Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (21 page)

The Navy, Pentagon, and State concluded, however, “that the advantages of having a station on an island which has no other inhabitants makes it worth the risk to ask the British to carry out the relocation.” In fact, Cochrane wrote, the advantages of having the British relocate the inhabitants were “so great that the United States should adopt a strict ‘let the British do it’ policy while at the same time keeping as well informed as possible on the actual relocation activities.”
⁵³

Weighing the concerns of the advance party and Cochrane’s recommendation, Zumwalt had the final say. On a comment sheet with the subject line “Copra workers on Diego Garcia,” Zumwalt had three words:

“Absolutely must go.”
⁵⁴

“ON THE RACK”

With the money finally secured from Congress and the British taking charge of the final deportations, the Navy set to work building its base. “Resembling an amphibious landing during World War II,” writes a former Navy officer who worked on the project, “Seabees landed on Diego Garcia in March 1971 to begin construction.”
¹
A tank landing ship, an attack cargo ship, two military sealift command charter ships, and two dock landing ships descended on Diego with at least 820 soldiers and equipment to construct a communications station and an 8,000-foot airstrip. The Seabees brought in heavy equipment, setting up a rock crusher and a concrete block factory. They used Caterpillar bulldozers and chains to rip coconut trees from the ground. They blasted Diego’s reef with explosives to excavate coral rock for the runway. Diesel fuel sludge began fouling the water.
²

According to many Chagossians, there were threats that they would be bombed or shot if they did not leave the island. Children hid in fear as military aircraft began flying overhead.
³
The
Washington Post
’s David Ottaway later reported that “one old man . . . recalled being told by an unidentified American official: ‘If you don’t leave you won’t be fed any longer.’”
⁴

Navy officials continued to pressure their British counterparts to complete the deportations as quickly as possible. On April 16, the United Kingdom issued BIOT Immigration Ordinance #1 making it a criminal offense for anyone except authorized military personnel to be on the islands without a permit. A State Department official in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Africa later acknowledged, “In order to meet our selfimposed timetable, their evacuation was undertaken with a haste which the British could claim has prevented careful examination of resettlement needs.”
⁵
Construction continued unabated, with the runway operational by July 1971.

The image placed here in the print
version has been intentionally omitted

Figure 7.1 M.V.
Nordvær
, 1968. The BIOT cargo ship used to deport Chagossians, at times with more than 100 aboard. Photo courtesy of Kirby Crawford.

The BIOT administration and its Moulinie & Co. agents continued to remove families to Peros Banhos and Salomon. Some Chagossians refused but were told they had no choice but to leave. Marcel Moulinie and other Moulinie & Co. agents reiterated that there would be no more work. There would be no more transportation to and from the island, food stores had run out, and the boats were taking away the salvageable plantation infrastructure.

For the voyage, passengers were generally allowed to take a small box of their belongings and a straw bed mat. Most of their possessions and all their animals were left behind. In August 1971, the BIOT dispatched its 500-ton cargo ship, the M.V.
Nordvær
, to Diego to remove the last families from the island. When the
Nordvær
experienced engine troubles before reaching Diego, the BIOT administration sent another ship, the
Isle of Farquhar
, to continue the removals.
⁶
By then food supplies were running dangerously low, and BIOT officials started considering asking for emergency assistance. The Navy’s Seabee contingent eventually shipped food and medical supplies across the lagoon to sustain the remaining islanders.
⁷

In the days before the last inhabitants of Diego Garcia were removed, BIOT commissioner Sir Bruce Greatbatch sent the order to Moulinie & Co. to kill the Chagossians’ pet dogs and any other remaining dogs on the island. Marcel Moulinie, who had been left to manage Diego Garcia, was responsible for carrying out the extermination.

According to Moulinie, he first tried to shoot the dogs with the help of Seabees armed with M16 rifles. When this failed as an expeditious
extermination method, he attempted to poison the dogs with strychnine. This too failed. Sitting in his home overlooking a secluded beach in the Seychelles 33 years later, Moulinie explained to me how he finally used raw meat to lure the dogs into a sealed copra-drying shed, the
kalorifer
. Locking them in the shed, he gassed the howling dogs with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Setting coconut husks ablaze, he burnt the dogs’ carcasses in the shed.
⁸
The Chagossians were left to watch and ponder their fate.

THE FINAL DEPORTATIONS

After the
Isle of Farquhar
took a load of Chagossians and Seychellois from Diego, a repaired
Nordvær
returned to remove the final inhabitants. “There was a crowd of people there and a lot of them were crying,” Marcel Moulinie remembered. “People were upset about” the killing of their dogs, “as well as being upset about having to leave the islands. I persuaded Marcel [Ono, a Diego Garcia commandeur] that he had to go as there were no more rations on the island and the boat had not brought in any food. The stores had been removed and there was no way of feeding anyone. . . . I last saw him as he walked on to the boat.” With U.S. military personnel looking on shortly before the end of October 1971, the last boatload steamed away from Diego Garcia.
⁹

Chagossians and others report that the boats were terribly overcrowded and that the open seas were often rough on the initial 1,200-mile, fourday journey to the Seychelles. The
Nordvær
had cabin passenger space for twelve and deck space for sixty (accommodating a total of 72 passengers). On the last voyage, 146 were packed on the vessel. At the orders of Sir Bruce Greatbatch, Diego’s horses were given the best places on deck. All but a few Chagossians made the trip exposed to the elements elsewhere on deck or in the hold, sitting and sleeping on a cargo of copra, coconuts, company equipment, and guano—bird feces. Many became ill during the passage, vomiting on deck and in the hold. Two women are reported to have miscarried.
¹⁰

Moulinie recalled:

