Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (39 page)

31
. Charles Anderson to Colonial Secretary, September 5, 1838, MA: RD 18.

32
. G. Meyer, “Report on Visit to Chagos Archipelago,” Port Louis, Mauritius, Labour Office, May 23, 1949, PRO: CO 859/194/8, 1.

33
. Bulpin,
Islands in a Forgotten Sea
, 28, 314; Ackroyd, “Report of the Police and Stipendary Magistrate,” 11; Scott,
Limuria
, 162.

34
. Scott,
Limuria
, 162–65.

35
. Ackroyd, “Report of the Police and Stipendary Magistrate,” 11. Without hearing from Chagossians at the time, however, one must be careful about drawing conclusions based on these uncorroborated official reports.

36
. Scott,
Limuria
, 253; Warner, “Report of Mr. Warner on the Dependencies of Mauritius,” Port Louis, Mauritius, MA: TB 1/3.

37
. H. J. Holland, letter to Colonial Secretary, February 7, 1887, MA: SA 167/25.

38
. Ivanoff Dupont, “Report of the Acting Magistrate for the Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius on Diego Garcia,” Bambous, Mauritius, June 4, 1883, MA: SA 142/9, 2–5; Scott,
Limuria
, 169–78.

39
. Papen, “The French-based Creoles of the Indian Ocean”; John Holm,
Pidgins and Creoles
, vol. 2:
Reference Survey
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989), 403–4.

40
. Also
Ilwa
. See Roger Dussercle,
Archipel de Chagos: En mission, novembre 10, 1933–janvier 1934
(Port Louis, Mauritius: General Printing and Stationery, 1934), 9; John Madeley, “Diego Garcia: A Contrast to the Falklands,” The Minority Rights Group Report 54, London: Minority Rights Group Ltd, 1985 [1982], n. 5.

41
. Ly-Tio-Fane and Rajabalee, “An Account of Diego Garcia and Its People,” 105; Scott,
Limuria
, 182.

42
. For a concise description of copra processing, see I. Walker, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” 563.

43
. The account and all quotations in this section come from W. J. Hanning, “Report on Visit to Peros Banhos,” parts I and II, March 29, 1932. PRO: CO 167/879/4 102894. Unfortunately I was unable to ask Rita and other older Chagossians about the events described.

44
. Ibid., I:6.

45
. Ibid., I:5.

46
. Ibid., I:6.

47
. Ibid., I:8.

48
. Ibid., I:8–9.

49
. Ibid., I:9–10.

50
. Ibid., attachment.

51
. Ibid., II:1–3.

52
. John Todd, “Notes on the Islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory,” report, January 10, 1969. SNA, 33; “Notes on a Visit to Chagos by the Administrator, British Indian Ocean Territory,” report, July 30, 1969, PRO, 3; Dalais 1935:18.

53
. R. Lavoipierre, “Report on a Visit to the Mauritius Dependencies: 16th October–10th November, 1953,” Port Louis, Mauritius, December 7, 1953, PRO: CO 1023/132 1953:5; Mary Darlow, “Report by Public Assistance Commissioner and Social Welfare Advisor,” Port Louis, Mauritius, December, PRO: CO 1023/132 1953; Scott,
Limuria
, 7.

54
. The plantation company had the power—and at times exercised it—to deport workers that management considered troublesome. Otherwise, everyone living on the islands was guaranteed work. The following description of working and living conditions comes from many sources, including interviews and conversations with Chagossians and other plantation employees. See also Scott,
Limuria
; I. Walker,
Zaffer Pe Sanze
, “British Indian Ocean Territory”; the reports of J. R. Todd; and a series of magistrate reports on Chagos dating to the nineteenth century.

55
. See, e.g., Todd, “Notes on the Islands of the BIOT.”

56
. Scott,
Limuria
, 285.

57
. Ibid., 266–67.

58
. Ibid., 242.

59
. Hilary Blood, “The Peaks of Lemuria,”
Geographical Magazine
29 (1957): 522.

60
. Scott,
Limuria
, 184, 24.

61
. Auguste Toussaint,
Histoire des Iles Mascareignes
(Paris: Editions BergerLevrault, 1972), 18.

62
. Scott,
Limuria
, 293. Scott meant his description to apply also to the people of the other Lesser Dependencies like Agalega.

Chapter 2
The Bases of Empire

1
. Interview with U.S. Navy historian Jeffery Barlow, August 2005. This chapter’s title owes a debt to
Monthly Review
, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” March 2002,
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm
. There are few histories of how the U.S. and U.K. governments created the base on Diego Garcia and expelled the Chagossians. Works by Bandjunis (
Diego Garcia
) and Bezboruah (
U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean
), based in part on interviews with some of the key U.S. Government officials involved, provide the best accounts. The latter, by a retired naval officer who participated in the development of the base and who also had access to relevant Navy documents, is a detailed insider’s account of the history. The self-published book has been indispensable to my reconstruction of the history but is not the work of a professional historian.

2
. The idea is indicated by a curious three-sentence memorandum from shortly before the 1960 elections, found in the Navy archives without its originally attached proposal. The first and key sentence reads, “The attached proposal by Stuart Barber was intended as an idea to be fed, somehow, to both Presidential candidates.” The memorandum’s subject line reads “South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force.” See Op-61, “South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force,” memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations, August 2, 1960, NHC: 00 Files, 1960, Box 8, 5710. I am inferring the contents of the proposal from the subject line.

