken by both the British and American governments occupies a parallel universe, in which the timeless resonance of Aeschylus' words is confirmed.

For five years, since questions were first asked about the secret prison by Lord Wallace of Saltaire in January 2003, the British government refused to acknowledge its existence, and its first denial was indicative of what was to come. "The United States Government," Baroness Amos explained, "would need to ask for our permission to bring any suspects to Diego Garcia. They have not done so and no suspected terrorists are being held on Diego Garcia."

The blanket denials finally came to an end this February, when David Miliband announced that his US counterparts had checked their records and had discovered that two rendition flights, each carrying one prisoner, had passed through Diego Garcia in 2002. He maintained, however, that he had been assured that the planes had only landed for refuelling, and that no prisoner had ever set foot on the island. Mr. Miliband repeated these claims just four weeks ago, after apparently receiving further confirmation from his US counterparts that no other rendition flights had passed through British territory.

The latest revelations about Diego Garcia make it abundantly clear that the British government can no longer accept any kind of "assurances" from its US counterparts regarding the use of the island. Ignoring Aeschylus' sage advice, Ministers have, to put it bluntly, fooled themselves into thinking that ignorance is a substitute for accountability. The truth, of course, is that they are both morally and legally responsible for what takes place on Diego Garcia, and have a duty to address crimes committed on British territory.

As these crimes include kidnapping, "extraordinary rendition" and illegal imprisonment, which are prohibited under domestic UK and international law, and quite possibly torture, which is prohibited under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, the British government must immediately initiate a full and open public inquiry into Diego Garcia's true role in the "War on Terror".

Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed

Ellie Keen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:04:22 +0000

Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar

The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the “War on Terror,” and yesterday’s revelations in TIME -- based on disclosures by a “senior American official” (now retired), who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, and who reported that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island” -- will come as no surprise to those who have been studying the story closely ( http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1828469,00.html).

The news will, however, be an embarrassment to the US government, which has persistently denied claims that it operated a secret “War on Terror” prison on Diego Garcia, and will be a source of even more consternation to the British government, which is more closely bound than its law-shredding Transatlantic neighbor to international laws and treaties preventing any kind of involvement whatsoever in kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition” and the practice of torture.

This is not the first time that TIME has exposed the existence of a secret prison on Diego Garcia. In 2003, the magazine broke the story that Hambali, one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, was being held there, and in the years since confirmation has also come from other sources. Twice, in 2004 and 2006, Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, revealed the prison’s existence. In May 2004, he blithely declared on MSNBC’s 'Deborah Norville Tonight,' “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he spoke out again, saying, in an NPR interview with Robert Siegel, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

The prison’s existence was also confirmed by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed report on “extraordinary rendition” for the Council of Europe in June 2007 and by Manfred Novak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, in March this year. Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, Marty told the European Parliament, “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees,” and Manfred Novak explained to the Observer that “he had received credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island that detainees were held on Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003.” The penultimate piece of the jigsaw puzzle came in May, when El Pais broke the story that “ghost prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, whose current whereabouts are unknown, was imprisoned on the island in 2005, shortly after his capture in Pakistan -- although the English-speaking press failed to notice.

Despite these previous disclosures, yesterday’s article, by Adam Zagorin, is particularly striking because of the high-level nature of the source, and his admission that “the CIA officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence.” In addition, the source noted that “the US may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia's territorial waters, a contention the US has long denied.”

Zagorin also spoke to Richard Clarke (at the time the National Security Council’s Special Advisor to President Bush regarding counter-terrorism), who explained, “In my presence, in the White House, the possibility of using Diego Garcia for detaining high value targets was discussed.” Although Clarke “did not witness a final resolution of the issue,” he added, “Given everything that we know about the administration's approach to the law on these matters, I find the report that the US did use the island for detention or interrogation entirely credible,” and he also pointed out that using the island for interrogations or detentions without British permission “is a violation of UK law, as well as of the bi-lateral agreement governing the island.”

Zagorin’s source did not name the prisoners, but it seems clear that the period he was referring to (“2002 and possibly 2003”) was when three particular “high-value detainees” -- Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh -- are reported to have been held on the island, and it seems entirely plausible, therefore, that after these three were transferred to another secret CIA facility in Poland, the prison was used not only to hold Hambali, but also to hold the two other “high-value detainees” captured with him -- Mohammed bin Lep (aka Lillie) and Mohd Farik bin Amin (aka Zubair). The addition of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, who, it seems, may have been held into 2006, not only confirms that a secret prison existed, but that it was possibly in use for four years straight.

These damaging revelations seal Diego Garcia’s reputation as a quagmire of injustice. A British sovereign territory -- albeit one that was leased to the United States nearly 40 years ago, when the islanders were shamefully discarded by the British government and exiled to face destitution and death by misery in Mauritius -- Diego Garcia has long been a source of shame to opponents of modern colonial activity ( http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/10/384112.html).

