So far we have seen how officials were worried that despite the advantages of overseas bases for controlling large territories, bases also carry with them significant risks. The most serious, as Stu Barber realized, is the possibility that a host nation will evict its guest from a base. There is also the danger that for political or other reasons a host will make a base temporarily unavailable during a crisis. During the lead-up to the most recent invasion of Iraq, for example, Turkey’s Islamist ruling party refused to allow the United States use of its territory for a large troop deployment, though it permitted the basing of warplanes and the use of its airspace. In most cases, guest nations are forced to negotiate continually for a variety of base rights with their hosts.
The other main risk facing bases on foreign soil is that posed by the people outside a base’s gates. As recent U.S. experience in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Okinawa has shown, foreign bases can become targets of attacks and lightning rods for local protest and criticism about foreign intrusion and imperialism.1 Worst of all, the military fears outright revolt against a base, or that locals could press claims to self-determination before the United Nations and thus threaten the life of the base. This was of special concern for U.S. officials during an era of rising nationalism and anti-imperialism in Africa and Asia.2 U.S. military officials also worry that local populations pose risks of espionage, security breaches, and uncontrollable sexual and romantic liaisons between troops and their neighbors.
In short, soldiers and diplomats view local peoples as the source of troubles, headaches, and work that distracts the military from its primary missions. If civilian workers are needed as service personnel, importing outsiders without local ties or rights, who can be controlled and sent home at will, is typically preferred.
For these reasons, in the eyes of soldiers and diplomats, a base free of any nonmilitary population is the best kind of base. For these reasons, after World War II, U.S. officials increasingly looked for bases located in relatively unpopulated areas.3 The Strategic Island Concept was premised on the threat to bases posed by rising anti-Western sentiment and the search for people-less bases. With the islanders scheduled for removal from Diego Garcia, military planners were thrilled at the idea of a base with no civilian population within almost 500 miles. U.S. officials and their British counterparts wanted total control over the island and the entire archipelago without the slightest possibility of outside interference—be it from foreign politicians or local inhabitants.
Diego Garcia was attractive once it became British sovereign territory precisely because it was not subject to, as one Navy official explains, “political restrictions of the type that had shackled or even terminated flexibility at foreign bases elsewhere.”4 The “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom ensured the U.S. military near carte blanche (pun intended) use of the island.
The priorities of the U.S. and U.K. governments were clear: maintaining complete political and military control over the islands; retaining the unfettered ability to remove any island populations by force; and assuming an intentional disregard for the rights of inhabitants. The U.S. Government wanted unencumbered freedom to do what it wished with a group of “sparsely populated” islands irrespective of the treatment owed to the people of dependent territories. In simplest terms, the U.S. Government wanted the Chagossians removed because officials wanted to ensure complete political and military control over Diego Garcia and the entire archipelago.
