Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos
archipelago in the Indian Ocean, is the site of a major US military base and
was leased from Britain in 1966 [Reuters]
There are times when one tragedy tells us how a whole system
works behind its democratic facade and helps us understand how much of the
world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify
their actions with lies.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British government of
Harold Wilson expelled the population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony
in the Indian Ocean, to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia,
the largest island. In high secrecy, the Americans offered the British
payment for the islands in the form of a discount on the Polaris nuclear
submarine system.
The truth of this conspiracy did not emerge for another 20
years when secret official files were unearthed at the Public Record Office in
London by lawyers acting for the former inhabitants of the coral archipelago.
Historian Mark Curtis described the enforced depopulation in Web of Deceit, his
2003 book about Britain's post-war foreign policy.
The British media all but ignored it; the Washington Post
called it a "mass kidnapping".
I first heard of the plight of the Chagossians in 1982, during
the Falklands War. Britain had sent a fleet to the aid of 2,000 Falkland
Islanders at the other end of the world while another 2,000 British citizens
from islands in the Indian Ocean had been expelled by British governments and
hardly anyone knew.
The
difference was that the Falkland Islanders were white and the Chagossians were
black and, crucially, the United States wanted the Chagos Islands -
especially Diego Garcia - as a major military base from which to command the
Indian Ocean.
The Chagos was a natural paradise. The 1,500 islanders were
self-sufficient with an abundance of natural produce, and there was no extreme
weather. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a
railway and an undisturbed way of life - until the secret 1961 Anglo-American
survey of Diego Garcia led to the expulsion of the entire population.
By John Pilger
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-forcefully-depopulated-archipelago-190225082624527.html
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