Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (17 page)

Seeking to avoid congressional oversight and required congressional approval for a budget appropriation, the DOD credited the British for payments owed on research and development costs on the purchase of Polaris missiles. Another British document described the evasion of Congress:

The second point, and of even more importance to us, is the American insistence that the
Financial Arrangements must remain secret
. . . . The Americans attach great importance to secrecy because the Unites States Government has, for cogent political reasons of
its own, chosen to conceal from Congress the substantial financial assistance which we are to get in the form of a remission of Polaris Research and Development dues.
⁷⁶

No money was exchanged directly, but in effect, a $14 million debt was wiped off the books for Great Britain.

Yet this was not the only secret agreement. Another confidential “agreed minute” referred to a paragraph in the public notes where the United States agreed to notify the United Kingdom in advance of using any island so that Britain might take those “administrative measures” necessary to make the islands available for use. Those administrative measures, the secret notes show, were any actions necessary for closing down the plantations and “resettling the inhabitants.”
⁷⁷

*
Pakistanis and Chinese Communists from the Peoples Republic of China, respectively, in the bigoted bureaucratic lingo of the day.

**
In a handwritten note on the same memorandum, Komer in fact seems to confuse the name Diego Garcia with Diego Suarez, the French port in Madagascar.

***
They appear not to have bothered asking how to spell the name.

****
The correct estimated cost for half of the project was $25 million.

“MAINTAINING THE FICTION”

So far we have seen how officials were worried that despite the advantages of overseas bases for controlling large territories, bases also carry with them significant risks. The most serious, as Stu Barber realized, is the possibility that a host nation will evict its guest from a base. There is also the danger that for political or other reasons a host will make a base temporarily unavailable during a crisis. During the lead-up to the most recent invasion of Iraq, for example, Turkey’s Islamist ruling party refused to allow the United States use of its territory for a large troop deployment, though it permitted the basing of warplanes and the use of its airspace. In most cases, guest nations are forced to negotiate continually for a variety of base rights with their hosts.

The other main risk facing bases on foreign soil is that posed by the people outside a base’s gates. As recent U.S. experience in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Okinawa has shown, foreign bases can become targets of attacks and lightning rods for local protest and criticism about foreign intrusion and imperialism.
¹
Worst of all, the military fears outright revolt against a base, or that locals could press claims to self-determination before the United Nations and thus threaten the life of the base. This was of special concern for U.S. officials during an era of rising nationalism and anti-imperialism in Africa and Asia.
²
U.S. military officials also worry that local populations pose risks of espionage, security breaches, and uncontrollable sexual and romantic liaisons between troops and their neighbors.

In short, soldiers and diplomats view local peoples as the source of troubles, headaches, and work that distracts the military from its primary missions. If civilian workers are needed as service personnel, importing outsiders without local ties or rights, who can be controlled and sent home at will, is typically preferred.

For these reasons, in the eyes of soldiers and diplomats, a base free of any nonmilitary population is the best kind of base. For these reasons, after World War II, U.S. officials increasingly looked for bases located in relatively unpopulated areas.
³
The Strategic Island Concept was premised on the threat to bases posed by rising anti-Western sentiment and the search for
people-less
bases. With the islanders scheduled for removal from Diego Garcia, military planners were thrilled at the idea of a base with no civilian population within almost 500 miles. U.S. officials and their British counterparts wanted total control over the island and the entire archipelago without the slightest possibility of outside interference—be it from foreign politicians or local inhabitants.

Diego Garcia was attractive once it became British sovereign territory precisely because it was not subject to, as one Navy official explains, “political restrictions of the type that had shackled or even terminated flexibility at foreign bases elsewhere.”
⁴
The “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom ensured the U.S. military near
carte blanche
(pun intended) use of the island.

The priorities of the U.S. and U.K. governments were clear: maintaining complete political and military control over the islands; retaining the unfettered ability to remove any island populations by force; and assuming an intentional disregard for the rights of inhabitants. The U.S. Government wanted unencumbered freedom to do what it wished with a group of “sparsely populated” islands irrespective of the treatment owed to the people of dependent territories. In simplest terms, the U.S. Government wanted the Chagossians removed because officials wanted to ensure complete political and military control over Diego Garcia and the entire archipelago.

PLANNING THE REMOVALS

Four days after the government of the United Kingdom created the British Indian Ocean Territory in November 1965, the British Colonial Office sent the following instructions to the newly established BIOT administration, headquartered in the Seychelles: “Essential that contingency planning for evacuation of existing population from Diego Garcia . . . should begin at once.”
⁵

While planning between the British and U.S. governments had been underway since at least 1964, officials began to plan the removals in earnest after the creation of the BIOT. British officials again faced the untidy problem of how to get rid of the Chagossians, given UN rules on decolonization
and the treatment due permanent inhabitants of colonial territories. In a 1966 memorandum, Secretary of State for the Colonies Francis Pakenham proposed simply rejecting “the basic principle set out in Article 73” of the UN Charter “that the interests of the inhabitants of the territory are paramount.” “The legal position of the inhabitants would be greatly simplified from our point of view—though not necessarily from theirs,” another official suggested, “if we decided to treat them as a floating population.” They would claim that the BIOT had no permanent inhabitants and “refer to the people in the islands as Mauritians and Seychellois.”
⁶