Four days after the government of the United Kingdom created the British Indian Ocean Territory in November 1965, the British Colonial Office sent the following instructions to the newly established BIOT administration, headquartered in the Seychelles: “Essential that contingency planning for evacuation of existing population from Diego Garcia . . . should begin at once.”5
While planning between the British and U.S. governments had been underway since at least 1964, officials began to plan the removals in earnest after the creation of the BIOT. British officials again faced the untidy problem of how to get rid of the Chagossians, given UN rules on decolonization and the treatment due permanent inhabitants of colonial territories. In a 1966 memorandum, Secretary of State for the Colonies Francis Pakenham proposed simply rejecting “the basic principle set out in Article 73” of the UN Charter “that the interests of the inhabitants of the territory are paramount.” “The legal position of the inhabitants would be greatly simplified from our point of view—though not necessarily from theirs,” another official suggested, “if we decided to treat them as a floating population.” They would claim that the BIOT had no permanent inhabitants and “refer to the people in the islands as Mauritians and Seychellois.”6
Another official, Alan Brooke-Turner, feared that members of the UN Committee of Twenty-Four on Decolonization might demand the right to visit the BIOT, jeopardizing the “whole aim of the BIOT.” Brooke-Turner suggested issuing documents showing that the Chagossians and other workers were “belongers” of Mauritius or the Seychelles and only temporary residents in the BIOT. “This device, though rather transparent,” he wrote, “would at least give us a defensible position to take up in the Committee of Twenty-four.”7
“This is all fairly unsatisfactory,” a colleague responded in a handwritten note a few days later. “We detach these islands—in itself a matter which is criticised. We then find, apart from the transients, up to 240 ‘ilois’* whom we propose either to resettle (with how much vigour of persuasion?) or to certify, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else. This all seems difficult to reconcile with the ‘sacred trust’ of Art. 73, however convenient we or the US might find it from the viewpoint of defence. It is one thing to use ‘empty real estate’; another to find squatters in it and to make it empty.”8
A response came from Sir Paul Gore-Booth, Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office: “We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a Committee (the Status of Women Committee does not cover the rights of Birds).”9
Below Gore-Booth’s note, one of his colleagues, D. A. Greenhill (later Baron of Harrow), penned back, “Unfortunately along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc. When this has been done, I agree we must be very tough.”10
British officials eventually settled on a policy, as Foreign Office legal adviser Anthony Aust proposed, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population.”
“We are able to make up the rules as we go along,” Aust wrote. They would simply represent the Chagossians as “a floating population” of “transient contract workers” with no connection to the islands.11
Following the signing of the 1966 agreement, British officials moved to purchase the islands in the BIOT that were privately owned. After conveniently appointing themselves as the legislature for the new colony, British ministers passed “BIOT Ordinance No. 1 of 1967,” allowing for the compulsory acquisition of land within the territory. In March 1967, the United Kingdom bought Chagos from Chagos-Agalega Ltd. for £660,000.12
The next month the British Government leased the islands back to Chagos-Agalega to continue running the islands on its behalf. Until this point, Chagossians could, as they had been accustomed since emancipation, leave Chagos for regular vacations or medical treatment in Mauritius and return to Chagos as they wished. After May 1967,13 the BIOT administration ordered Chagos-Agalega to prevent Chagossians, like Rita Bancoult’s family, from returning to Chagos. When, at the end of 1967, one of Chagos-Agalega’s parent companies, Moulinie & Co., took over management, it also agreed to serve as the United Kingdom’s agent in Chagos and prevent the entry of anyone without BIOT consent.14 Like Rita, Chagossian after Chagossian appearing at the steamship company in Mauritius for return passage was turned away and told, “Your island has been sold.”15
By February 1968, Chagossians in Mauritius had begun to protest their banning to the Mauritian Government. Mauritian officials asked Moulinie & Co. to allow their return on the next ship to the islands. When Paul Moulinie, Moulinie & Co.’s director, asked BIOT officials if they would allow some Chagossians to return, they refused. The company’s steamer, the M.V. Mauritius, left on its next voyage for Chagos with no Chagossians aboard.
Later in 1968, with labor running low on the plantations, Moulinie & Co. requested permission from BIOT authorities to bring some Chagossians back from Mauritius. Amid ongoing consultations with U.S. officials, BIOT authorities denied the request. British officials understood, as one wrote, “if we accept any returning Ilois, we must also accept responsibility for their ultimate resettlement.”16 To keep the plantations running at a “basic maintenance level,” the BIOT administration allowed Moulinie & Co. to replace the stranded Chagossians with imported Seychellois workers.17
Back in Chagos, BIOT administrator John Todd found that “the islands have been neglected for the past eighteen months, due to uncertainty as to their future.”18 With military talks ongoing and the start of base construction uncertain, the BIOT and its agents gradually reduced services on the islands, making only basic maintenance repairs to keep the plantations running.
