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The Dispossessed
In 1969, Marie Aimee took her two children for medical treatment, a six-day voyage across the Indian Ocean from their home on Diego Garcia island to Port Louis, Mauritius. Her husband, Dervillie Permal, stayed behind to work at a coconut oil factory and tend the family garden and animals. After visiting the doctor and picking up supplies in Port Louis, Marie and her children arrived at the quay for the trip home. However, a British Government agent refused to allow them onto the boat, stranding Marie and her children in Mauritius. Throughout the following weeks, other marooned islanders appeared, congregating in a local slum, living in boxes or tin shacks. Two years later, Marie’s husband arrived in Port Louis with one small bag and a chilling story.
Environmentalists are sometimes accused of caring more about animals than people, an idea refuted by countless actions protecting human victims of industrial and military disasters. The 1970s Greenpeace campaign to stop nuclear testing in the South Pacific, for example, included support for the displaced and irradiated innocents of Rongelap Island. More recently, in March 2008, two former Greenpeace skippers – Jon Castle and Peter Bouquet, both from the original Rainbow Warrior crew – sailed into the lagoon of Diego Garcia, to protest the treatment of dispossessed islanders, including Marie Aimee and her descendants.
Real estate, ocean view Diego Garcia island sits in the Chagos Archipelago, east of the Seychelles, 1000 nautical miles south of India. In the eighteenth century, French Navy ships marooned lepers on the island and later established coconut plantations worked by slaves.
The British seized the islands in 1815, eventually converted the slaves to indentured labourers, and imported peasant workers from India and Mauritius. Marie and her husband are descendants of these workers. They are the Chagossians.
By the twentieth century, around 2000 Chagossians lived modest but pleasant lives on Diego Garcia, under the dominion of British colonists and military officers. The islanders worked on the coconut plantations, maintained family gardens, raised chickens, and ate lobster and fish from the bountiful lagoon. Their children grew healthy on the rich diet, attended schools, and played in the marine paradise.
In 1961, American military officers arrived, looking for a suitable US bomber base in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia, with its protected coral lagoon and clear, long-range radio reception appeared perfect. One problem, however, persisted. The Americans desired privacy, and did not want indigenous inhabitants near their base.
Britain paid its own colony of Mauritius £3-million for unrestricted rights to the Chagos Archipelago and formed the "British Indian Ocean Territory" (BIOT) among the islands. Their first legal act, "BIOT Ordinance No. 1: Compulsory Acquisition of Land," presumed the authority to confiscate land deemed necessary for British or American security.
In 1966, Britain granted the US a 50 year lease on the island, for US$ 1 per year, plus a one-off payment of US$ 14-million (£5-million at the time, a neat profit on their real estate investment). The US delivered the payment in trade, in the form of Polaris nuclear submarine missiles.
Pet Cemetery
Documents later released under court order by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) described islanders as "Tarzans and Men Fridays" with "little aptitude for anything except growing coconuts." The FCO promised Americans that deportations could be "timed to attract the least attention," leaving "no indigenous population except seagulls."
When Richard Nixon became US president in 1969 he handed the Diego Garcia portfolio to his protégé, 32-year-old law school dropout Donald Rumsfeld. British officers, on behalf of their American clients, closed coconut plantations, putting people out of work. They lured families to Mauritius with free holidays, barred them from returning, and made no provisions for stranded islanders such as Marie Aimee and her children.
In 1971, armed soldiers seized the island. They ordered Marie’s husband, Dervillie Permal, to leave immediately allowing him to take only the possessions he carried on his way home from work. British troops burned homes, killed livestock, and corralled some 800 dogs, including family pets, into an abandoned coconut oil plantation building. They converted the building into a gas chamber by attaching vehicle exhaust pipes and executed the dogs in full view of weeping families.
The soldiers herded distraught islanders, traumatized men and women, onto ships. Marie Therese Mein, now 68, suffered a miscarriage on the six-day slave-ship style voyage, and Christian Simon, 28, overcome by despair, threw himself into the sea.
In Port Louis, Permal met his wife Marie in the city slum, where they begged for food and menial jobs. Many Chagossians fell victim to alcoholism, drugs, and prostitution. Their children were mocked and humiliated at local schools. Meanwhile, on Diego Garcia, British officers handed the depopulated island paradise to Mr. Rumsfeld and the American generals.