Until now, however, the only admission that any activities connected with the “War on Terror” had taken place on the island came in February, when, after years of denials on the part of the British government, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, finally conceded that requests for information from his US counterparts had revealed that, in 2002, two rendition flights had refuelled on the island. “In both cases,” Miliband stated with confidence, “a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia. The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia” ( http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/392068.html).

The British government had been provoked to action by critics within the UK, in particular the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, led by the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, and the legal action charity Reprieve ( http://www.reprieve.org.uk/), which represents 30 prisoners in Guantánamo, but the story appeared to grind to a halt when Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director, stepped forward to deny that Diego Garcia had ever been used as a “War on Terror” prison.

“That is false,” Gen. Hayden said when asked if a secret prison had existed on Diego Garcia, adding, as the New York Times put it, that “neither of the two detainees carried aboard the rendition flights that refuelled at Diego Garcia ‘was ever part of the CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation program.’” He also explained that one of the detainees “was ultimately transferred to Guantánamo,” while the other “was returned to his home country,” which was identified by State Department officials as Morocco. “These were rendition operations,” he added, “nothing more.”

Four weeks ago, however, the story resurfaced once more, as David Miliband reported the results of his latest request for information from his US counterparts. This concerned a list of rendition flights, which, in the opinion of Reprieve and the All-Party Parliamentary Group, may also have passed through British territory, but the Foreign Secretary was confident that there was no further evidence to be mined, stating, “The United States Government confirmed that, with the exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001” ( http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/07/403006.html).

Yet again, the assurances of his US colleagues did nothing to assuage the critics. Reprieve noted that the British government “intentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,” and added, presciently, “This remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic proportions. While the British government seems content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

Just three days after David Miliband’s last attempt to draw a line under the story, the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report on the British Overseas Territories, and was scathing about Diego Garcia, declaring that “it is deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the United States Administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to examine further the extent of UK supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

Yesterday’s revelations, of course, leave the US administration looking like bald-faced liars and the British government looking like myopic dupes. Whether Michael Hayden was also duped is not known, but his strenuous denial, just five months ago, that a secret prison existed, which was manned by his own employees, will do nothing for the credibility of the US administration, which likes to pretend that it does not torture and has nothing to conceal, but is persistently discovered not only being economical with the truth, but also behaving exactly as though it has guilty secrets to hide.

Whether this scandal will awaken much indignation in the American public remains to be seen, but it is hugely damaging to the British government, which is legally responsible for the activities that take place on its territory, however much it likes to hide behind “assurances” from its leaseholders that they have done nothing wrong.

It scarcely seems possible, but Diego Garcia’s dark history has suddenly grown even darker.

The prisoners held on Diego Garcia

1. Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn). Saudi, b. 1971. Seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan in a joint operation by Pakistani forces and the FBI on 28 March 2002, he is regarded by the administration as a senior al-Qaeda operative and training camp facilitator, although this has been disputed by former FBI interrogator Dan Coleman, who has described him as a minor logistician with a split personality ( http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/04/26/the-insignificance-and-insan...).

In February 2008, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted that Abu Zubaydah was one of three prisoners who had been subjected to waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning) in CIA custody ( http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/02/06/waterboarding-two-questions-...). Held initially in Thailand, and later in Poland, he is one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. At his tribunal in 2007, he denied being a member of al-Qaeda, and made a point of mentioning that he had been tortured. He has not yet been put forward for trial by Military Commission.

2. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Kuwaiti/Pakistani, b. 1964 or 1965. The supposed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed (commonly known as KSM) was seized in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on March 1, 2003. Like Abu Zubaydah, he was subjected to waterboarding, and is also presumed to have been held initially in Thailand, and later in Poland. Transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, he confessed to being “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z” at his tribunal in 2007, but also made a point of mentioning that he had been tortured. He was put forward for trial by Military Commission in February, and will face the death penalty if convicted.

Rumours that KSM was held on Diego Garcia have surfaced sporadically over the years, one example being an article in the Toronto Star on July 2, 2005, in which Lynda Hurst spoke to John Pike, a US defense analyst. Pike, who told Hurst that he believed that KSM had been held on Diego Garcia, explained, “Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility. They want somewhere that's difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal.”

3. Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Yemeni, b. 1972. A friend of the Hamburg cell that led the 9/11 attacks, bin al-Shibh was seized in a raid in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002. He was reportedly intended as the 20th hijacker, but was unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States, and subsequently worked closely with KSM in planning the attacks. Transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, he is also presumed to have been held initially in Thailand, and later in Poland, but his presence on Diego Garcia has long been suspected, because analyses of flight records have revealed that a plane flew from Pakistan to Diego Garcia immediately after his capture. He refused to take part in his tribunal in 2007, but was put forward for trial by Military Commission in February, and will face the death penalty if convicted.

4. Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin). Indonesian, b. 1966. Seized in Ayutthaya, Thailand in a joint operation by Thai forces and the CIA on 11 August 2003, he is regarded as the main link between al-Qaeda and its Indonesian counterpart, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). He is alleged to have been one of the planners of the Bali bombings in October 2002, which killed over 200 people, and was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. At his tribunal in 2007, he said that he resigned from JI in 2000, and was not involved with al-Qaeda or with any bombings or plots. He has not yet been put forward for trial by Military Commission.

5 and 6. Lillie (Mohammed Nazir bin Lep) and Zubair (Mohd Farik bin Amin). Malaysians, seized with Hambali, little is known of these two men, beyond claims by the administration that they worked closely with Hambali, although they were both discussed in another TIME article, in October 2003, which examined Hambali’s interrogation logs. They were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, but have not yet been put forward for trial by Military Commission.

7. Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (Abu Musab al-Suri). Syrian/Spanish, b. 1958. Seized in Quetta, Pakistan in October 2005 and handed over to US forces a month later, he is not accused of being involved in direct attacks on US forces, but is wanted in Spain as a witness in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Regarded as one of the most significant proponents of universal jihad, his writings include a 1600-page book, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which was published on the internet in 2004. A critic of al-Qaeda, he reportedly fell out with Osama bin Laden in 1998, and has stated that the 9/11 attacks were catastrophic for the jihadi cause. Unlike the six prisoners mentioned above, he was not transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, and it is not known, therefore, whether he is being held in a secret CIA prison or if he has been rendered to a third country.

Andy Worthington is the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press), which includes a detailed chapter on rendition and secret prisons ( http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files/).

Scandal of Diego Garcia Rendition Flights

Ellie Keen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:48:23 +0000

This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands — known collectively as the Chagos Islands — were shamefully cleared of their existing population in the late 1960s, to make way for a US airbase on Diego Garcia itself. This was a manifestation of the “special relationship” between the UK and the US, which involved the old empire facilitating its successor’s global reach, in exchange for a significant discount on the UK’s Trident nuclear missile programme.

Ever since, the exiled Chagossians have been attempting to regain access to their ancestral lands, but with limited success. Although successive British governments have toned down the racist rhetoric used at the time of the islanders’ forced removal — when official documents referred to them as “Tarzans or Men Fridays” — Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands have remained at the forefront of a colonial mindset that has never quite been extirpated from the Foreign Office’s mentality.

Although the islanders won a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled that their expulsion had been illegal, the government fought back in 2003, when Prime Minster Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic “royal prerogative” to strike down their claims once more. Although the court of appeal reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ right to return was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,” it was clear that, in the struggle between a group of cruelly disposed islanders on the one hand, and the US military-industrial complex on the other, the Chagossians’ fight was far from over.

Last week, just after a party of Chagossians visited London to hear lawyers for the Foreign Office appealing in the House of Lords against the 2006 verdict and claiming, as the Guardian put it, that “[a]llowing the Chagossian islanders to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a ‘precarious and costly’ operation,” and that “the United States had said that it would also present an ‘unacceptable risk’ to its base on Diego Garcia,” David Miliband, the foreign secretary, delivered a short statement relating to the other scandal of Diego Garcia: its use for “extraordinary rendition” flights in the “War on Terror.”

After years of denials by the British government that rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, David Miliband admitted in February that he had just been informed by his US counterparts that, upon searching their records, they had discovered that two flights had stopped on Diego Garcia in 2002. “In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia,” Miliband said. “The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

At the time, I noted that this appeared to be a sly form of damage limitation, as there was compelling evidence that, far from being used on just two occasions as a transit point, the island had actually housed a secret prison. Three examples will suffice for now, although it’s a safe bet that more revelations are forthcoming.

In October 2003, Time magazine ran an exclusive feature by Simon Elegant focusing on the imprisonment of Hambali, a “high-value detainee,” who spent years in various secret CIA prisons — including Diego Garcia — until he was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. Other evidence came from Council of Europe investigator (and Swiss senator) Dick Marty, who reported in June 2006 that, having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he had “received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.’”

The final piece of evidence came from inside the US administration itself, when Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, and currently a professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, let slip on two occasions that Diego Garcia had housed a secret prison. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

David Miliband’s statement last Thursday did nothing to suggest that the British government had any intention of pushing the matter further with its US allies, even though, as the sovereign power in charge of the islands, the ministers are unable to evade responsibility for what has taken place on Diego Garcia.

Rather feebly, the foreign secretary stated that, after sending a list of possible rendition flights that may have passed through British territory to the US authorities, “The United States Government confirmed that, with the exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Reprieve, the legal action charity that has spent several years investigating “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, responded by pointing out that the British government “intentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,” noting that the Foreign Office had declined to ask the US government for the names of the prisoners transported via Diego Garcia in 2002, that it had failed to ask if any other rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, even if, as the US asserted, no other planes landed there, and had also failed to ask whether any other flights passed through UK territory en route to engaging in “extraordinary rendition,” which would make the UK complicit in the crime.