Beginning in 1965 with the creation of the BIOT, Chagos-Agalega began importing three-month stocks of food rather than the six-month stocks ordered previously. This left staple supplies of rice, flour, lentils, milk, and other goods lower than normal, making Chagossians increasingly reliant on fish and their own produce to meet food needs.19
After 1967 (and perhaps as early as late 1965) medical and school staff began leaving the islands. The midwife at the hospital in Peros Banhos left Chagos sometime before August 1968. She was not replaced, leaving only a single nurse at the hospital.20 Around the same time, in 1967, the school in Peros Banhos closed due to the lack of a teacher.21 In the Salomon Islands, the midwife departed during the first half of 1969, leaving a single nurse employed there as well. Salomon’s teacher left sometime before July 1970, and the school there closed.22
At first Chagos-Agalega neglected the islands to avoid making capital investments on plantations it knew the BIOT might soon shut down. After the company sold the islands and gave up its lease, the BIOT institutionalized the neglect in the contract Moulinie & Co. signed to manage the islands: No improvements of more than Rs2,000 (around $420 at the time) could be made without BIOT permission.23
With conditions worsening, some Chagossians left for Mauritius, with hopes that life in Chagos would improve and allow their return. Others left as usual for vacations or medical treatment. Some Chagossians report being tricked or coerced into leaving Chagos with the award of an unscheduled vacation in Mauritius.24 When the new arrivees and other Chagossians in Mauritius attempted to book their return passage, they, like their predecessors, were again refused. Because there was no telephone service in Chagos and because mail service between Mauritius and Chagos had been suspended, news of Chagossians being stranded in Mauritius did not reach those in the archipelago. By 1969, there were at least 356 Chagossians already in exile.25
This growing number found themselves having lost their jobs, separated from their homes and their land, with almost all of their possessions and property still in Chagos. Most were separated from family members left behind. All were confused about their future, about whether they would be allowed to return to their homes, and about their legal status in Mauritius.
The islanders also found themselves in a country that was highly unstable after gaining its independence in March 1968. Just after independence, riots between Afro-Mauritians and Indo-Mauritian Muslims broke out in many of the poor neighborhoods where Chagossians were living and continued through most of 1968.
Meanwhile, unemployment in Mauritius was over 20 percent.26 British experts warned that the island was a Malthusian disaster in the making and would soon lack the resources to feed and support its rapidly growing population. A secret British telegram acknowledged “the near impossibility of [Chagossians] finding suitable employment. There is no Copra industry into which they could be absorbed.”27 The result was that most were left, as another British official put it, languishing “on the beach.”28
As one Chagossian explained to me in 2004, life was turned completely upside down. Suddenly, “Chagossien dan dife, nu de lipie briye”—Chagossians were in the fire, with both our feet burning.
As Paul Nitze’s staff member Robert Murray recalled, the British “relieved us of a lot of problems. I mean, we didn’t have to think through” the question of the removals anymore. “We didn’t have to decide how we were going to manage our force relative to the local population, because there wasn’t a local population.”
I asked Murray if there were discussions about the fate of the Chagossians.
There were, he said, but “it was something the British thought they could manage. We didn’t, we didn’t try to get ourselves involved in it. Unless Kitchen and State did. We had the practical interest in having the base. And the British said that they could manage the transition. And they went about it and some of it was legal and some of it was otherwise. They were doing whatever they were doing. To the best of my knowledge they weren’t consulting with us on the—now maybe that’s not true, but I don’t remember it anyway.”
“And your sense was that you wanted to leave that to them and it was something you didn’t particularly look into, or—” I asked before Murray interrupted.
“Yeah, we wanted to leave it to the British, I think, to manage that transition of the people and the sovereignty. We saw that as their responsibility. It was their island. . . . We personally saw, in Defense, no need or opportunity for us to inject ourselves—at least that’s how I saw it at the time.”