Footprint Freedom
Diego Garcia island is now the largest US military base outside the United States, with arsenals, bunkers, and hangers for B2 stealth bombers. The once-rich lagoon is now an oily harbour for some 30 warships. B52 Bombing raids depart from Diego Garcia for Iraq and Afghanistan, bombing more peasant people to secure America’s access to oil fields and pipeline routes.
The 1450 US soldiers, 2000 civilian contractors, and 50 British soldiers entertain themselves with a windsurfer club, yacht club, fishing tours, and an annual "Miss Diego Garcia" beauty contest. US military personnel refer to their 6,000 global bases as America’s "footprint," and Diego Garcia has been branded "Footprint Freedom."
US "Footprint Freedom" on Chagossian homeland
At the heart of Footprint Freedom sits a detention and interrogation centre that the local soldiers refer to as "Camp Justice," exposed by Scottish MP Alex Salmon and confirmed by US general Barry McCaffrey and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Donald Rumsfield – architect of the final solution to the island’s indigenous problem and Iraq War planner – admits that the US holds "ghost detainees" at these "extraordinary rendition" camps.
In 2002, during the planning of the Iraq War, the US brought prisoner Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi to Diego Garcia on the USS Bataan. According to the London human rights group, Reprieve, Al-Libi was tortured into "admitting" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and worked with al-Qaida, the two erroneous pretenses that Rumsfeld and George Bush used to launch the oil wars. According to a Council of Europe investigation, Diego Garcia’s "Camp Justice" is a primary interrogation centre for "high-value detainees."
The Rule of Law
The story of Diego Garcia Island is the story of industrialized, militarized western world gone mad, the rich and powerful subjugating the landscape and the most defenseless people on Earth. The dispossessed Chagossian people, however, struggle back.
In 2003, they filed a lawsuit in the United States against Rumsfeld and others instrumental in seizing Diego Garcia, including US Vice President Dick Cheney, US ambassador Anne Armstrong, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Halliburton, the corporation they run that held the construction contract for the base. These defendants faced charges of kidnapping, genocide, torture, and degrading treatment of innocent people. The US Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and the US media virtually ignored the story.
In Britain, however, the Chagossian people have won three High Court decisions against the British Government, confirming that the expulsions were unlawful and that the right to a homeland represents a "fundamental liberty" under British and International law. The Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have appealed these rulings, but the case now stands before the British House of Lords, with a decision expected in October.
In July of this year a committee of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland ruled that Britain "should ensure that the Chagos islanders can exercise their right to return to their territory [and] should investigate allegations related to transit through its territory of rendition flights."
British authorities arrested Jon Castle and Peter Bouquet in the Diego Garcia lagoon and seized their boat, Musichana. Another former Greenpeace activist from the 1970s peace vessel Fri and the Rainbow Warrior, Martini Gotje, provides updates at The People’s Navy. The UK Chagos Support Association posts legal updates. On 21 August an open International Conference, "The Fate of the Chagossians," commenced at VU University Amsterdam, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
The case of the Chagossians exposes the pretense of industrial civilization. Leaders of rich nations proclaim freedom and democracy, yet most peasant people and all environments in the world remain under relentless assault. Indigenous people in India, Africa, China, Tibet, Canada, the US, Brazil, Argentina, and throughout the western hemisphere, have been dispossessed from sustainable lives in forests, prairies, or islands and driven into urban slums in the name of economic progress. There exists an eternal link between the industrial and military destruction of the environment and the assault on the poorest people of the world.
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Originally published in my "Deep Green" column at Greenpeace International
Tags: Chagossians, Cheney, Diego Garcia, Ibn al-Sheikh, military base, Rumsfeld, U.S. military
This was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Ecology, Indigenous Nations . Feel free to respond, or trackback.
9 Responses to “The Dispossessed”
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kaye Moss Says:
Dear Rex,
This is a great article and very informative. Hearing stories like this makes it hard to remain hopeful for the future. In Denver this week we are having the US National Democratic Convention. I do think that Barack Obama wants a different kind of government. Someone told me last night that he has a picture of Ghandi in his office. We can only hope and stay vigilant, which you have never stopped doing. Thank you.
