Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (25 page)

Not surprisingly, some turned to theft, prostitution, and illegal drug sales.
³⁷
When the Chagos Refugees Group surveyed nearly the entire Chagossian population in Mauritius in 2001, 38 were in prison, yielding an adult incarceration rate easily surpassing the U.S. rate of 1 in 100, which ranks highest in the world.
³⁸

Given their employment difficulties and having little to no savings from Chagos, many quickly became indebted to local loan sharks to pay rent and other basic living expenses. Others ran up debts to the owners of small neighborhood grocery stores charging often equally exorbitant interest rates.
³⁹
Relatively unfamiliar with interest and the Mauritian economy when they first arrived, the Chagossians were particularly vulnerable to exploitation. As social worker Francoise Botte writes, “even the shopkeeper cheated them.”
⁴⁰
Since the economic boom of the 1980s, buying furniture, electronics, and other household items from department stores with similarly high-interest credit has become a widespread phenomenon among the poor of Mauritius.
⁴¹
Many Chagossians are active participants in this kind of indebtedness, reflecting the multiplication of generally unfulfilled materialistic desires in nations enjoying widespread but unequal economic growth.
⁴²

As forced displacement expert Michael Cernea and others have shown among other displaced populations,
⁴³
downward mobility was pronounced for the islanders: They were displaced from a society where they enjoyed lives of structural security, where they and their ancestors had worked and lived for generations with universal, nearly guaranteed employment, food, income, housing, health care, education, and other necessities of life, to societies where they were in positions of structural insecurity and marginalization in increasingly competitive economies, where the skills they possessed were generally not in demand, where formal education (which most did not have) was increasingly important to securing employment, and where, as we shall see, most found themselves lumped into dark-skinned “Creole” groups facing employment discrimination in rigid social hierarchies allowing little socioeconomic mobility.

“I’m telling you, Mauritians, when they, how can I say it. They found out that you were Ilois, they laughed at you. They said things like, ‘You walk barefoot!’ if you didn’t have flip-flops. What can you do, David? You can’t steal from someone when you family is living in
mizer
,” said Rita.

“At my children’s school, everyone said, ‘He’s a little Ilois! A little Ilois!’ My children came and told me this,” she continued. “I said, ‘Leave them be, leave them be. Let them talk. You don’t need to say anything.’ Do you understand? My children went to school, they didn’t even have a little tea” to drink. “They didn’t have anything.”

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOTTOM

Arriving in Mauritius and the Seychelles, islanders like Rita found themselves in positions vulnerable to ethnic and racial discrimination, as Chagossians and as AfroMauritians. Their arrival at times of heightened social tensions was noted with considerable anxiety by many of their hosts sensitive to new economic competition. During the first years in Mauritius, the word “Ilois” shifted from a term of self-identification to a term of insult, pronounced derisively by some Mauritians
ZZZEEL-wah
.
¹
As anthropologist Iain Walker noted, many Mauritians began to use the term to describe any person “behaving in an antisocial or immoral fashion.”
²
In the Seychelles, Chagossians heard curses of “
Anara!
” a word suggesting they had no identity, that they were soulless, uncivilized pagans, and that as a people, they were the lowest of the low. Others in both nations were called
sovaz
—savage—and
bet
—stupid. Many heard people shout, “Go back to the islands!”
³

Francine Volfrin, who was removed from Diego Garcia and then Peros Banhos as a teenager in the 1970s, remembered walking to school from their home in the Seychelles, a shack on a relative’s land, with neighbors throwing apricots fallen from the trees at her and her siblings. Some spit on them. The neighbors were very mean and cruel, she said. Some would say she and her family had not been vaccinated and would make them sick. (This was a common insult aimed at the islanders. If they had not previously been vaccinated, they were vaccinated upon arrival in the Seychelles. And indeed, evidence points to the opposite of the insult’s accusation: Living in the Seychelles and Mauritius has actually made many Chagossians sick.)

Discrimination extended beyond verbal abuse. Employment discrimination was common by Mauritian “employers who favor local Mauritians.”
⁴
In the Seychelles, discriminatory treatment began with the housing of the islanders in a local prison, while Moulinie & Co. “staff” stayed in hotels.
⁵
This discrimination compounded difficulties Chagossians had in finding jobs because they lacked the social connections important to finding work in these small island societies.

Desperate to find work and earn money after their arrival, many used “intermediates” to connect them with employers and jobs. When they were to be paid, the intermediates took most of their salaries. Many intermediates and employers also appear to have preyed upon Chagossians’ innumeracy and relative inexperience with cash. Botte explains how the exploitation worked, particularly against women: “These ‘intermediates’ explained to the employers that these Ilois women are not used to money and some money could be given to the intermediates from the salary of that poor maid-servant or washerwoman. These Mauritian employers preferred to engage the Ilois women because [they] did not know about labour law and the employers had only to exchange a Rs10 note into many coins to make the employees believe that it was much money.” Over time, women realized that they were being cheated and became more assertive with Mauritian employers.
⁶

In Mauritius, and to a lesser extent in the Seychelles, Chagossians entered an environment of longstanding racism and discrimination against people of mostly or entirely African descent, known locally as Creoles. In Mauritius, bigotry and prejudice against AfroMauritians has been unabated since Franco-Mauritians began importing enslaved African peoples to the island. Bigotry increased with the post-emancipation introduction of indentured laborers from India, soon to make up the majority of Mauritius’s population and against whom AfroMauritians were pitted by the “white” ruling class. Since the nineteenth century, people of French and
British descent have remained at the top of the social, political, and economic hierarchies; people of mixed and Indian ancestry have occupied a middle stratum; AfroMauritian Creoles have remained primarily working class, generally at the bottom of the hierarchies.
⁷