Murray’s memory of the Chagossians reflects a striking consistency in former officials’ responses when I asked what they remembered thinking about the Chagossians. Almost all remembered spending little time thinking about the islanders. The people were, as State Department official James Noyes put it, a “nitty gritty” detail that they never examined. Or as another said, they were something to which officials turned a “blind eye.” The removal was a “fait accompli . . . a given” never requiring any thought.
I asked former State Department official George Vest if he disagreed in any ways with the Diego policy.
“I didn’t have that deep a sense, [that] deep a feeling about it,” he explained. “There was never any conflict. My attitude, which I expressed, was what I call an inner internal marginal attitude. I accepted the premises which led us to do what we were doing there without any real questioning.”
That he and the United States were doing good in the world, Vest and others took for granted. Noyes said, “It was taken as a given good.”
Indeed, Noyes explained that by the time he arrived at the State Department in 1970, there was no policy analysis about Diego Garcia because the base was treated as already being in place. There was no questioning of the British about “‘What are you guys doing with the natives?’” he said. “It was an accepted part of the scenery.”
“It was—the question, the ethical question of the workers and so on,” Noyes said hesitatingly, “simply wasn’t, wasn’t in the spectrum. It wasn’t discussed. No one realized, I don’t think . . . the human aspects of it. Nobody was there or had been there, or was close enough to it, so. It was like questioning apple pie or something.”
With the population already gone in the minds of most U.S. and U.K. officials, the Pentagon simultaneously pursued the Air Force’s interest in Aldabra and the Navy’s proposal for Diego Garcia. The Air Force budgeted $25 million in fiscal year 1968 for the 50/50 base on Aldabra. For the Diego Garcia proposal, Secretary of the Navy Nitze asked McNamara to “reconsider” McNamara’s 1966 decision to withhold the Navy’s request from Congress. This time Nitze had a new justification for the base, pitching it around the war in Vietnam as an “austere” refueling port for ships traveling to and from southeast Asia. The plan had a revised $26 million budget, divided into two funding increments beginning in fiscal year 1969. The austere facility, Nitze noted, would still offer a “nucleus” for expansion into a larger base, “if need arose.”29
For this new incarnation, Nitze and the Navy had allies at DOD in Nitze’s former office and its new Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, John McNaughton. Together, Nitze and McNaughton now pushed McNamara to approve the new Diego-as-fueling-depot plan.
Still hesitant, McNamara referred the proposal to the office in the Pentagon that, bureaucratically speaking, defined his tenure as Secretary of Defense: Systems Analysis. When McNamara joined the Kennedy administration, he brought with him, from his tenure at Ford Motor Company, a mode of statistically based economic analysis that had started to grow in popularity in the 1950s. McNamara saw it as a way to seize control of the Pentagon from the military services by imposing rationality on Defense decision-making and hired a group that became known as the “Whiz Kids” to implement the changes.
“Young, book-smart, Ivy League,” these “think-tank civilian assistants,” many coming from the RAND Corporation, championed rational calculation and statistical analysis as the basis for all policy decisions. “Everything was scrutinized with the cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis” of RAND, Fred Kaplan writes in Wizards of Armageddon (1991[1983]). The questions of the day were ones like, “‘What weapon system will destroy the most targets for a given cost?’ or ‘What weapon system will destroy a given set of targets for the lowest cost?’”30
McNamara charged Systems Analysis, and its head Alain Enthoven, with providing this analysis. In Systems Analysis, statistically based cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit calculations helped shape, justify, and evaluate military policymaking. Nearly every weapons purchase, every troop deployment, and every base decision had to pass through Systems Analysis for approval.
