While to now the Chagossians have been almost entirely forgotten in the United States, the responsibility of the United States for the people’s fate is clear: Although the British Government and its agents performed most of the physical work involved in displacing the Chagossians, the U.S. Government ordered, orchestrated, and financed the expulsion. First, the U.S. Government developed and advanced the original idea for a base on Diego Garcia as part of the Strategic Island Concept. Next, U.S. officials solicited and then colluded with the British Government as its partner. In the process, the U.S. Government insisted on the removal of the Chagossians, a condition to which the British Government readily agreed. Subsequently, the United States secretly paid the British for the expulsion, for the silence of Mauritius and the Seychelles, and for other costs of establishing the BIOT as a military colony. Along the way, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations circumvented congressional oversight of military appropriations and base creation, censored media coverage of base plans, and took other steps to conceal the expulsion and the creation of the base from the U.S. public and the world.
After finally receiving a congressional appropriation for the base, the U.S. Government ordered the British Government to complete the removal of the islanders, refusing requests from the U.S. Embassy in London and British officials to allow the people to remain on Diego Garcia as base employees. U.S. officials then monitored the progress of the deportation process, ignoring warnings about the absence of a resettlement plan, as U.S. Seabees assisted in the last deportations on Diego Garcia and the extermination of Chagossians’ pet dogs. Finally, since the expulsion, the U.S. Government has continually denied all responsibility for the islanders and their welfare and barred them from working as civilian employees on the base. In exile, most Chagossians quickly found themselves impoverished. Most to this day have remained impoverished as marginal outsiders in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Given these facts, we must now step back to consider what we can learn from Diego Garcia and what we must do about it.
First and foremost, we cannot mince words. The expulsion was an act of racism. Because Chagossians were considered “black,” because Chagossians were small in number and lacked any political or economic clout, they were an easy target for removal. Because they were considered black, planners could easily regard them as insignificant, as a “nitty gritty” detail. Planners could think of them (in the moments that officials gave them any thought), as the CIA once put it, as “NEGL”—NEGLIGIBLE.1
“The fact is that nobody cared very much about these populations,” said former Defense Department official Gary Sick, who testified to Congress about the removals in 1975. “It was more of a nineteenth-century decision—thought process—than a twentieth- or twenty-first-century thought process. And I think that was the bind they got caught in. That this was sort of colonial thinking after the fact, about what you could do.” And U.S. officials, Sick said, “were pleased to let the British do their dirty work for them.”
In this way, the Chagossians’ expulsion and the pattern of forcibly displacing numerically small, non-“white,” non-European colonized peoples to build bases resembles many forms of violence that tend to afflict the poor, the dark, and the powerless, those who so often get treated as “rubbish people.” Anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois explain:
The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Eriksen referred to “pseudo-speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human.2
Mark Curtis has called the Chagossians “unpeople.”3
Ultimately, however, race and racism played a different role in the displacement of the islanders and other victims of base displacement than in older forms of empire. Whereas race and racism were the explicit ideologies of European imperialism,4 in more recent history, race and racism have played a prominent role in structuring the vulnerability of those who will be displaced, while serving as a more subtle, internal ideological influence allowing officials to “assume the license” to displace the racialized.5
The Chagossian case illustrates this shift: As a people, the islanders have been displaced twice—once as enslaved people and indentured laborers taken to work on Chagos by the British and French empires and once expelled from Chagos at the behest of the U.S. Empire. The result in both cases has been the profound disruption and impoverishment of their lives. Though racism played different roles in the two displacements, both are examples of how, in different ways, as anthropologist Leith Mullings says, “racism works through modes of dispossession,” turning “perceived differences, generally regarded as indelible and unchangeable, into inequality.”6