The British government faced a fresh barrage of criticism just three days later, when the Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report (PDF) on the Overseas Territories. With reference to Diego Garcia, the Committee declared that “it is deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the United States Administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to examine further the extent of UK supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

For good measure, the Committee also had harsh words about the government’s treatment of the Chagossians, noting, “We conclude that there is a strong moral case for the UK permitting and supporting a return … for the Chagossians. The FCO (Foreign Office) has argued that such a return would be unsustainable, but we find these arguments less than convincing.”

Under pressure on two fronts over Diego Garcia, it remains to be seen whether the government can once more worm its way out of trouble. Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, is keen not to let this happen. Speaking after the report was published, he chastised the foreign secretary for dismissing his concerns about “extraordinary rendition” when he first raised the issue last October. “The Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances,” Tyrie said, adding, “My allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary’s brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.”

Reprieve was even more blunt, stating, “This remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic proportions. While the British government seems content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

Andy is the author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

No Bases for Empire

Tim Holmes — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:28:07 +0000

AMY GOODMAN: It sounds like a fast-food franchise—hundreds of locations spanning some 130 countries across the globe—but in fact, it’s perhaps the ultimate face of US hegemony: military bases. There are more than 700 US military bases worldwide, used for launching wars, holding prisoners, testing weapons.

One could be closing down in Ecuador, where lawmakers recently approved a ban on foreign bases. The Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has famously quipped that he’ll let the US military remain if the US agrees to an Ecuadorian military base in Miami.

Well, things are different in Europe, where the Bush administration now appears to have secured plans for its proposed missile system. US missiles would be stationed in Poland along with a radar site in the Czech Republic. Earlier this month, NATO leaders met in Romania and endorsed the missile plans. The Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said a formal accord will likely come next month.

KAREL SCHWARZENBERG: [translated] I met with the US Secretary of State in friendly talks where we discussed the plan to have a radar facility as part of our NATO defense system. Once we are clear about the contents, we will discuss the possibility of signing the agreement. The first week of May looks like a good time to sign.

AMY GOODMAN: Majorities in both Poland and the Czech Republic oppose the missile plan, which is widely seen as a first-strike threat against Iran.

Two activists are in the United States now, speaking as part of a campaign called “No Bases for Empire.” They’re joining me from Washington, D.C. Jan Tamas is from the Czech Republic. He’s the founder of the No Bases Initiative, a coalition against the proposed US missile system in Eastern Europe. I’m also joined by Olivier Bancoult. He has been expelled from his native Diego Garcia when he was four years old. The US has operated a military base there since British forces expelled native islanders in the early ’70s. Olivier is with the Chagos Refugee Group.

I want to begin with Jan Tamas. Talk about the Czech Republic.

JAN TAMAS: Hello. Hello to you, Amy, and to all the listeners. Well, yes, like you said, the majority of Czech people oppose this project. 70 percent of people have been steadily opposing this for the last two years. And the reason why we oppose it is that we really do fear that this will lead to a new arms race, that this may lead to a new Cold War. And in fact some of the statements by the Russian President Putin proved that that’s actually the case. They do feel threatened by this, and they do say that they will need to take measures to respond to this.

You have to keep in mind that no matter how sophisticated a military system the US is going to implement, the enemy is always going to be able to implement other measures that will overcome it. And so, the US will then have to take other measures to overcome the countermeasures of the enemy. And in this way you begin to have this spiral of armament, and so that’s the new Cold War. Or it could even be a hot war, we don’t know. So we believe that the way to achieve peace in Europe and the world is actually by disarming and not creating new military bases, not by arming.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the attitude of people in the Czech Republic right now?

JAN TAMAS: I’m sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: The attitude of people in the Czech Republic to the base?

JAN TAMAS: Well, since the first polls that were conducted back in August 2006, there were 73 percent of Czechs opposed it. It’s steadily around that number. More than two-thirds of people oppose this. But our government continues the negotiations as if nothing has happened. And so, we really see this as a deficit in democracy, because we believe in a truly democratic society the politicians should reflect on the will and the voice of the people; however, that’s not the case in our country.

And I would just like to say one thing. We’ve heard our foreign minister before saying that the deal will be signed sometime during the first week of May. That is the truth. However, that will only be the agreement between the government, and what has to happen in our country is that that deal then has to be passed, it has to be ratified by the Czech Parliament. And the situation is far from clear, because the government has a very small mandate. They don’t even have a majority. They were only able to pass a confidence vote after seven months of negotiations, and thanks to some two members of parliament that didn’t vote against them. So they have a very weak mandate, and it’s far from clear how the vote will go.

