Partners in Crime: Britain, The US & The Scandal of the Dispossessed Chagos Islanders

The Polemicist

by Michael House

LONDON, England—(Weekly Hubris)—6/27/11—Dervillie Permal lived on the Chagos Islands, a tropical paradise south of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Until the summer of 1971.

He was coming back from work on a coconut plantation when he was stopped by armed soldiers. He was told he must leave the island at once. He was not allowed to visit his home or take any property with him. He was frog-marched to a ship already full of distressed islanders. His livestock were killed. So was his dog.

After a week, the ship docked at Port Louis, capital of Mauritius, 1,200 miles from his home. There he met his wife and children, who had traveled earlier to Port Louis for medical treatment and had been forcibly prevented from returning home.

This was 1971. Not 1871.

The illiterate, unskilled, poverty-stricken islanders were given no help to resettle. They lived in huts with dirt floors on the fringes of the city. Dervillie Permal made a few dollars unloading rice ships. His wife did a little sewing. They raised seven children. Last year, their daughter brought them to Britain, where they now live, in a three-bedroom house in Crawley, Sussex.

Of the 2,000-odd Chagossians evicted from their homes in the late 60s and early 70s, just 700 survive.

In 1966, the Americans began looking for a base in the Indian Ocean as a counter to the Soviet threat. A deal was struck with the British Government—then as now firmly lodged in the President’s sphincter—whereby a 50-year lease was granted to the Americans on the largest island in the group, Diego Garcia, in return for Polaris nuclear missiles, sold cheap. The Americans insisted that the population of all the islands be removed.

The Brits agreed. Foreign Office mandarins described the islanders as “mere Tarzans and Men Fridays” who had “little aptitude for anything except growing coconuts.” The evictions were to be “timed to attract the least attention.” If the secret leaked, it was to be claimed that the islanders were “migrant contract laborers” despite the families’ having lived there for generations. Stalin would have been proud.

Once Diego Garcia had been cleansed, the British Government designated the remaining Chagos Islands the “British Indian Ocean Territory.” The other islands were cleansed by trickery, force and intimidation—islanders were encouraged to take trips and then not allowed to return; supply ships were stopped and plantations were shut down. They eked out an existence on Mauritius and in the Seychelles, often resorting to drugs, alcohol and prostitution. There were deaths from malnutrition and suicide.

Someone in Government may have been slightly ashamed of one of the most squalid episodes in British colonial history. In 1982, the islanders were offered £4 million (less than £3,000 per person) on condition they renounce their right to return. Most signed with thumb-prints, since they could not read the document in front of them. In 2002, in a further attempt to buy them off, they were granted British citizenship.

Legal action began in 1998, and the Government has contested the case inch by inch. In 2000, the Divisional Court ruled that the deportations had been unlawful. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, whose subsequent tragic death robbed the country of about the only Cabinet Minister of integrity in the “New” Labour Government, decided not to contest the ruling, agreeing that the islanders could return to any island except Diego Garcia.

Until 9/11. Then the Americans decided that Diego Garcia was a vital launch pad for its war of aggression against Iraq. (It is also rumored that major al Qaeda suspects were/are detained and tortured there.) The island is 150 miles away from its closest neighbor.

Rumsfeld gave the client state its instructions, which it hastened to obey. In 2004, the Government issued two Orders in Council negating the court’s ruling. The significance of the procedure is that it bypasses Parliament. But in 2006, the High Court ruled that the move was unlawful and “repugnant” (strong stuff for the judiciary in relation to governments). The Court of Appeal agreed in May 2007, dubbing the Orders in Council an abuse of power, with this ringing sentence: “The freedom to return to one’s homeland, however poor and barren the conditions of life, is one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings.”

All this under on Tony Blair’s watch. So far, so predictable. Then Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, hinting that he was not going to be Bush’s poodle. Fat chance. Last week, the Government sucessfully applied for leave to appeal to the House of Lords, Britain’s Supreme Court, against the Court of Appeal’s ruling, a spokesman (how can these people manage to look at themselves in the mirror every morning?) waffling about treaty obligations and “effective governance of overseas territories” (aka the remnants of the British Empire).

The leader of the Chagossians in Britain is Olivier Bancoult. His father and brother died of what the islanders call “sadness.” Two other brothers drank themselves to death and a sister killed herself. He says that the Government is “playing with us until one by one we die and there is nobody left and they can silently close the case.”

The solicitor representing the islanders said, “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.”

I’m proud to say that my chambers played an active role in the original court case.

But right now, I’m ashamed to be British.

Editor’s Note: for an update on this case, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/19/chagos-islands-resettlement-campaign.