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Stephan Lehrer Says:
This is one of thousands of critical stories that we’ll never hear on CNN or in other corporate media. It seems that 99% of conventional world media so-called journalists are asleep at their desks. Thanks for doing this work. I was glad to see this story on the Greenpeace website.
Another story we don’t read in our daily news is how war profiteers have driven world geopolitics toward militarism and disaster. Naomi Klein exposes this in “The Shock Doctrine.”
Journalists like you and Ms. Klein are doing the work that the well-paid, too-comfortable pretenders are not doing.
Everyone wants “positive solutions,” but what is the solution to racism and genocide? Will a new American president change any of this? “Footprint freedom” is just another jackboot on the neck of the poor. Just as I’m writing this, I’m seeing on the Truthout website that US-led airstrikes just killed 76 Afghan civilians, most of them children. Russia and China treat their colonies the same way: buy them off with money, and if that doesn’t work, stomp them into submission. Not much has changed since the days of the Belgian Congo and open slavery. But these horrors were limited also by real journalists willing to confront the powerful with their crimes.
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Andrea Peloso Says:
September 1st, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Speaking of stories that need to be told, here’s another:
I’ve taken the liberty of copying an article by Starhawk and pasting it here.
May the stories we share protect one another.
RNC2�Raid on the Convergence Center
By Starhawk
It’s Friday night. Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of theMississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a call. The cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we’re organizing meetings and trainings for the protests against the Republican National Convention. It’s not a role play, the caller says. It’s real.
Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old theater we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings. I `ve spent the last two days doing magical activism trainings, teaching people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and when things get chaotic. Now it’s time to put the training into practice. Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews strides along beside me. “Are you grounded?” I ask him. He nods, and runs ahead.
Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an arrow, walking, not running, but still covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail behind. We’re often street buddies, because we’re both big, slow, and supremely calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation and become the immovable object.
We’re stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the building. They refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is blocking Scarecrow’s car. There’s an investigation underway, they say, and won’t say more.
Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity meeting, ironically enough. So are two very young people who had just joined our cluster that night. I try calling Brush’s cell phone, but get no reply.
We wait. That’s what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids inside a building. You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try to think of useful things to do.
We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media. We call friends who might know politicians and media.
Through the kitchen door, we cansee young kids sitting on the floor, handcuffed. We walk across the street, back, made more phone calls. An ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics head into the building, leaving a gurney ready. Susu, from her car around the corner, reports that the cops have been grabbing pedestrians from the street, forcing them down to the ground, handcuffing them.
Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member. She wants to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul will be as welcoming to protestors as to delegates, but no one has his home number.
What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an action is just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in your stomach and your feet starting to hurt. Song talks to a helpful neighbor, who’s come over to find out what’s happening. He knows where the mayor lives, says it’s just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.
We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops. About five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a neighborhood of comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the Mississippi. The Mayor’s house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and lights were on inside. We decide that just a few of us will go to the door, so as not to look intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied middle-aged woman with a sweet face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa, formidable organizer though she is, looks slight and unthreatening. The rest of us hang back. Someone opens the door. Our friends have a conversation with the mayors’ wife, who is not pleased to be visited by constituents late at night, and who tells us we should call the office. The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not wake him up.
We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go see what’s going on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.
A protestor has been released from the building. A small crowd has gathered across the street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview Song, who does her first ever Fox media spot. She tells them the truth�that people were in there watching movies�a documentary about Meridel Le Seuer. Meridel would be proud, and I’m glad she is with
us in some form.One by one, protestor’s trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the story. The cops burst in, with no warning. They pulled drew their guns on everyone�including a five year old child who was there with his mother, forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.
They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search for `bomb making materials.’ They were searching everyone in the building, then one by one releasing them as they found nothing.
They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours. Meanwhile, more and more media arrives. These cops are not as creative as the DC cops during our first mobilization there against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime soup�which included onions and chili powder, claiming they were materials for home made pepper spray.
We wait until the last person gets out. He’s a twenty year old who the cops have accused of stealing his own backpack�but apparently they relented.
And now it’s morning. I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding houses where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus warrant and arresting people, including a four year old child. They’ve arrested people at the Food Not Bombs house�a group dedicated to feeding protestors and the homeless. They’ve arrested others, presumably just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a park in the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its participants ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.