That’s why we have now intensified our campaign. We are more than sixty organizations from all kinds of different backgrounds. And we are now, among other things, having an online petition on the website nonviolence.cz, where we would like to have a million signatures within the next few weeks so that we would intensify the pressure on the Czech parliamentarians, so that they would not be willing to raise their hands for this dangers system.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Olivier Bancoult of the Chagos Refugee Group. You left Diego Garcia when you were four years old. You were expelled. Explain what’s happening on your island.

OLIVIER BANCOULT: Yeah. On our island, it had been decided in 1965 that every people, all the people have to move in order to make place for US military base. All of the removal started on Diego Garcia were—had been used to build a US military base.

But first of all, I have to let people know that before choosing Diego Garcia, the choice was making on an island called Aldabra, where there were a population of giant tortoises. When the expert, American expert and US—UK expert go and visit Aldabra, they found a population of giant tortoises. They decided just to leave these tortoises in peace and just make the second choice—that is, on Diego Garcia, where human beings were having this wonderful life.

When the removal started on Diego Garcia, they just used to kill more than 1,500 dogs, in order to frighten people to leave, because without the dogs, the island will become dangerous. I was age four, and the reason I was forced to go to Mauritius, because my sister was—had been hurt by a wheel cart, and when my mom decided to have treatment for my sister and—in a view to return back in Peros Banhos. But arriving in Mauritius two months after my sister passed away, when we decided to return, we have learned that the island had been given to Americans. And what’s the way? All those who were living on the island had been ordered they have to leave, and there is a communication. All thing had been cut, all the link with Mauritius had been cut. That is in a very shameful way and a forcible way that we have been uprooted from our motherland, the Chagos Archipelago.

AMY GOODMAN: You are awaiting a high court decision in Britain, your case expected to be heard on June 30? What will happen there?

OLIVIER BANCOULT: Yeah. As you know, since 1997, we started a legal procedure against the British government, because we think that what had been done to us is unlawful, because our fundamental rights as a human being had been violated by the UK government, because there is an ordinance in 1971 who say that no native can return back to their homeland, whereas UK and US soldiers can do so. We started, and we have been able to win three cases in our favor, mostly where the judge concludes that what had been done to us is unlawful, and then we are belongers and that what had been done is very repugnant, and the queen have the right to govern, but don’t have the right to remove people—everything.

But now, still now, the UK government is still giving us a very hard time. They just bring it to the House of Lords, but even that, we will not give up our struggle. On the 30th of June this year, we will have an appeal from the British government to our case, and this will be heard in the House of Lords, where we shall be present. Of course, we are very optimistic, because we think that justice must be done again in our case for all variation, for all unhuman that had been to us.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Tamas, final words, as you are wrapping up your journey around the United States in this No Bases for Empire project?

JAN TAMAS: Yeah. Well, I would say we are understanding that we are fighting a global enemy: the corporations that are going to make huge profits on this. Already more than $100 billion have been spent on the missile defense itself, and it’s not even near to working. These huge profits are being made by global corporations. They cross boundaries as if they don’t exist. And so need we. We also—the global—the peace movement needs to become global. And that’s why I’m here as part of this tour, to intensify the links, to intensify the cooperation across the Atlantic, across the boundaries of countries and across different organizations, so that together we have a stronger chance of winning this nonviolent battle against this armament effort that is underway right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Tamas and Olivier Bancoult, both of the No Bases for Empire project, I want to thank you very much for joining us from Washington, D.C.

Bearing Witness to a Crime

The Staff — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:19:55 +0000

From the Guardian:

British campaigners arrested at sea in Diego Garcia protest

Two British human rights campaigners have been arrested at sea off Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean after protesting against the island’s use in British and US military operations. The two men were demonstrating against the island’s admitted use by the US for rendition flights and the historic removal of the Chagos islanders from their homes nearly 40 years ago.

Peter Bouquet, 59, originally from Devon, and Jon Castle, 56, originally from Guernsey, were detained by UK authorities after allegedly failing to leave the waters around Diego Garcia on board their vessel, Musichana. Both men are former captains of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior and veterans of environmental and human rights direct actions around the world.

They are currently part of a group called the People’s Navy which has been seeking to highlight the plight of the Chagossians and to protest against the military use of the islands, which form part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. In a statement before their arrest, the men said that they wanted to show “the serious nature of our concerns about the plight of the Chagossians and about … military activities on Diego Garcia”.

The pair hope to draw attention to the cause of the Chagos islanders, who were removed by the UK in 1971 to make way for the base, following an agreement with the US, and have still not been able to return permanently, despite victories in high court actions in London. The statement said the protest was also against the recent use of Diego Garcia by the US for the transportation of prisoners being “rendered … without regard to even the most basic and accepted concepts of justice”. It added that although some Chagossians had been allowed to return temporarily to clean and restore graveyards, they should be allowed to return permanently.

