Chagos Islanders | ukwatch.net

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.

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.

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.