With the money finally secured from Congress and the British taking charge of the final deportations, the Navy set to work building its base. “Resembling an amphibious landing during World War II,” writes a former Navy officer who worked on the project, “Seabees landed on Diego Garcia in March 1971 to begin construction.”1 A tank landing ship, an attack cargo ship, two military sealift command charter ships, and two dock landing ships descended on Diego with at least 820 soldiers and equipment to construct a communications station and an 8,000-foot airstrip. The Seabees brought in heavy equipment, setting up a rock crusher and a concrete block factory. They used Caterpillar bulldozers and chains to rip coconut trees from the ground. They blasted Diego’s reef with explosives to excavate coral rock for the runway. Diesel fuel sludge began fouling the water.2
According to many Chagossians, there were threats that they would be bombed or shot if they did not leave the island. Children hid in fear as military aircraft began flying overhead.3 The Washington Post’s David Ottaway later reported that “one old man . . . recalled being told by an unidentified American official: ‘If you don’t leave you won’t be fed any longer.’”4
Navy officials continued to pressure their British counterparts to complete the deportations as quickly as possible. On April 16, the United Kingdom issued BIOT Immigration Ordinance #1 making it a criminal offense for anyone except authorized military personnel to be on the islands without a permit. A State Department official in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Africa later acknowledged, “In order to meet our selfimposed timetable, their evacuation was undertaken with a haste which the British could claim has prevented careful examination of resettlement needs.”5 Construction continued unabated, with the runway operational by July 1971.
Figure 7.1 M.V. Nordvær, 1968. The BIOT cargo ship used to deport Chagossians, at times with more than 100 aboard. Photo courtesy of Kirby Crawford.
The BIOT administration and its Moulinie & Co. agents continued to remove families to Peros Banhos and Salomon. Some Chagossians refused but were told they had no choice but to leave. Marcel Moulinie and other Moulinie & Co. agents reiterated that there would be no more work. There would be no more transportation to and from the island, food stores had run out, and the boats were taking away the salvageable plantation infrastructure.
For the voyage, passengers were generally allowed to take a small box of their belongings and a straw bed mat. Most of their possessions and all their animals were left behind. In August 1971, the BIOT dispatched its 500-ton cargo ship, the M.V. Nordvær, to Diego to remove the last families from the island. When the Nordvær experienced engine troubles before reaching Diego, the BIOT administration sent another ship, the Isle of Farquhar, to continue the removals.6 By then food supplies were running dangerously low, and BIOT officials started considering asking for emergency assistance. The Navy’s Seabee contingent eventually shipped food and medical supplies across the lagoon to sustain the remaining islanders.7
In the days before the last inhabitants of Diego Garcia were removed, BIOT commissioner Sir Bruce Greatbatch sent the order to Moulinie & Co. to kill the Chagossians’ pet dogs and any other remaining dogs on the island. Marcel Moulinie, who had been left to manage Diego Garcia, was responsible for carrying out the extermination.
According to Moulinie, he first tried to shoot the dogs with the help of Seabees armed with M16 rifles. When this failed as an expeditious extermination method, he attempted to poison the dogs with strychnine. This too failed. Sitting in his home overlooking a secluded beach in the Seychelles 33 years later, Moulinie explained to me how he finally used raw meat to lure the dogs into a sealed copra-drying shed, the kalorifer. Locking them in the shed, he gassed the howling dogs with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Setting coconut husks ablaze, he burnt the dogs’ carcasses in the shed.8 The Chagossians were left to watch and ponder their fate.
