Expelled From Home

Diego Garcia, which houses a critical U.S. military base, is home for 5,000 Chagossians. So why aren’t they allowed to return?

By Emily Hawkins, Campus Progress
Friday October 28, 2005

When he was just four years old, Olivier Bancoult left his home on Peros Banhos, an atoll of the Chagos Archipelago located halfway between Africa and Indonesia, with his family, to seek medical care for his ailing sister on the larger island of Mauritius. Days later, after Bancoult’s sister had passed away, his parents were told they would not be able to return to Peros Banhos. Left with only a few belongings, the Bancoults were stranded in Mauritius. Chagos had been sold for the purpose of building a U.S. military base. They were to make their new life in Mauritius.

Bancoult’s story is hardly unique. From 1965 to 1973, at the direction of the U.S. government and in coordination with Great Britain, the indigenous people of the Chagos Archipelago were forcibly removed. The expulsion was the result of secret negotiations between the American and British governments, which began in 1964, to establish a U.S. military facility in the Indian Ocean. The United States convinced the British government to excise Chagos from Mauritius and the Seychelles, to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). In exchange for the use of Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos islands, the U.S. government paid the British government $14 million dollars, which went toward the three-stage removal of Chagossians living not only on Diego Garcia, but on the other two major island groups of the Chagos Archipelago, Peros Banhos and the Salomon Islands.

When American and British press got word of the story, British officials deflected criticism, arguing that the Chagossians were little more than contract workers with no ties to the islands, when in fact, Chagossians had been on the islands for five generations since being brought there as slaves. The British government employed three tactics in the expulsion process: the first step was to prohibit Chagossians who left for vacation or medical treatment from returning to the islands. Next, they shut down the copra (coconut oil) plantations that employed the majority of Chagossians living on the islands. When they realized that it was taking too long to expel the Chagossians, the government began gassing their pets.

An excerpt from a report by the Chagos Refugees Group describes Chagossians ordered to lead their dogs to a big building. Once the dogs were locked inside, “two jeeps approach the building and back up in such a way as to bring their exhaust pipes as close as possible to a door; the British and American officers managed to connect the exhaust pipes of the vehicles to inside the building; they then left the vehicles’ engines running and went away.  By that time, we had realized that our dogs were being killed and that the [building] had been converted into a gas chamber.”  

The remaining Chagossians were crowded onto ships and deposited in Mauritius and the Seychelles. Families were arbitrarily separated, and though they had been promised they would find themselves taken care of in their new homes, the Chagossians were left without provisions for adequate housing, employment, or social services.

Though Bancoult barely remembers his life on Peros Banhos, the recollections handed down to him are, of course, idyllic: “For us, [life in Chagos] represented a paradise… Everyone has a job. Everyone has a wonderful life. Everyone has culture. Everyone has tradition. And people have jobs working mainly in copra plantations and fishing industries.”

Traumatized by their exile, with few skills suited for work outside copra plantations, the Chagossians found themselves in abject poverty, where for thirty years, they have occupied the bottom rung of Mauritian and Seychellois societies. An April 2005 study revealed that in addition to living in poverty, 50% of 1st generation Chagossians living in Mauritius are subjected to job discrimination; 66% have reported facing verbal abuse.

Bancoult’s family’s new life in Mauritius was marred by difficulty. His mother was hospitalized with psychiatric problems shortly after their expulsion. Of his five siblings, one brother suffered a stroke and died of what his mother called “sagren” (sadness), two of his brothers fell victim to drug and alcohol addiction (both died in their mid-thirties), and a fourth died at the age of ten of unknown causes after earning money for his family by selling water and begging at a local cemetery.

Last month, Olivier Bancoult paid his first visit to the United States to seek support for the cause of the Chagossian people as president of the Chagos Refugee Group (CRG). As the first Chagossian leader to come to the United States, Bancoult represents the Chagossian people in two class action lawsuits, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom, seeking compensation for mistreatment and the right of return. His case, Bancoult v. McNamara, against the U.S. government and its officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense under President Ford, was dismissed by the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C. last December and is now under appeal.