A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed last night that two men had been detained “after entering the waters illegally”. He added that an investigation was continuing. Bouquet, a former member of the merchant navy, made his first protest against whaling off Iceland more than 30 years ago. Castle has been involved mainly in environmental campaigns. Both men said that they were motivated by Quaker ideals “that you should bear witness to a crime, even if you cannot stop it happening”.

The arrests come in a week in which MPs and human rights groups have demanded an independent inquiry into the use of Diego Garcia by the CIA. Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister, has spoken to Manfred Novak, the UN’s special investigator on torture, about the alleged use of Diego Garcia as a detention centre for holding US suspects.

Last month, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, admitted to MPs that, contrary to earlier assurances, two CIA flights had landed at the base, each with a detainee on board. It has also been alleged that detainees have been interrogated at the base, although the foreign secretary has denied the claims.

Marooned by the Special Relationship

Ellie Keen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:04:08 +0000

Of course we are all shocked, shocked, that the CIA would have misled the British government about renditions taking place via so-called British territory Diego Garcia.

But we should also be shocked that Whitehall did not suspect or know about it. We would not be that shocked if it turned out that that the CIA's assurances that none of the prisoners were tortured was more than a little wobbly. Indeed, five years ago, exactly such questions were being raised - and waffled away by Tony Blair's ministers. It is, let us say, coyly, not beyond probability that the CIA, which lies to its own legislators, may be economical with the truth with satellite state governments.

But apart from putting some truth in Robert Harris's novel The Ghost about a former British prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting just such rendition, the brief flurry of interest in these islands may remind people worldwide of the original mass rendition, by which the British deported the island's inhabitants in order to hand over a nominal British colony to effective American control.

Luckily, the politicians involved then are now mostly dead, and the ICC has no retrospective authority, otherwise the ethnic cleansing and continued exclusion of the inhabitants would be subject to prosecution, as indeed would be complicity in the renditions.

Indeed, the British signature on the International Court of Justice, which precludes liability for any act occurring before 1974 and from any present or past member of the Commonwealth, also handily stops the Seychelles from protesting the timely removal of the islands from its jurisdiction just before independence.

Of course the American presence, and the islanders' absence from their home, is all in the name of defending the world for democracy and the rule of law - which is why the British government is defying successive court rulings in favour of the cleansees.

Indeed Diego Garcia is the distilled essence of the "special relationship" between Britain and the US. The British government stole the islands from their own inhabitants and the Seychellois, and handed them over rent-free to the US in return for a discount on the Polaris submarines that in turn marked the end of the genuinely independent British deterrent that the post-war Labour government had strived for, and tied the country's fate almost inextricably to the US. It involved giving up Blue Streak, the successful rocket which would have allowed Britain to have a presence in space as well.

Harold McMillan, who did the Polaris deal, believed like Blair that Britain could be Athens to Washington's Rome. He had marginally better expectations of constructive results from John F Kennedy than Blair did from his diplomatic duet with George Bush. At the insistence of the latter, Blair over-rode decisions of British courts on letting the inhabitants of Diego Garcia return.

Surely it's time for a declaration of independence. The lease of Diego Garcia is up for renewal in 2016. Britain should let the islanders back immediately and let them take it over then and join the Seychelles if they wish. And it should drop the pretensions to "independent" nuclear power and give up on the Trident replacement. Any relationship that involves the country in violations of international human rights law is indeed "special", but it is not necessarily desirable.

A People Without A Home

Tim Holmes — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:09:02 +0000

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.

A People Without A Home

Ellie Keen — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:03:54 +0000

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.

Come on Gordon. Give up the fight. Let them go home to live in peace. Before another islander dies of a broken heart.

The Shame of Diego Garcia

Tim Holmes — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 20:08:05 +0000

One of the more sordid and long-running stories in Anglo-American colonial history - that of Diego Garcia, the chief island of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean - reared its ugly head again on Friday when the UK's all-party foreign affairs committee announced plans to investigate long-standing allegations that the CIA has, since 2002, held and interrogated al-Qaeda suspects at a secret prison on the island.

The shameful tale of Diego Garcia began in 1961, when it was marked out by the US military as a crucial geopolitical base. Ignoring the fact that 2,000 people already lived there, and that the island - a British colony since the fall of Napoleon - had been settled in the late 18th century by French coconut planters, who shipped in African- and Indian-born laborers from Mauritius, establishing what John Pilger called "a gentle Creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation," the Labor government of Harold Wilson conspired with the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands (the words come from American documents that were later declassified).