After the Isle of Farquhar took a load of Chagossians and Seychellois from Diego, a repaired Nordvær returned to remove the final inhabitants. “There was a crowd of people there and a lot of them were crying,” Marcel Moulinie remembered. “People were upset about” the killing of their dogs, “as well as being upset about having to leave the islands. I persuaded Marcel [Ono, a Diego Garcia commandeur] that he had to go as there were no more rations on the island and the boat had not brought in any food. The stores had been removed and there was no way of feeding anyone. . . . I last saw him as he walked on to the boat.” With U.S. military personnel looking on shortly before the end of October 1971, the last boatload steamed away from Diego Garcia.9
Chagossians and others report that the boats were terribly overcrowded and that the open seas were often rough on the initial 1,200-mile, fourday journey to the Seychelles. The Nordvær had cabin passenger space for twelve and deck space for sixty (accommodating a total of 72 passengers). On the last voyage, 146 were packed on the vessel. At the orders of Sir Bruce Greatbatch, Diego’s horses were given the best places on deck. All but a few Chagossians made the trip exposed to the elements elsewhere on deck or in the hold, sitting and sleeping on a cargo of copra, coconuts, company equipment, and guano—bird feces. Many became ill during the passage, vomiting on deck and in the hold. Two women are reported to have miscarried.10
Moulinie recalled:
The boat was very overcrowded. The boat deck was covered with stores, the belongings of the labourers, and a lot of labourers were traveling on deck. Greatbatch had insisted that the horses be carried back to Mahé and these were on deck with the labourers. The labourers also traveled in the holds. This was not unusual but there were more people than usual in them. The holds also held a lot of copra being taken out of Diego. When the boat finally arrived the conditions were filthy. They had taken four days to travel and many of the women and children were sick. The boat deck was covered in manure, urine and vomit and so was the hold.11
When the Nordvær arrived in the Seychelles, offloading the islanders before the second leg of the journey, another 1,200 miles to Mauritius, Moulinie & Co. arranged to have their management housed in hotels. The Chagossians were housed in a prison.12
With the arrival in Mauritius of the last islanders from Diego Garcia, the U.S. Embassy in Port Louis grew increasingly concerned about the condition of what officials described as “1300 miserable and uneducated refugees.”13
“The USG has a moral responsibility for the well-being of these people who were involuntarily moved at our request,” the embassy argued to the State Department in Washington. U.S. moral responsibility was especially heavy given that the government had “resisted GOM and HMG efforts to permit Ilois to remain as employees of the facility.” Even if legally speaking “primary responsibility” lay with the British, the Port Louis mission believed, the U.S. Government was responsible for ordering the removal and was vulnerable to criticism in public and at the UN.14
The embassy was equally unhappy about the lack of resettlement planning: “To our knowledge,” the mission cabled, “there exists no operative plan and no firm allocation of funds to compensate them for the hardship of the transfer from their former home and their loss of livelihood.” While the British were still in the midst of convincing the Mauritian Government to create a resettlement plan, such a scheme was “foredoomed,” first, because of the “political impossibility” of giving special resources to the Chagossians while unemployed Hindus, Muslims, and Afro-Mauritians received nothing, and second, because of the Mauritian Government’s own inability to make use of current British aid money, let alone new funds for a special Chagossian project.15
“The plight of the Ilois,” the embassy wrote, “is a classic example of perpetuation of hardship through bureaucratic neglect.” “The Embassy believes we have regrettably neglected our obligation toward them. We recommend that early and specific exchanges with HMG be undertaken in order to assure the welfare of the Ilois and that authority for this essentially political matter be appropriately centralized within the Department.”16
The primary author of these remarkable cables was Henry Precht, the deputy to the ambassador in an embassy of just seven (Precht later worked on Iran at the State Department, playing a key role in the Carter administration’s handling of the hostage crisis). Now living in the Washington area, Precht remembered that the Navy “didn’t want to be bothered. They wanted an all-American facility,” free of any labor problems, health issues, or anything that would have “complicated life there.” It was “much neater” without the islanders, he said.
For three months, Precht and Ambassador William Brewer cabled strongly worded reports about the Chagossians, demanding, “Justice should be done.” Lambasting the “inadequate and cavalier treatment so far accorded the Ilois,” they traded charged dispatches with an undersecretary of the Air Force and others in the bureaucracy over the U.S. Government’s responsibility.17 It was “absurd” to say, as some in the bureaucracy continued to maintain, that Diego Garcia had “no fixed population,” given its history of habitation dating to the eighteenth century. Moreover, “DOD acknowledged its responsibility for the removal of the Ilois by payment of $14 million to HMG.” Precht and Brewer wrote that the Government didn’t fulfill its obligation to the Chagossians by its $14 million payment, pointing out correctly that most of the money seemed to have gone toward building an international airport in the Seychelles.
“The point of our exercise,” they said, is that “the USG should make sure that the British do an adequate job of compensation.”18 (Around the same time Brewer was also helping to “burnish the Diego public relations image” in Mauritius by delivering 3,000 bags of Christmas candy prepared by Navy personnel on Diego to underprivileged and children’s groups.19)
I asked Precht why he thought no one else spoke out on behalf of the Chagossians. “There weren’t very many of them,” he replied. “They didn’t add up to much of a problem. They were easily pushed aside.” And it would have taken someone in Washington, he said, to have enough interest “to pursue it. And pursuing something in Washington” takes a lot of political energy. It can be quite a “profitless enterprise.”