The boat was very overcrowded. The boat deck was covered with stores, the belongings of the labourers, and a lot of labourers were traveling on deck. Greatbatch had insisted that the horses be carried back to Mahé and these were on deck with the labourers. The
labourers also traveled in the holds. This was not unusual but there were more people than usual in them. The holds also held a lot of copra being taken out of Diego. When the boat finally arrived the conditions were filthy. They had taken four days to travel and many of the women and children were sick. The boat deck was covered in manure, urine and vomit and so was the hold.
¹¹

When the
Nordvær
arrived in the Seychelles, offloading the islanders before the second leg of the journey, another 1,200 miles to Mauritius, Moulinie & Co. arranged to have their management housed in hotels. The Chagossians were housed in a prison.
¹²

A VOICE IN THE BUREAUCRACY

With the arrival in Mauritius of the last islanders from Diego Garcia, the U.S. Embassy in Port Louis grew increasingly concerned about the condition of what officials described as “1300 miserable and uneducated refugees.”
¹³

“The USG has a moral responsibility for the wellbeing of these people who were involuntarily moved at our request,” the embassy argued to the State Department in Washington. U.S. moral responsibility was especially heavy given that the government had “resisted GOM and HMG efforts to permit Ilois to remain as employees of the facility.” Even if legally speaking “primary responsibility” lay with the British, the Port Louis mission believed, the U.S. Government was responsible for ordering the removal and was vulnerable to criticism in public and at the UN.
¹⁴

The embassy was equally unhappy about the lack of resettlement planning: “To our knowledge,” the mission cabled, “there exists no operative plan and no firm allocation of funds to compensate them for the hardship of the transfer from their former home and their loss of livelihood.” While the British were still in the midst of convincing the Mauritian Government to create a resettlement plan, such a scheme was “foredoomed,” first, because of the “political impossibility” of giving special resources to the Chagossians while unemployed Hindus, Muslims, and AfroMauritians received nothing, and second, because of the Mauritian Government’s own inability to make use of current British aid money, let alone new funds for a special Chagossian project.
¹⁵

“The plight of the Ilois,” the embassy wrote, “is a classic example of perpetuation of hardship through bureaucratic neglect.” “The Embassy
believes we have regrettably neglected our obligation toward them. We recommend that early and specific exchanges with HMG be undertaken in order to assure the welfare of the Ilois and that authority for this essentially political matter be appropriately centralized within the Department.”
¹⁶

The primary author of these remarkable cables was Henry Precht, the deputy to the ambassador in an embassy of just seven (Precht later worked on Iran at the State Department, playing a key role in the Carter administration’s handling of the hostage crisis). Now living in the Washington area, Precht remembered that the Navy “didn’t want to be bothered. They wanted an all-American facility,” free of any labor problems, health issues, or anything that would have “complicated life there.” It was “much neater” without the islanders, he said.

For three months, Precht and Ambassador William Brewer cabled strongly worded reports about the Chagossians, demanding, “Justice should be done.” Lambasting the “inadequate and cavalier treatment so far accorded the Ilois,” they traded charged dispatches with an undersecretary of the Air Force and others in the bureaucracy over the U.S. Government’s responsibility.
¹⁷
It was “absurd” to say, as some in the bureaucracy continued to maintain, that Diego Garcia had “no fixed population,” given its history of habitation dating to the eighteenth century. Moreover, “DOD acknowledged its responsibility for the removal of the Ilois by payment of $14 million to HMG.” Precht and Brewer wrote that the Government didn’t fulfill its obligation to the Chagossians by its $14 million payment, pointing out correctly that most of the money seemed to have gone toward building an international airport in the Seychelles.

“The point of our exercise,” they said, is that “the USG should make sure that the British do an adequate job of compensation.”
¹⁸
(Around the same time Brewer was also helping to “burnish the Diego public relations image” in Mauritius by delivering 3,000 bags of Christmas candy prepared by Navy personnel on Diego to underprivileged and children’s groups.
¹⁹
)

I asked Precht why he thought no one else spoke out on behalf of the Chagossians. “There weren’t very many of them,” he replied. “They didn’t add up to much of a problem. They were easily pushed aside.” And it would have taken someone in Washington, he said, to have enough interest “to pursue it. And pursuing something in Washington” takes a lot of political energy. It can be quite a “profitless enterprise.”

Adam Hochschild’s exploration of violence perpetrated by the Belgian Empire in the Congo helps explain Precht’s observation: Because Belgian authorities sanctioned violence against the Congolese, “for a white man to rebel meant challenging the entire system that provided your livelihood.
Everyone around you was participating. By going along with the system, you were paid, promoted, awarded medals.”
²⁰

As the embassy’s failed protests show, challenges to the expulsion would likely have been fruitless save for those originating at the highest levels of the bureaucracy, from people like Nitze, Komer, Zumwalt, Moorer, McNamara, and Rusk. “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus in which he is harnessed,” Max Weber wrote half a century earlier. “The professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity by his entire material and ideal existence. In the great majority of cases, he is only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march. The official is entrusted with specialized tasks and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top.”
²¹

Back in the State Department bureaucracy in Washington, James Bishop was the desk officer who received Precht and Brewer’s cables. “Vaguely” recalling the dispatches when I spoke to him in early 2008, Bishop said they came a “considerable time” before human rights “became a major part of our diplomacy.” This “was the Kissinger era,” when the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser was “chastising” the African bureau “as a bunch of missionaries.” Plus, the Chagossians were not a very high issue on State’s agenda when it came to relations with Bishop’s “parish” Mauritius. On the other hand, he said, “there wasn’t any question about their being recent arrivals. It was their homeland.” Bishop added, “I do recall feeling that they were going to get screwed.”