Today the base on Diego Garcia is of critical importance to U.S. military strategy. Located south of India and halfway between Africa and Indonesia, the base has been used for U.S. military action from the first Gulf War through the war in Afghanistan. The base shelters B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers. Its harbor houses an aircraft carrier, attack submarines, and ships nearly the size of the Empire State Building. The island is home to a satellite spy station, 1,700 military personnel and 1,500 civilian contractors. Chagossians are strictly barred by the U.S. government from employment on Diego Garcia: 540 Chagossians have applied for employment; not one has been hired.

1,200 miles away, 6,000 Chagossians live in misery – a stark contrast to the life they lived in Chagos – a life of abundant food and gardens, free housing, health care, vacations, retirement pensions, unrestricted access to Chagos’s copious fishing grounds and flora, regular salaries, social services, schools, and a deep and longstanding tradition of community. Unemployment amongst Chagossians on Mauritius runs at around 60%, compared to a national average in Mauritius of 4%. Chagossian illiteracy is 45% compared with only 15% amongst Mauritians. British documentary filmmaker John Pilger, whose recent documentary Stealing A Nation tells the plight of the Chagossians, visited a family who had been filmed in 1982 living in abject poverty with 25 sleeping in shifts in one room. Twenty-two years later he finds them in the same house, in much the same conditions.

According to the allegations outlined in the lawsuit Bancoult v. McNamara, Chagossians continue to “live in extreme poverty in the most desperate areas of Mauritius … [They] live in tin shacks that house as many as sixteen people…Most living quarters do not have doors, windows, or running water.” They use communal spigots, many of which are unprotected from sewage, and share either make-shift tin out-houses or holes in the ground covered by tarps, which serve as bathrooms. The areas in which they live are too impoverished to afford trash removal so trash-heaps amass around their shacks. These, as well as pools of standing water around communal spigots, attract swarms of insects and rodents, which infest their living quarters and cause disease.

Though Bancoult is pursuing legal avenues, he believes that it will take pressure from the American people to bring justice for his people. It is of the utmost importance to Bancoult that people understand that the Chagossians are not seeking the closure of the base on Diego Garcia. What Chagossians want is the right to return home, receive fair and equal employment opportunities, and compensation for what they have suffered, which he says would enable them to begin to rebuild the flourishing society that was uprooted 30 years ago.

David Vine, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center who has studied Chagossians for four years, sees no rationale for the inaction on the part of the U.S. government: “We’re talking about a group of 5,000 people. The amount of money it would take to compensate them properly is very small in terms of any other expense the government undertakes. On Diego Garcia at least half of the island or more is unused by the military and is physically separated from the part that is used by the base.” Furthermore, Peros Banhos and Salomon, the two other main island groups, are over 150 miles from the base and, since the removal of the Chagossians, have remained uninhabited but for the tourists on yachts who anchor off the island and camp on shore.

The U.S. government to date has provided no explanation for its refusal to return the Chagossians to their home. It’s no secret that the U.S. military prefers not to have to deal with civilian populations in close proximity to a secure military base, yet it has employed thousands of civilians from the Philippines, Mauritius, the Seychelles and elsewhere. In addition, the U.S. denies accountability for the plight of the Chagossian people, maintaining that Diego Garcia is part of the BIOT and its former inhabitants are beyond the U.S. government’s jurisdiction. In reality, Diego Garcia is a U.S. military colony.

At a moment in United States history when the whole world has tuned in to watch as the social, racial and economic consequences of Hurricane Katrina expose a whole new set of human rights concerns, Bancoult hopes that Americans will lend support to his cause. While in the States, Bancoult met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the International Rescue Committee, Human Rights Watch, TransAfrica, and Senator Kennedy’s office. In fact, Senator Edward Kennedy is one of the few politicians ever to speak out on the issue of the Chagossian plight. Thirty years ago to the day that Bancoult arrived in the U.S., Senators Kennedy (D-MA) and Culver (D-IA) introduced an amendment requiring the Ford Administration to report on what had happened to the Chagossians, which resulted in a little more than a nine-page report.

Over the last 30 years, only a handful of media outlets, few of which could be considered mainstream, have ever covered Chagos. Still, Bancoult believes that his best chance for justice lies in public pressure. As Bancoult explains, “we just want to have the support of all people who believe in the respect of human rights to help us have our dignity as a people and have the same rights as all human beings.”

For more information about Chagos, contact Oliver Bancoult at obancoultcrg@intnet.mu.