Adam Hochschild’s exploration of violence perpetrated by the Belgian Empire in the Congo helps explain Precht’s observation: Because Belgian authorities sanctioned violence against the Congolese, “for a white man to rebel meant challenging the entire system that provided your livelihood. Everyone around you was participating. By going along with the system, you were paid, promoted, awarded medals.”20
As the embassy’s failed protests show, challenges to the expulsion would likely have been fruitless save for those originating at the highest levels of the bureaucracy, from people like Nitze, Komer, Zumwalt, Moorer, Mc-Namara, and Rusk. “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus in which he is harnessed,” Max Weber wrote half a century earlier. “The professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity by his entire material and ideal existence. In the great majority of cases, he is only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march. The official is entrusted with specialized tasks and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top.”21
Back in the State Department bureaucracy in Washington, James Bishop was the desk officer who received Precht and Brewer’s cables. “Vaguely” recalling the dispatches when I spoke to him in early 2008, Bishop said they came a “considerable time” before human rights “became a major part of our diplomacy.” This “was the Kissinger era,” when the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser was “chastising” the African bureau “as a bunch of missionaries.” Plus, the Chagossians were not a very high issue on State’s agenda when it came to relations with Bishop’s “parish” Mauritius. On the other hand, he said, “there wasn’t any question about their being recent arrivals. It was their homeland.” Bishop added, “I do recall feeling that they were going to get screwed.”
Jonathan “Jock” Stoddart had responsibility at the State Department for much of the implementation of the removals. I asked Stoddart if anyone investigated the embassy’s reports.
“My answer would be, I don’t think so,” Stoddart replied from his apartment at The Jefferson, a retirement facility in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. “I doubt if the Navy sent somebody that was interested in human rights out to Diego to look into this. I think the Navy’s attitude was, accept what the British say, and turn a blind eye to whatever was going on.”
State and Defense officials seemed to choose the same tack. “It was, I would say, an issue that was lurking in the background but generally ignored,” Stoddart said. “We were all leaving the whole problem up to the British—to justify, rationalize, whatever. We were quite aware that our original—the original information that we had received from the British was wrong: that this was an uninhabited archipelago. I think we fully accepted that fact.”
Still, “this is one of the best deals the United States has ever negotiated,” Stoddart added, from his apartment complex named for the president known for one of the nation’s earliest land acquisitions.
“For a change,” he said, it came “at a minimal cost.”
The official response to Precht and Brewer from higher-ups in the State and Defense bureaucracies was a February cable from the State Department. “Basic responsibility” for the Chagossians lay with the British, the telegram said; but it directed the embassy in London to inform the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the U.S. Government’s “concern” over their treatment. The State Department conceded internally (in its clipped bureaucratic language), “USG also realizes it may well share in any criticism levied at British for failing meet their responsibilities re inhabitants’ welfare.” Concerned about the removal’s Cold War implications, State added: “Continued failure resolve these issues exposes both HMG and USG to local criticism which could be picked up and amplified elsewhere.”22
Former national security officials Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, who resigned from the Nixon administration to protest the invasion of Cambodia, describe memoranda from Washington like these and the effect of the geographical and, as they say, spiritual distance between decision makers and those affected by their decisions:
We remember, more clearly than we care to, the well carpeted stillness and isolation of those government offices where some of the Pentagon Papers were first written. The efficient staccato of the typewriter, the antiseptic whiteness of nicely margined memoranda, the affable, authoritative and always urbane men who wrote them—all of it is a spiritual as well as geographic world apart from piles of decomposing bodies in a ditch outside Hue or a village bombed in Laos, the burn ward of a children’s hospital in Saigon, or even a cemetery or veteran’s hospital here. It was possible in that isolated atmosphere, and perhaps psychologically necessary, to dull one’s awareness of the direct link between those memoranda and the human sufferings with which they were concerned.23
In the summer of 1972, the State Department sent Precht to Tehran and Brewer to fill the place of the assassinated ambassador to Sudan.
At about the time that Brewer was on his way to Khartoum, the British secured the agreement of the Mauritian Government to receive the Chagossians. Despite the fact that a majority of the Chagossians said they wanted to receive compensation in cash, a planned Anglo-Mauritian rehabilitation scheme called for the provision of housing, pig breeding jobs (never a significant economic activity in Chagos), and some cash payments. On September 4, 1972, Mauritian Prime Minister Ramgoolam accepted £650,000 to resettle the Chagossians, including the remaining few hundreds who were still to be removed from Peros Banhos and Salomon.
British officials realized that the project was “under-costed” for an adequate resettlement, but were happy to have struck such a cheap deal. Precht had earlier weighed in on the likelihood of the resettlement plan’s working: “We doubt it.”24 The resettlement was never implemented, and Chagossians saw almost none of the £650,000 for more than five years.
