".......It was in 1966 that that the British started forcibly removing some 2000 islanders from their beautiful homeland of coral atolls that lies midway between Africa and Asia.
The British had just done a secret deal with the Americans, letting them use the main island, Diego Garcia, as a strategically-positioned airbase to counter the perceived Soviet threat for a period of fifty years. In return the British got access to American nuclear missiles at a greatly reduced cost. A non-negotiable part of the deal was the eviction of the local population at whatever the human cost.
So began yet another disgraceful episode in British foreign policy – an injustice that burns brightly to this day. Veteran investigative journalist, John Pilger, writing in his book “Freedom Next Time” which was published last year, describes how “Not only was their homeland stolen from them, they were taken out of history. Until recently, the [British] Foreign Office website denied their very existence”.
Documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from the time show the deceit the British planned. Internal FCO documents described how any deportations should be “timed to attract the least attention and should have some logical cover where possible worked out in advance [otherwise] they will arouse suspicion as to their purpose”.
Other documents argued that once the local population had been removed, the British would present to the outside world “a scenario in which there were no permanent inhabitants on the archipelago”. This they did. The FCO wrote to the British Representative at the UN asking him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagros Islands were “uninhabited when the United Kingdom first acquired them”. This he subsequently did too.
One document, written by a legal advisor to the FCO in 1968, was called “Maintaining the Fiction”. The “fiction was that the local people were “only a floating population” because this would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population”. This was despite the fact that the local population had lived there for generations.
Over a number of years, the islanders were removed and barred from returning. Their story is absolutely heart-breaking. The islanders were literally just dumped in the capitol of Mauritius, St. Luis. They received no help from the British in resettling them. For a people who had lived and survived peacefully by fishing and practicing subsidence agriculture, they suddenly had nothing: no homes, no jobs, no way of making a living. Moreover, much worse, is that they had no way of returning to their beloved homeland.
Over the following years, the exiled islanders died of neglect, poverty, or suicide. One islander, Lizette Talate’s two children died within days of each other. They “died of sadness” she recalls.
It is a story that is repeated. Another islander, Loius Onezime lives in cramped appalling conditions in St Louis, with a leaking roof, and no kitchen. His family often goes hungry. His young wife died of a heart attack. “She died of sadness”, he told John Pilger last year.
It is a reoccurring theme of the islanders. Sadness is killing them, one by one. The lawyer representing the islanders in London, Richard Gifford, told the Times newspaper earlier this month. “I’ve lost count of the old folk I’ve met who have subsequently died broken-hearted at the fact they couldn’t see their beloved homeland.""
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To read more about this please goto:
Diego Garcia: Paradise Cleansed
The History.
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