Another official, Alan Brooke-Turner, feared that members of the UN Committee of Twenty-Four on Decolonization might demand the right to visit the BIOT, jeopardizing the “whole aim of the BIOT.” Brooke-Turner suggested issuing documents showing that the Chagossians and other workers were “belongers” of Mauritius or the Seychelles and only temporary residents in the BIOT. “This device, though rather transparent,” he wrote, “would at least give us a defensible position to take up in the Committee of Twenty-four.”
⁷

“This is all fairly unsatisfactory,” a colleague responded in a handwritten note a few days later. “We detach these islands—in itself a matter which is criticised. We then find, apart from the transients, up to 240 ‘ilois’
*
whom we propose either to resettle (with how much vigour of persuasion?) or to certify, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else. This all seems difficult to reconcile with the ‘sacred trust’ of Art. 73, however convenient we or the US might find it from the viewpoint of defence. It is one thing to use ‘empty real estate’; another to find squatters in it and to make it empty.”
⁸

A response came from Sir Paul Gore-Booth, Permanent UnderSecretary in the Foreign Office: “We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain
ours
; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a Committee (the Status of Women Committee does
not
cover the rights of Birds).”
⁹

Below Gore-Booth’s note, one of his colleagues, D. A. Greenhill (later Baron of Harrow), penned back, “Unfortunately along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius
etc.
When this has been done, I agree we must be very tough.”
¹⁰

British officials eventually settled on a policy, as Foreign Office legal adviser Anthony Aust proposed, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population.”

“We are able to make up the rules as we go along,” Aust wrote. They would simply represent the Chagossians as “a floating population” of “transient contract workers” with no connection to the islands.
¹¹

GRADUAL DEPOPULATION

Following the signing of the 1966 agreement, British officials moved to purchase the islands in the BIOT that were privately owned. After conveniently appointing themselves as the legislature for the new colony, British ministers passed “BIOT Ordinance No. 1 of 1967,” allowing for the compulsory acquisition of land within the territory. In March 1967, the United Kingdom bought Chagos from Chagos-Agalega Ltd. for £660,000.
¹²

The next month the British Government leased the islands back to Chagos-Agalega to continue running the islands on its behalf. Until this point, Chagossians could, as they had been accustomed since emancipation, leave Chagos for regular vacations or medical treatment in Mauritius and return to Chagos as they wished. After May 1967,
¹³
the BIOT administration ordered Chagos-Agalega to prevent Chagossians, like Rita Bancoult’s family, from returning to Chagos. When, at the end of 1967, one of Chagos-Agalega’s parent companies, Moulinie & Co., took over management, it also agreed to serve as the United Kingdom’s agent in Chagos and prevent the entry of anyone without BIOT consent.
¹⁴
Like Rita, Chagossian after Chagossian appearing at the steamship company in Mauritius for return passage was turned away and told, “Your island has been sold.”
¹⁵

By February 1968, Chagossians in Mauritius had begun to protest their banning to the Mauritian Government. Mauritian officials asked Moulinie & Co. to allow their return on the next ship to the islands. When Paul Moulinie, Moulinie & Co.’s director, asked BIOT officials if they would allow some Chagossians to return, they refused. The company’s steamer, the M.V.
Mauritius
, left on its next voyage for Chagos with no Chagossians aboard.

Later in 1968, with labor running low on the plantations, Moulinie & Co. requested permission from BIOT authorities to bring some Chagossians back from Mauritius. Amid ongoing consultations with U.S. officials, BIOT authorities denied the request. British officials understood, as one wrote, “if
we accept any returning Ilois, we must also accept responsibility for their ultimate resettlement.”
¹⁶
To keep the plantations running at a “basic maintenance level,” the BIOT administration allowed Moulinie & Co. to replace the stranded Chagossians with imported Seychellois workers.
¹⁷

DETERIORATING CONDITIONS

Back in Chagos, BIOT administrator John Todd found that “the islands have been neglected for the past eighteen months, due to uncertainty as to their future.”
¹⁸
With military talks ongoing and the start of base construction uncertain, the BIOT and its agents gradually reduced services on the islands, making only basic maintenance repairs to keep the plantations running.

Beginning in 1965 with the creation of the BIOT, Chagos-Agalega began importing three-month stocks of food rather than the six-month stocks ordered previously. This left staple supplies of rice, flour, lentils, milk, and other goods lower than normal, making Chagossians increasingly reliant on fish and their own produce to meet food needs.
¹⁹

After 1967 (and perhaps as early as late 1965) medical and school staff began leaving the islands. The midwife at the hospital in Peros Banhos left Chagos sometime before August 1968. She was not replaced, leaving only a single nurse at the hospital.
²⁰
Around the same time, in 1967, the school in Peros Banhos closed due to the lack of a teacher.
²¹
In the Salomon Islands, the midwife departed during the first half of 1969, leaving a single nurse employed there as well. Salomon’s teacher left sometime before July 1970, and the school there closed.
²²

At first Chagos-Agalega neglected the islands to avoid making capital investments on plantations it knew the BIOT might soon shut down. After the company sold the islands and gave up its lease, the BIOT institutionalized the neglect in the contract Moulinie & Co. signed to manage the islands: No improvements of more than Rs2,000 (around $420 at the time) could be made without BIOT permission.
²³