After the emptying of Diego Garcia, around 370 Chagossians remained in Peros Banhos and Salomon. Like those who went to Mauritius and the Seychelles, those who went from Diego Garcia to Peros and Salomon had been required to leave most of their possessions, furniture, and animals in Diego. They received Rs500 (about $90) as a “disturbance allowance” to compensate them for the costs of reestablishing their lives. Those going to Mauritius and the Seychelles received nothing.
The neglect of Peros Banhos and Salomon by the BIOT and Moulinie & Co. continued as it had on Diego Garcia, and conditions worsened dramatically in 1972 and 1973. Food supplies declined and Chagossians remember how their diet became increasingly dependent on fish and coconuts. When milk supplies ran out, women fed their children a thin, watery mixture of coconut milk and sugar. Medicines and medical supplies ran out. With even ripe coconuts in short supply, people ate the spongy, overripe flesh of germinated nuts. The remaining staff in each island’s hospital left, and the last school, in Peros Banhos, closed.
In June 1972, the Nordvær continued emptying Peros and Salomon. At least 53 left on this one voyage, telling BIOT agents they wished to “return later to the islands,” hopeful that conditions would improve.25 Again Chagossians say conditions on the ship were terrible. Marie Therese Mein, a Chagossian woman married to the departing manager of Peros Banhos, described the voyage:
Our conditions were somewhat better than the other suffering passengers since we were given a small cabin [because her husband was the manager], but we had to share this between my husband, myself and our 8 children. We could not open the portholes since the ship was heavily laden, and the sea would splash in if we did. It was therefore extremely hot and uncomfortable. Many people were in much worse conditions than us, having to share a cargo compartment with a cargo of coconuts, horses and tortoises. Some had to sleep on top of the deck of the ship. No meals were provided, and the captain, a Mr. Tregarden, told the families to prepare their own meals. By contrast the horses were fed grass. The passage was rough and many of the passengers were seasick. There was urine and manure from the horses on the lower deck. The captain decided to jettison a large part of the cargo of coconuts in order to lessen the risk of being sunk. The whole complement of passengers suffered both from an extremely rough passage and from bad smells of animals and were sick and weary after the 6 day crossing.26
Mein was three months pregnant at the time. She miscarried a day after arriving in the Seychelles.
A subsequent voyage of the Nordvær had 120 Chagossians on board, nearly twice its maximum capacity.27 In December 1972, BIOT administrator Todd reported that Salomon had closed, with all its inhabitants moved to Peros Banhos or deported to Mauritius or the Seychelles. A small number of Chagossians remained in Peros, with only enough food to last until late March or April.
Early in 1973, Moulinie & Co. agents informed the remaining Chagossians that they would have to leave. At the end of April, with food supplies exhausted, the Nordvær left Peros Banhos with 133 Chagossians aboard. The Nordvær arrived in Mauritius on April 29.
By this time, however, the Chagossians on the Nordvær had heard about the fate of others arriving in Mauritius. They refused to disembark. They demanded that they be returned to Chagos or receive houses in Mauritius. After nearly a week of protest and negotiations, 30 families received a small amount of money and dilapidated houses in two of the poorest neighborhoods of Port Louis.
A month later, on May 26, 1973, the Nordvær made its final voyage, removing 8 men, 9 women, and 29 children from Peros Banhos. The expulsion from Chagos was complete.
As early as Christmas Day, 1972, Bob Hope and Red Foxx were cracking jokes for the troops on Diego Garcia as part of a USO special.28 Shortly before the final deportations from Peros Banhos in 1973, the Seabees completed their 8,000-foot runway and made the communications station operational. By October, the Navy was using the base to fly P-3 surveillance planes to support Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war—quite a feat for a mere communications station.29
As Nitze and others in the U.S. Government had hoped, the original “austere communications facility” on Diego Garcia served as a nucleus for what became a rapidly expanding base. Before the base was operational, Zumwalt was already asking others in the Navy in 1972, “What do we do in 74, 75, and 76 for Diego Garcia?” referring to expansion ideas for the upcoming fiscal years.30
Restricted to the use of the Azores as its only base from which to resupply Israel during the October war, the Navy soon submitted an “emergency” request for $4.6 million in additional construction funds. The Pentagon turned them down. Within weeks, the Navy submitted a request to the Pentagon for an almost $32 million expansion of the base over three years, to include ship support facilities and a regular air surveillance capacity. Days later, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Moorer sent a recommendation to Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to expand the base beyond the new request, including a runway extension to accommodate B-52 bombers. In January 1974, the Air Force asked for a $4.5 million construction budget of its own.31
After an initial supplemental appropriation for fiscal year 1974 was deferred to the 1975 budget, additional appropriations for Diego Garcia soon became a minor political battle between the Ford administration and Democratic senators concerned about U.S. military expansion and a growing arms race with the Soviet Union in the Indian Ocean. Hearings were held in both houses of Congress. Amendments to defeat the expansion and to force arms negotiations in the Indian Ocean were introduced but defeated. Congress made new funding contingent on the President affirming that the expansion was “essential to the national interest of the United States,” which Ford quickly did. “In particular,” his justification said, “the oil shipped from the Persian Gulf area is essential to the economic well-being of modern industrial societies. It is essential that the United States maintain and periodically demonstrate a capability to operate military forces in the Indian Ocean.”32
During House committee hearings, State Department representative George Vest was asked, was there “any question about Diego Garcia being in the open sea lanes?”