“McNamara would not act on a proposal without letting Alain’s department have a chop at it,” explained Earl Ravenal, a Systems Analysis staffer who worked on the Diego Garcia proposal. “Systems analysis became accepted as the buzz word, the way that decisions were rationalized, the currency of overt transactions, the lingua franca inside the Pentagon,” Kaplan writes.31 Often, this language and the use of statistical data alone were enough to create the veneer of rationality and justify policy decisions. This is exactly the type of language one sees in the Strategic Island Concept, in the talk of “stockpiling” islands like “commodities” and “investing” in bases as “insurance” to obtain future “benefits.” As anthropologist Carole Cohn has shown among “defense intellectuals,” and as the recollections of officials suggest, this language played an important role in shaping a particular version of reality and in shielding officials from the emotional and human impacts of their decisions.32
But at this time Ravenal’s team in Systems Analysis received the proposal for Diego Garcia with instructions to “look into the quantitative rationale” for the base and “see if it makes sense.” They took the Navy at its word and evaluated its most recent justification for the project—to create a new fueling depot for ships traveling to and from Vietnam. Ravenal’s team found the base was not cost-effective: Given the distances involved and the costs of transporting fuel, it was simply cheaper to refuel ships at existing ports.
McNamara wrote to the new Secretary of the Navy, Paul R. Ignatius (by the end of June 1967, Nitze was back at the Pentagon as Deputy Secretary of Defense), to inform him that he would again defer “investment.”33
Ravenal explained that the Navy and ISA were “extremely annoyed.” They were “hopping up and down” mad, he said. Even people within Systems Analysis were concerned that Ravenal’s team had taken on and defied the Navy over what they saw as such a relatively small project (thinking only in dollar terms). Rear Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Senior Aide to the Secretary of the Navy, who had worked on Diego Garcia since serving under Nitze at ISA, immediately knew that the Navy had picked the wrong rationale to get the base.
“We knew it would be a billion before long,” Ravenal said of the base’s cost. “They said, ‘Why are you opposing an austere communications facility?’ I said, ‘That’s not what’s going on here. You’re going to have a tremendous base here. It’s gonna be a billion’—of course it’s over that now.”
I asked Ravenal if any discussion of the Chagossians had surfaced in the work of Systems Analysis. Ravenal said he “heard about birds” on the island—some flightless rails, he thought—but “very little” about any people. “It was sort of out in the middle of, we thought, nowhere,” he explained. “We thought nowhere because even though someone may have mentioned that there were some coconut farmers there, it didn’t register. I never heard a single thing. Just birds. That’s all.”
“Why do you think it didn’t register?” I asked.
“Well,” Ravenal paused. “The mindset of almost anyone on the political-military side of government, they simply were not sensitized to those kinds of issues,” Ravenal replied. “And I think it would have been my assumption, if you had twelve hundred people there, if you’re going to have a military base there . . . everyone’s better off getting them off there. But I would have made the assumption in my mind—but probably not bothered to check it out, I have to admit—that we were going to give them a lot of money and relocate them somewhere. Now if we didn’t, I think that’s a terrible shame.”
While the Navy was facing continued resistance at the Pentagon, the British Government was still pursuing a base on Aldabra. At the time, however, the United Kingdom was undergoing a severe financial crisis and looking for ways to cut its overseas expenditures. In April and May 1967, British officials informed their U.S. counterparts that they remained interested in a Diego facility but the U.K. financial participation would be no more than a nominal one.34 In July, a U.K. white paper announced the withdrawal of all British troops from Singapore and Malaysia by mid-1970.
As the British continued plans for construction on Aldabra, U.K. and U.S. scientists who had been sent by the governments to survey the islands of the BIOT began to rally public opposition against the base. In what soon became known as the Aldabra Affair, scientists from the Royal Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution argued against a base on Aldabra. They said the military would endanger local populations of giant tortoises and rare birds, like the red-footed booby, which made Aldabra the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.”35
By contrast, according to David Stoddart, one of the scientists who surveyed the islands, Diego Garcia “was simply a coconut plantation. The plants were common and the birds and land animals few.”36
* U.K. and U.S. documents offer widely varying, and mostly inaccurate, estimates of the numbers of Chagossians. In fact, there were probably 1,000–1,500 in Chagos and at least 250–500 living in Mauritius at this time.