Let me be perfectly clear here�all of us here are planning nonviolent protests against an administration which is responsible for immense violence, bombs that have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration have brought us, a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where pre-emptive strikes have become the strategy of choice for those who hold
power, where any group can be accused of `bombmaking’ or `terrorism’
on no evidence whatsoever in order to deter dissent.Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.
Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged by these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to let dissent be heard.
FLOOD THE MAYORS’ OFFICES ASAP
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman
651-266-8510Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak
(612) 673-2100
(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis -
Peter Russell Says:
September 1st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Thanks, Rex.
I’ve been following this story for over ten years now, and I always have the hope that the islanders might finally find the justice they deserve.
Each of us in the developed world must remember that the earth is sacred and that we all have the same right to life, security and happiness. All of us have that secret place where we condone the use of power to get what we want. The real power is the ability to put that aside and to embrace everyone.
I suspect Mother Nature has a few tricks up her ample sleeves, and that we can expect to bear the brunt of them. Good on her!
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Adrian Fisher Says:
September 19th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Thanks for filling in that blank spot in Rumsfeld’s resume, and adding to the geography of “extraordinary rendition” and our history of perverting the meaning of the word “freedom”-not to mention the concept of “all humans are created equal.”
In the face of evil we must continue to remember that we are called to help mend the world, and to heed that call through action in our daily lives, however we can, no matter how small the action, or how hopeless the general conditions seem.
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mothepa elizabeth ndumo Says:
September 19th, 2008 at 7:44 am
I live in a tiny, landlocked mountain Kingdom called Lesotho in Southern Africa. I first read about the Chagossians in John Pilger’s Hidden Agendas and subsequently Freedom Next Time. I vowed i would use whatever public platform i had to expose this astonishing and disgusting crime against humanity. I then became a columinst for a local weekly (English) and wrote about how the US and Britain grossly violated human rights to establish a military base on Diego Garcia. Guess what? i got a call from the local US Embassy to meet for lunch not too long thereafter. I attended the lunch, with my wits about me and with two other friends. The Embassy official told me with no sense of irony whatsoever (and with a blank face) that he only learned about Diego Garcia through my column!! Right. How is this possible in a civilised world ? Do Americans genuinely believe that their country is exporting democracy and freedom to the rest of the world? really? I don’t believe it.
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mary Says:
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:02 am
I feel sick, literally … angry, despondent, ashamed of my stinking government – British – not for the first time,where on earth are we heading? For the sake of God Americans,please vote for Obama. Heaven only knows who we brits can look to.
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Mark Haugaard Says:
September 28th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for your comment on the population control which has ideed been made a non-issue by political elites. I think the problem may be even worse than you suggest in that it’s not only food that’s the most pressing issue but the fact that even alternative energies pollute. A windmill has to be made built, which polutes in the first instance. So, the only real solution to the environmental problem is actually a radical decrease in population, possibly back to 1900 levels, which will take much more than simple access to contraceptives and women’s rights. The problem with actually decreasing populations is not only cultural but the inbuilt shor-termism of politics. Many European nations with declining poplutaions claim to have a ‘pension crisis’. Decreasing population means asking people to vote for uncertain time in their old age, which few are willing to do. Obviously, these are the kinds of sacrifices which people should be willing to make.
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A. Strong Says:
I happened upon your article while searching DG and found it hard to believe and somewhat hatefull twords Americans. As an American soldier who has been there take my advice and do a little more research and get the facts instead of guestemated numbers and made up accustations. Maybe thats why the press has ignored your “stories.” Love a little more… Hate no one.
Rex Weyler:
Thanks for writing. Sorry you found this “hateful.” Your reaction may say more about you than the essay itself, since there is nothing hateful here. I am reporting the evidence that is available. You suggest that I get some facts wrong. Please explain. What facts? If you have better information, data, or research I’d be thrilled to receive it. This story has been researched extensively by me, by Martini Gotje, and by journalists in the UK and elsewhere. In fact, the world press has not ignored this story. The US media has mostly ignored it, but not because the facts are wrong, but because the facts show that the US and the UK stole this land from its inhabitants. It is embarrassing to the US and UK, certainly. Nevertheless, the history and information I offer in the essay is all verified. I have nothing against you; I hope your time on Diego Garcia Island was fruitful. If you think I’ve made any mistake with any facts, please support your allegation with the correct facts, and the verifiable sources. rw.
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