3
. Long-Range Objectives Group, Director, “Annual Statement of Long-Range Navy Objectives,” report to Chief of Naval Operations, 1956, NHC: 00 Files, 1956, Box 1, A1 Plans, Projects, and Developments, 1.

4
. U.S. Naval Institute, “Reminiscences of Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired), oral history vol. 3,” Annapolis, MD, U.S. Naval Institute, May 1978, 300–301.

5
. R. L. Johnson, memorandum for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans & Policy), 2. All signs indicate that Barber drafted the memo.

6
. Bandjunis,
Diego Garcia
, 2.

7
.
Monthly Review
, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire.”

8
. The Department of Defense acknowledges having 909 bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. This list strangely omits many well-known bases, including all those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well secret bases unacknowledged by the DOD. An estimate of around 1,000 thus seems fair. The definitions and even the terminology surrounding bases (forts, camps, stations, etc.) are notoriously elusive. I generally use the term
base
and generally call anything the DOD refers to as a
site
a base. See Department of Defense, “Base Structure Report Fiscal Year 2007 Baseline (A Summary of DoD’s Real Property Inventory),” 2007; C. Johnson,
The Sorrows of Empire
.

9
. I define imperialism as the creation and maintenance of hierarchical relationships of formal or informal rule, domination, or control by one people or
sociopolitical entity over a significant part of the life of other peoples or sociopolitical entities such that the stronger shapes or has the ability to shape significant aspects of the ways of living (political, economic, social, or cultural) of the weaker. Empire is then the designation reserved for states and other entities practicing imperialism.

10
. E.g., Harvey,
The New Imperialism
; Smith,
American Empire
; Ferguson,
Colossus
; C. Johnson,
The Sorrows of Empire
.

11
. Ferguson,
Colossus
; Ignatieff, “The Burden.”

12
. Ferguson is ultimately skeptical that the nation has the proper will and “imperial cast of mind” to play such a role. See Ferguson,
Colossus
, 2, 25, 29.

13
. Ignatieff, quoted in Chalmers Johnson,
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 73–74.

14
. E.g., William Appleman Williams,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962); Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. La Feber, and Thomas J. McCormick,
Creation of the U.S. Empire
, vol. 1:
U.S. Diplomatic History to 1901
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1976); Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. La Feber, and Thomas J. McCormick,
Creation of the U.S. Empire
, vol. 2:
U.S. Diplomatic History since 1893
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1976); Smith,
American Empire
.

15
. Smith,
American Empire
, 360.

16
. See e.g., Williams,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
; Gardner et al.,
Creation of the U.S. Empire
, vols. 1–2; Harvey,
The New Imperialism
.

17
. Sydney Lens,
Permanent War: The Militarization of America
(New York: Schocken Books, 1987); Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadows of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); C. Johnson,
The Sorrows of Empire
; C. Johnson,
Nemesis
;
Monthly Review
, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire”; Tom Engelhardt, “Gunboat Diplomacy,”
Mother Jones
, April 1, 2004,
http://www.motherjobes.com/news/dailymojo/2004/04/03_667.html
2004; and even Smith,
American Empire
, 349.

18
. James R. Blaker,
United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma
(New York: Praeger, 1990), 29.

19
. Scholars in the basing literature may have underestimated the number of pre–World War II bases. Given the frequency of major U.S. military interventions in Latin America before the war and occupations in Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, bases and garrisons (as well as U.S. naval power) likely played a key role in the maintenance of U.S. dominance in the region. See, e.g., Carolyn Hall and Héctor Pérez Brignoli,
Historical Atlas of Central America
, cartographer John V. Cotter (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 288.

20
. William Earl Weeks,
Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), ix; Richard W. Van Alstyne,
The Rising U.S. Empire
(New York: Norton Library, 1960), 8; see also Reginald Horsman,
Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), viii, 5–6.

21
. Horsman,
Expansion and American Indian Policy
, 141, 157; Gillem,
American Town
, 18–19.

22
. Anni P. Baker,
American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 4; Gillem,
American Town
, 19.

23
. Francis Paul Prucha,
A Guide to the Military Posts of the United States 1789–1895
(Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964), 10–11.

24
. Dee Brown,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
(New York: Henry Holt, 1970).

25
. Alan Brinkley,
American History: A Survey
, vol. 1:
To 1877
, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 306.

26
. D. Brown,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, 7.

27
. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry purchased a $50 plot of land on what is now called Chi Chi Jima, near Iwo Jima in the western Pacific, which he intended to become a U.S. coaling station. A. M. Jackson, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 7, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1965, Box 26, 11000/1B, 2; Richard D. Challener,
Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy: 1898–1914
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5.

28
. Philip A. Crowl, “Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age,” ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 455.

29
. Ibid., 444–77; see also Hall M. Friedman,
Creating an American Lake: United States Imperialism and Strategic Security in the Pacific Basin, 1945–1947
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 2–3.

30
. Stephen A. Kinzer,
Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
(New York: Times Books, 2006), 86–87.

31
. Ibid., 48.

32
. See Williams,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
; Gardner et al.,
Creation of the U.S. Empire
, vols. 1–2; Smith,
American Empire
.

33
. For an interesting discussion of how the United States learned the value of a more discreet, indirect form of imperialism avoiding sovereignty over dependent lands, see Christina D. Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,”
American Quarterly
57, no. 3 (2005): 779–805.

34
. John Lindsay-Poland,
Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama
, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16–17; Hall and Pérez Brignoli,
Historical Atlas of Central America
, 209; Brinkley,
American History
, 767.