Although many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, a British Foreign Office official wrote in 1966 that the government's aim was "to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents," so that they could be exiled to Mauritius. Having removed the "Tarzans or Men Fridays," as another British memo described the inhabitants, the British effectively ceded control of the islands to the Americans, who established a base on Diego Garcia, which, over the years, has become known as "Camp Justice," complete with "over 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course." So thoroughly were the islands cleared, and so stealthy the procedure, that in the 1970s the British Ministry of Defence had the effrontery to insist, "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Suffering in exile, the Chagos islanders have struggled in vain to secure the right to return to their ancestral home, winning a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled their expulsion illegal, but then suffering a setback in 2003, when, with typically high-handed authoritarianism, Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic "royal prerogative" to strike down their claims once more. Although the appeal court reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders' right to return was "one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings," it remains to be seen how this belated judicial recognition of their rights can be squared with the Americans' insistence that their military-industrial archipelago must remain unsullied by outsiders.

In their resistance to the islanders' claims, Blair and the Foreign Office were clearly protecting the interests of their American allies, for whom the geopolitical importance of Diego Garcia as a strategic base had recently been augmented by its use, and the use of some of the ships moored there, as fabulously remote offshore prisons in which to hold and interrogate "high-value" al-Qaeda suspects.

The suspicion, which the foreign affairs committee has pledged to investigate, is that on Diego Garcia the Americans found a far more compliant partner in torture - the British government - than they found in most other locations chosen for secret CIA prisons. According to various reports over the years, the Americans' other partners in the offshore torture game - Thailand, Poland and Rumania, for example - were only prepared to be paid off for a while before they got cold feet and sent the CIA packing.

Whether the committee will probe deeply or not remains to be seen. The British-based legal charity Reprieve, which has called for such an investigation for some time, has already told the committee in a submission that it believes that the British government is "potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention." Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, told the Guardian that he is "absolutely and categorically certain" that prisoners have been held on the island.

When questioned by diligent MPs like Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP for Chichester, who is a staunch opponent of the CIA's use of "extraordinary rendition," the British government has persistently maintained that it believes "assurances" given by the US government that no terror suspects have been held on the island, but there are several compelling reasons for concluding, instead, that the government is actually being economical with the truth.

Studies of planes used by the CIA for its rendition program have established that on September 11, 2002, the day that 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized after a firefight in Karachi, one of the CIA's planes flew from Washington to Diego Garcia, via Athens. Bin al-Shibh did not resurface again until September 2006, when he was moved to Guantánamo, and he has not spoken about his experiences. Unlike his supposed mentor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo earlier this year, but this is not the only piece of the torture jigsaw that has been reconstructed by diligent researchers.

In June 2006, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed report on "extraordinary rendition" for the Council of Europe, also concluded that Diego Garcia had been used as a secret prison. Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he told the European Parliament, "We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the 'processing' of high-value detainees."

Anecdotally, Marty's findings have been confirmed by other sources. Manfred Novak, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, declared that he heard from "reliable sources" that the US has "held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean," and detainees in Guantánamo have also told their lawyers that they were held on US ships in addition to those held on the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu, which are discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files. One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve, "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

The most incriminating evidence of all, however, has come not from opponents of Guantánamo, or, indirectly, from those subjected to some of the regime's most horrendous abuses, but from an upstanding insider. Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice let slip that Diego Garcia has, as the administration's opponents have struggled to maintain, been used to hold terror suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, "We're probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq," and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, "They're behind bars ... we've got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo."

Do we need any further proof?

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007).

He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

Violators as Preachers: The Shame of Diego Garcia

Tim Holmes — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:35:52 +0000

Now and then the heads of missions in Colombo, of the Transatlantic cousins come up for air and preach us homilies on human rights, the rule of law, disappearances and abductions and the gamut of what might be broadly called rights violations. Reading the words of American ambassador Robert Blake and his diplomatic colleague from the other side of the pond, Dominick Chilcott, one sometimes finds oneself in a dizzy world of moral intoxication.

Their preaching, not confined to the Sabbath, might have had moral validity had they practised for the world to see what they preach so universally. I don’t mean Messrs Blake and Chilcott (super power first, you would notice) personally but the countries they represent.

Since they represent their countries (or lie on behalf of them as the job description of diplomats goes) they must accept the strictures directed at their own countries since they have tried so cleverly to cover the mote in their eyes while pointing their fingers at others.

It would appear that if their countries violate the widely accepted moral code and international law such conduct is justified on the premise that they are fighting terrorism. However if others step out of line even marginally what is sauce for the goose does not apply to the gander.

This is not to say that one should brazenly or even tangently violate human rights or the rule of law if such conduct could be avoided. To fall back on another old saying two wrongs do not make a right, and all that. But it does take a bladder full of gall to condemn publicly what others are perceived to be doing when the accusers themselves are committing far worse crimes and have been doing it for a long time.

It is this kind of pretentious moral superiority that sticks in the craw and gives substance to accusations of double standards. It seems there is no moral equivalence between the west and the rest of the world. The west has been given, it would seem, a moral licence from up above to do as it pleases, when it pleases.