In the Seychelles, where the population is a more homogeneous collection of people of mostly mixed African and European descent, there is somewhat less discrimination against people of recognizable African ancestry (in part because almost all Seychellois have at least some [recent
*
] African ancestry). Still, high social and economic status in the Seychelles remains closely linked to lightly pigmented skin and European ancestry. Discrimination is prevalent against those with the darkest skin.
⁸

Being primarily of African or mixed African and Indian descent, almost all Chagossians in Mauritius have been perceived socially as part of the AfroMauritian Creole community, the community that has benefited least from Mauritian economic success. Increasingly in Mauritius, scholars and others recognize that AfroMauritians, marked as they are by their socially defined race, class, and segregated residential geography, have been excluded from the economic prosperity of the nation as a whole.
⁹
Arriving in a setting where they were lumped with this minority group, the islanders have faced additional barriers to economic success and social acceptance.

Even worse, Chagossians are thought to occupy a subset of AfroMauritian Creoles known as
ti-kreol
(literally, “little Creole”), who by definition are found in the most marginal and lowest-paying occupations. This group resides at the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum from the
grand blanc
or rich white ruling class. Anthropologist Thomas H. Eriksen describes in stark and commonly held racist terms the place in the national hierarchy of the ti-kreol: They are, “perhaps [the] most stigmatized category of people in Mauritius; that is, the segments of Creoles . . . comprising fishermen, dockers, unskilled workers and artisans.” Eriksen adds, “As an ethnic category, the ‘ti-kreol’ are known by outsiders as lazy, backward and stupid people, as being too close to nature and resembling Africans in a not particularly flattering fashion.”
¹⁰
With the ti-kreol at the bottom of Mauritian society, Chagossians are widely considered to reside, along with people from the small Mauritian dependency of Rodrigues, at the bottom of the ti-kreol—the bottom of the bottom.
¹¹

And these hierarchies are not just a matter of perception. They reproduce themselves in ways that have maintained Mauritius and the Seychelles
as relatively rigid hierarchical societies organized around class and ethno-racial stratification.
¹²

Chagossians’ inability to benefit from national macroeconomic growth thus stems in part from structural and individual discrimination and exclusion faced by Chagossians, both as AfroMauritians and specifically as Chagossians. Because they belong to two stigmatized groups, the discrimination they have faced often involves a complex array of overlapping prejudice, bigotry, and systemic marginalization. The expulsion thus put the islanders in a position of structural disadvantage in part by making them vulnerable to a kind of double discrimination in ethnically hierarchical societies.

For many, however, the most painful and symbolic form of discrimination and exclusion has been that of being barred from jobs on the Diego Garcia base. Since the 1980s, the base has employed nonmilitary service workers who are neither U.S. nor U.K. citizens, mostly from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius. When Chagossians (men for the most part) have applied for these jobs at recruitment offices in Mauritius, they have been repeatedly rejected. Since the expulsion, no one born in Chagos or the child of someone born in Chagos has ever worked on Diego Garcia. “It has been stipulated that no Ilois,” two Indian Ocean scholars explain, “are to be allowed to go.” When asked about employing Chagossians, a Mauritian recruiter told
60 Minutes
in a June 2003 broadcast, “Definitely no. . . . I was given instructions to be careful. They don’t want any kind of claim or demonstration.”
¹³
(Since 2006, a few Chagossian men have been allowed to work on the base.)

Jacques Victor, who was born on Diego Garcia, described going three times to apply for jobs and being rejected each time. As soon as they saw that he was born on Diego, he said, they turned him away. “They judge us” before even knowing us, Mr. Victor said, shifting to address the whole of his experience in exile.
It’s as if life is a prison for us here in Mauritius—there’s a lot of discrimination
.
¹⁴

“Beaucoup, beaucoup discrimination. Beaucoup,” he said, switching into French. Lots, lots of discrimination. Lots.

In Peros Banhos, Alex Bancoult and his siblings went to the small one-room schoolhouse on Corner Island. In Mauritius, he started school but didn’t stay long. He left to earn money for the family, taking a job in a cologne factory making Rs9 a week. “He didn’t go” to school for long, “but he was very clever,” Rita recalled sadly.

Rita’s only surviving daughter, Mimose, went to work at fourteen to earn money for the family. Mimose worked for a Mauritian family miles away as a domestic servant and cook. For years, she worked for the family, going stretches of three to four months without seeing her mother and siblings. It was very painful to leave her family, she said. But she had no choice because the family was poor and needed her income. “Plore,” Mimose said. I cried. “Plore, plore, plore. . . .” I cried, I cried, I cried.

Never given a bed to sleep on, Mimose had to sleep on a mat under a flight of stairs. Frequently, the husband in the family abused her. One day she finally walked out of the house and returned to her mother. She told her she was ill and never told her family what had happened with the Mauritians.

“It’s terrible what we experienced, do you understand?” Rita told me. “My children went to school without having flip-flops. My children went to school without having a book. Only Olivier persisted in always going” to school.

The youngest of Rita’s sons born in Chagos, Louis Olivier stayed in school longer than his siblings. But when it came time to take exams at the end of high school, Rita didn’t have the money for his exam fees. Some charitable Mauritians had been helping to pay for Olivier’s after-school tutoring (essentially mandatory for educational success and a
de facto
part of the country’s unequal educational system usually available only to the middle and upper classes). “I wasn’t able to go and ask them again for the money to pay for his fees,” Rita said.