Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (22 page)

Jonathan “Jock” Stoddart had responsibility at the State Department for much of the implementation of the removals. I asked Stoddart if anyone investigated the embassy’s reports.

“My answer would be, I don’t think so,” Stoddart replied from his apartment at The Jefferson, a retirement facility in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. “I doubt if the Navy sent somebody that was interested in human rights out to Diego to look into this. I think the Navy’s attitude was, accept what the British say, and turn a blind eye to whatever was going on.”

State and Defense officials seemed to choose the same tack. “It was, I would say, an issue that was lurking in the background but generally ignored,” Stoddart said. “We were all leaving the whole problem up to the British—to justify, rationalize, whatever. We were quite aware that our original—the original information that we had received from the British was wrong: that this was an uninhabited archipelago. I think we fully accepted that fact.”

Still, “this is one of the best deals the United States has ever negotiated,” Stoddart added, from his apartment complex named for the president known for one of the nation’s earliest land acquisitions.

“For a change,” he said, it came “at a minimal cost.”

The official response to Precht and Brewer from higher-ups in the State and Defense bureaucracies was a February cable from the State Department. “Basic responsibility” for the Chagossians lay with the British, the telegram said; but it directed the embassy in London to inform the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the U.S. Government’s “concern” over their treatment. The State Department conceded internally (in its clipped bureaucratic language), “USG also realizes it may well share in any criticism levied at British for failing meet their responsibilities re inhabitants’ welfare.” Concerned about the removal’s Cold War implications, State added: “Continued failure resolve these issues exposes both HMG and USG to local criticism which could be picked up and amplified elsewhere.”
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Former national security officials Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, who resigned from the Nixon administration to protest the invasion of Cambodia, describe memoranda from Washington like these and the effect of the geographical and, as they say, spiritual distance between decision makers and those affected by their decisions:

We remember, more clearly than we care to, the well carpeted stillness and isolation of those government offices where some of the Pentagon Papers were first written. The efficient staccato of the typewriter, the antiseptic whiteness of nicely margined memoranda, the affable, authoritative and always urbane men who wrote them—all of it is a spiritual as well as geographic world apart from piles of decomposing bodies in a ditch outside Hue or a village bombed in Laos, the burn ward of a children’s hospital in Saigon, or even a cemetery or veteran’s hospital here. It was possible in that isolated atmosphere, and perhaps psychologically necessary, to dull one’s awareness of the direct link between those memoranda and the human sufferings with which they were concerned.
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In the summer of 1972, the State Department sent Precht to Tehran and Brewer to fill the place of the assassinated ambassador to Sudan.

DETERIORATING CONDITIONS

At about the time that Brewer was on his way to Khartoum, the British secured the agreement of the Mauritian Government to receive the Chagossians. Despite the fact that a majority of the Chagossians said they
wanted to receive compensation in cash, a planned Anglo-Mauritian rehabilitation scheme called for the provision of housing, pig breeding jobs (never a significant economic activity in Chagos), and some cash payments. On September 4, 1972, Mauritian Prime Minister Ramgoolam accepted £650,000 to resettle the Chagossians, including the remaining few hundreds who were still to be removed from Peros Banhos and Salomon.

British officials realized that the project was “under-costed” for an adequate resettlement, but were happy to have struck such a cheap deal. Precht had earlier weighed in on the likelihood of the resettlement plan’s working: “We doubt it.”
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The resettlement was never implemented, and Chagossians saw almost none of the £650,000 for more than five years.

After the emptying of Diego Garcia, around 370 Chagossians remained in Peros Banhos and Salomon. Like those who went to Mauritius and the Seychelles, those who went from Diego Garcia to Peros and Salomon had been required to leave most of their possessions, furniture, and animals in Diego. They received Rs500 (about $90) as a “disturbance allowance” to compensate them for the costs of reestablishing their lives. Those going to Mauritius and the Seychelles received nothing.

The neglect of Peros Banhos and Salomon by the BIOT and Moulinie & Co. continued as it had on Diego Garcia, and conditions worsened dramatically in 1972 and 1973. Food supplies declined and Chagossians remember how their diet became increasingly dependent on fish and coconuts. When milk supplies ran out, women fed their children a thin, watery mixture of coconut milk and sugar. Medicines and medical supplies ran out. With even ripe coconuts in short supply, people ate the spongy, overripe flesh of germinated nuts. The remaining staff in each island’s hospital left, and the last school, in Peros Banhos, closed.

In June 1972, the
Nordvær
continued emptying Peros and Salomon. At least 53 left on this one voyage, telling BIOT agents they wished to “return later to the islands,” hopeful that conditions would improve.
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Again Chagossians say conditions on the ship were terrible. Marie Therese Mein, a Chagossian woman married to the departing manager of Peros Banhos, described the voyage:

Our conditions were somewhat better than the other suffering passengers since we were given a small cabin [because her husband was the manager], but we had to share this between my husband, myself and our 8 children. We could not open the portholes since the ship was heavily laden, and the sea would splash in if we did. It was therefore extremely hot and uncomfortable. Many people were
in much worse conditions than us, having to share a cargo compartment with a cargo of coconuts, horses and tortoises. Some had to sleep on top of the deck of the ship. No meals were provided, and the captain, a Mr. Tregarden, told the families to prepare their own meals. By contrast the horses were fed grass. The passage was rough and many of the passengers were seasick. There was urine and manure from the horses on the lower deck. The captain decided to jettison a large part of the cargo of coconuts in order to lessen the risk of being sunk. The whole complement of passengers suffered both from an extremely rough passage and from bad smells of animals and were sick and weary after the 6 day crossing.
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Mein was three months pregnant at the time. She miscarried a day after arriving in the Seychelles.