President George W. Bush has said he gets his directions from the deities-or rather a single deity-implying, of course, that he has divine sanction for his actions. Others, who do not pretend to such communion, must follow man-made laws.

I was reminded of such sanctimonious humbug when attending the 20th anniversary conference of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative over two weeks ago. Last Sunday I said I would return to that subject because of the announcement that the British Government is funding a four-year programme to build human rights capacity in the British Overseas Territories with the help of three Commonwealth NGOs.

Interestingly of the two British Government departments involved are the Department for International Development (DfID) and Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Why interestingly, will become clearer later. However it might be said immediately that in trying to bring human rights to British overseas’ territories (colonies really but the word is not politically correct these days) the British Government has made a serious omission. It has left out the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), a fiction created by the British to detach the Chagos islands archipelago from Mauritius and to deliberately mislead the United Nations in order to complete a secret deal with the United States to establish a military base on Diego Garcia, the main island.

As pressure for decolonisation built up round the world the UN passed Declaration 1514 in 1960 which held that all colonial peoples had an inalienable right to independence without conditions and alien subjugation was a “denial of fundamental human rights….” Instead of decolonisation Britain created the new colony of BIOT and took the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius on the promise of early independence for it.

The Anglo-American machinations alerted the UN whose General Assembly passed resolution 2066 of 1965 calling on the British Government “to take no action which would dismember the territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity.” This was blithely ignored by Britain which went ahead anyway by creating the BIOT in November 1965 by amalgamating Chagos with some islands detached from the Seychelles. So much for respect for the United Nations and its resolutions!

When the secret negotiations with the US started in 1964 the Americans wanted not only Diego Garcia but the surrounding island cleared of any people. “Sanitised” and “swept” were the words the Americans used in documents released much later under the Freedom of Information Act, to achieve one of the clearest cases of ethnic cleansing in recent colonial history.

Hundreds of pages of documents, most of them marked secret, released to the public show that the governor of the Seychelles Sir Bruce Greatbatch was put in charge of “sanitising” the islands. He did such a great job of it. He summarily and forcibly evicted nearly 2000 persons from the islands mostly from Diego Garcia and literally dumped them in Mauritius-and some in the Seychelles- with only a suitcase each of their worldly possessions.

What is more Sir Bruce got rid of over 1000 dogs, pets of the Ilois or Chagossian people, by gassing the whole lot. At a Whitehall meeting prior to the eviction of the indigenous people, the Treasury representative “greatly preferred the ideal of a complete sterilisation in the islands.”

In order to avoid condemnation by the UN and others, Britain, supported by the US which could not care less what happened to the local population as long as they were dumped elsewhere, propagated the fiction that they were not permanent residents on the islands but “transient” workers employed as contract labour on the copra plantations.

By doing so British politicians and officials lied and misled the UN. Moreover neither the British nor the US ever told the truth to the government and people of Mauritius that the Chagos Islands were removed to build a military facility on Diego Garcia.They even lied to their own people. The secret deal entered into by Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the US was not known to the House of Commons or to Congress until about two decades later. Nor were they told about the virtual kidnapping of the islanders and their being dumped some 1000 miles away to live in poverty and destitution.

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. Not only are Britain and the US guilty of such a crime, the British Government has also shown its sheer contempt for the rule of law. It resorted to that archaic, centuries old Royal Prerogative- the Order-in-Council- to undermine the decisions of three British courts that ruled the eviction of the Chagossians, who had lived on those islands for at least two generations and some for five or more, was unjust and illegal.

In May 2006 the High Court in London in its ruling said: “The suggestion that a minister can, through an order-in-council exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim that he is doing so for the peace, order and good government of the territory is repugnant.”

Even then the British Government would not relent and was determined to nullify court rulings.In May this year the Appeal Court struck down an appeal against the earlier verdict that allowed the Chagossians to return home. Now the government has gone to the highest court, the House of Lords which is expected to hear the case some time next year.

The so-called “lease” under which the US military base continues, is due to end in 2016 but could be extended for another 20 years.
The US would not want to give it up because not only is it used as a base for air attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran if war ever breaks out between them) but it is also said to be used as a detention centre for terror suspects as part of the US “rendition” process where torture of ‘prisoners’ is not unknown.

In fact it is said that Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin) the leader of the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah responsible for 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali is currently held in Diego Garcia where there is a secret facility for “ghost detainees” or “new disappeared”. The fact is that even today the people who were abducted and then abandoned in violation of UN declarations and resolutions and of international law are being denied their human rights.

The lies have continued over the years. Governments have conspired to keep the truth from their own elected representatives and their people and indeed the world. This conspiracy of silence and deceit is one of the most shameful episodes in British and US history. Yet the UK and US and their representatives strike a holier than thou posture though they have poor credentials, as credible preachers of morality.