“No, it is open sea,” he replied, before volunteering, “and uninhabited.”
“There are no inhabitants in Diego Garcia?” queried Representative Larry Winn of Kansas.
“No inhabitants,” Vest answered.
“None at all?”
“No.”
Within weeks the Pentagon won appropriations for fiscal years 1975 and 1976 totaling more than $30 million.33
On September 9, 1975, a page-one Washington Post headline read, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base.” Reporter David Ottaway had become the first in the Western press to break the story. Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Culver of Iowa, who had opposed the expansion of the base, took to the floor of the Senate to propose an amendment demanding the Ford administration explain the circumstances surrounding the expulsion and the role of the U.S. Government in the removals. The amendment passed. A month later the administration submitted to Congress a nine-page response drafted by State and Defense.
The “Report on the Resettlement of Inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago” described how Chagos had been inhabited since the late eighteenth century, and that “despite the basically transitory nature of the population of these islands, there were some often referred to as ‘Ilois’. . . . In the absence of more complete data,” the report said, “it is impossible to establish the status of these persons and to what extent, if any, they formed a distinct community.”34
The report explained the removals by saying that the 1966 U.S.-U.K. agreement envisioned the total evacuation of the islands for military purposes, citing three reasons for wanting the islands uninhabited: security, British concerns about the costs of maintaining civil administration, and Navy concerns about “social problems . . . expected when placing a military detachment on an isolated tropical island alongside a population with an informal social structure and a prevalent cash wage of less than $4.00 per month.”35—this was a polite way of referring to trumped up, racist fears about prostitution and other unwanted sexual and romantic relations between military personnel and the islanders.
As to the deportations, the report said, “All went willingly.” It continued, “No coercion was used and no British or U.S. servicemen were involved.” Although acknowledging that the “resettlement doubtless entailed discomfort and economic dislocation,” the report concluded, “United States and United Kingdom officials acted in good faith on the basis of the information available to them.” The last sentence of the report offered the Ford administration’s final position: “There is no outstanding US obligation to underwrite the cost of additional assistance for the persons affected by the resettlement from the Chagos Islands.”36
7.2 U.S. Government officials. Top from left: Adm. Arleigh Burke, Adm. Horacio Rivero, Paul Nitze. Bottom from left: Robert McNamara, Adm. Thomas Moorer, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt. Photos credits: Admirals courtesy Naval Historical Center; Nitze courtesy Harry S. Truman Library and Museum; McNamara courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.
When the House Special Subcommittee on Investigations called for a day of hearings, administration representatives held firm. On November 4, 1975, Democrat subcommittee chair Lee H. Hamilton* asked State Department representative George T. Churchill if he considered the characterization “‘all went willingly’ to be a fair disclosure of the facts.”
“In the sense that no coercion at all was used,” Churchill replied.
“No coercion was used when you cut off their jobs? What other coercion do you need? Are you talking about putting them on the rack?”37
Figure 7.3 “Aunt Rita,” wearing her best for a Chagos Refugees Group festival and fundraising event, 2004. Photo by author.
At another point in the hearings Hamilton probed further with Churchill: “Is it the position of our Government now, that we have no responsibility toward these islanders? Is that our position?”
“We have no legal responsibility,” Churchill replied. “We are concerned. We recently discussed the matter with the British. The British have discussed it with the Mauritian Government. We have expressed our concern.”
“It is our basic position that it is up to the British. Is that it?” Hamilton pressed.
“It is our basic position that these people originally were a British responsibility and are now a Mauritian responsibility,” Churchill explained.
“We have no responsibility, legal or moral?”
“We have no legal responsibility. Moral responsibility is a term, sir, that I find difficult to assess.”38
Before testimony’s end, Churchill said that it was the position of the Government not to allow the Chagossians to return to their homeland. Congress has never again taken up the issue.
* Hamilton co-chaired the Iraq Study Group following the 2003 invasion.