A subsequent voyage of the
Nordvær
had 120 Chagossians on board, nearly twice its maximum capacity.
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In December 1972, BIOT administrator Todd reported that Salomon had closed, with all its inhabitants moved to Peros Banhos or deported to Mauritius or the Seychelles. A small number of Chagossians remained in Peros, with only enough food to last until late March or April.

Early in 1973, Moulinie & Co. agents informed the remaining Chagossians that they would have to leave. At the end of April, with food supplies exhausted, the
Nordvær
left Peros Banhos with 133 Chagossians aboard. The
Nordvær
arrived in Mauritius on April 29.

By this time, however, the Chagossians on the
Nordvær
had heard about the fate of others arriving in Mauritius. They refused to disembark. They demanded that they be returned to Chagos or receive houses in Mauritius. After nearly a week of protest and negotiations, 30 families received a small amount of money and dilapidated houses in two of the poorest neighborhoods of Port Louis.

A month later, on May 26, 1973, the
Nordvær
made its final voyage, removing 8 men, 9 women, and 29 children from Peros Banhos. The expulsion from Chagos was complete.

EXPANSION

As early as Christmas Day, 1972, Bob Hope and Red Foxx were cracking jokes for the troops on Diego Garcia as part of a USO special.
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Shortly before the final deportations from Peros Banhos in 1973, the Seabees completed
their 8,000-foot runway and made the communications station operational. By October, the Navy was using the base to fly P-3 surveillance planes to support Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war—quite a feat for a mere communications station.
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As Nitze and others in the U.S. Government had hoped, the original “austere communications facility” on Diego Garcia served as a nucleus for what became a rapidly expanding base. Before the base was operational, Zumwalt was already asking others in the Navy in 1972, “What do we do in 74, 75, and 76 for Diego Garcia?” referring to expansion ideas for the upcoming fiscal years.
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Restricted to the use of the Azores as its only base from which to resupply Israel during the October war, the Navy soon submitted an “emergency” request for $4.6 million in additional construction funds. The Pentagon turned them down. Within weeks, the Navy submitted a request to the Pentagon for an almost $32 million expansion of the base over three years, to include ship support facilities and a regular air surveillance capacity. Days later, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Moorer sent a recommendation to Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to expand the base beyond the new request, including a runway extension to accommodate B-52 bombers. In January 1974, the Air Force asked for a $4.5 million construction budget of its own.
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After an initial supplemental appropriation for fiscal year 1974 was deferred to the 1975 budget, additional appropriations for Diego Garcia soon became a minor political battle between the Ford administration and Democratic senators concerned about U.S. military expansion and a growing arms race with the Soviet Union in the Indian Ocean. Hearings were held in both houses of Congress. Amendments to defeat the expansion and to force arms negotiations in the Indian Ocean were introduced but defeated. Congress made new funding contingent on the President affirming that the expansion was “essential to the national interest of the United States,” which Ford quickly did. “In particular,” his justification said, “the oil shipped from the Persian Gulf area is essential to the economic wellbeing of modern industrial societies. It is essential that the United States maintain and periodically demonstrate a capability to operate military forces in the Indian Ocean.”
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During House committee hearings, State Department representative George Vest was asked, was there “any question about Diego Garcia being in the open sea lanes?”

“No, it is open sea,” he replied, before volunteering, “and uninhabited.”

“There are no inhabitants in Diego Garcia?” queried Representative Larry Winn of Kansas.

“No inhabitants,” Vest answered.

“None at all?”

“No.”

Within weeks the Pentagon won appropriations for fiscal years 1975 and 1976 totaling more than $30 million.
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CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

On September 9, 1975, a page-one
Washington Post
headline read, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base.” Reporter David Ottaway had become the first in the Western press to break the story. Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Culver of Iowa, who had opposed the expansion of the base, took to the floor of the Senate to propose an amendment demanding the Ford administration explain the circumstances surrounding the expulsion and the role of the U.S. Government in the removals. The amendment passed. A month later the administration submitted to Congress a nine-page response drafted by State and Defense.

The “Report on the Resettlement of Inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago” described how Chagos had been inhabited since the late eighteenth century, and that “despite the basically transitory nature of the population of these islands, there were some often referred to as ‘Ilois’. . . . In the absence of more complete data,” the report said, “it is impossible to establish the status of these persons and to what extent, if any, they formed a distinct community.”
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The report explained the removals by saying that the 1966 U.S.-U.K. agreement envisioned the total evacuation of the islands for military purposes, citing three reasons for wanting the islands uninhabited: security, British concerns about the costs of maintaining civil administration, and Navy concerns about “social problems . . . expected when placing a military detachment on an isolated tropical island alongside a population with an informal social structure and a prevalent cash wage of less than $4.00 per month.”
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—this was a polite way of referring to trumped up, racist fears about prostitution and other unwanted sexual and romantic relations between military personnel and the islanders.

As to the deportations, the report said, “All went willingly.” It continued, “No coercion was used and no British or U.S. servicemen were involved.” Although acknowledging that the “resettlement doubtless entailed discomfort and economic dislocation,” the report concluded, “United States and United Kingdom officials acted in good faith on the
basis of the information available to them.” The last sentence of the report offered the Ford administration’s final position: “There is no outstanding US obligation to underwrite the cost of additional assistance for the persons affected by the resettlement from the Chagos Islands.”
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