At another level, U.S. officials displaced the Chagossians and similar groups because military officials prefer not to be bothered by local populations, and because a group of powerful officials had the power to make it so—among them, Barber, Rivero, Burke, Komer, Nitze, Moorer, and Zumwalt, as well as the Navy itself, pushing the base plan over fifteen years. As sociologist Frances Fox Piven put it to me simply one day, U.S. officials displaced the Chagossians “because they could.” “Across history,” writes Mark Gillem, “the hands of empire predictably travel past the same markers: displacements and demolitions are the norm.”7
And the displacement of locals for military bases continues. In South Korea, the U.S. military has been expanding Camp Humphreys, which already occupies two square miles, to seize 2,851 additional acres from Daechuri village and other areas near the city of Pyongtaek. At the behest of the United States, the South Korean Government used powers of eminent domain to take farmers’ land for the base. When the farmers resisted, the South Korean Government sent police and soldiers to enforce the evictions. From March to May 2006, riot police invaded Daechuri with bulldozers and backhoes, beating protestors, destroying a local school, and tearing up farmers’ rice fields and irrigation systems. When many still refused to leave, the government surrounded the village with police, soldiers, and barbed wire. On April 7, 2007, the last villagers finally were forced to go, carrying a symbolic Peace Boat as they walked out of town. “I can’t stop shedding tears,” one older resident said. “My heart is totally broken.”8
In the minds of many U.S. officials, whether consciously or not, removals were (and are) justified by what they saw as the limited impact of removing a small number of people, especially when weighed against the supposed gains to be realized from a base. Henry Kissinger once said of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”9 Stu Barber’s Strategic Island Concept was predicated on the same assumption. In fact, after the expulsion, Stu claimed he hadn’t known the Chagossians “had a history of several generations there,” but even if he had, he still would have recommended the creation of the base.10 From the perspective of Chagossians and others, there was of course nothing limited about the effects of displacement.
While the Chagossians and other base displacement victims were certainly removed in part because they were small, isolated populations, another island comparison suggests the decisive role played by a people’s socially defined race and ethnicity. In Iwo Jima and Japan’s other Bonin-Volcano islands, there were before World War II roughly 7,000 inhabitants. The islanders were the descendants of nineteenth-century settlers who came both from Japan and in smaller numbers from the United States and Europe. In 1944, after the start of U.S. attacks on the islands, Japanese officials evacuated all the islanders to Japan’s main islands. After the U.S. capture of the Bonin-Volcanos and the end of the war, U.S. officials prohibited the return of the local people, to allow unhindered military use of the islands. In 1946, U.S. officials “modified” the decision: They would “permit the return of those residents of Caucasian* extraction who had been forcibly removed to Japan during the war and who had petitioned the United States to return.” Approximately 130 men were eventually repatriated with their families, becoming “the sole permanent residents of the islands.”11 The Navy helped establish self-government, a cooperative trading company to market agricultural products in Guam, and a Bonin-Volcano Trust Fund for financial support.12
To understand why officials wanted a base on Diego Garcia in the first place and what this says about the nature of the United States as an empire, about current trajectories in U.S. foreign and military policy, and about empire more broadly, we must now return to the history of the Cold War and to longer-term imperial trends. Remember that in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. officials faced a swirling mixture of fears about decolonization, base access, rising Soviet and Chinese power, and appearing “soft” on “defense” before domestic political audiences. At the same time, they retained an understanding of the profound military superiority of the United States over its rivals and a powerful interest in maintaining U.S. economic and political domination in the Indian Ocean region, increasingly in the Persian Gulf, and around the world. In this context, the Strategic Island Concept provided an answer to both their anxieties and their interests: Strategically located remote island bases would protect the nation’s “future freedom of military action” and its dominant position in the world.13
The history of Diego Garcia shows that much of the national security bureaucracy quickly adopted the Navy’s concept as an important strategic framework. Although the costs of the Vietnam War reined in the most far-reaching plans and left Diego Garcia as the only major base created under the Strategic Island Concept, the strategy became an important argument for the retention and expansion of major preexisting island bases, including those in Guam, Micronesia, the Bonin-Volcano islands, British Ascension, the Portuguese Azores, and Okinawa (in the early 1970s Stu hoped to create another BIOT-like territory with the British in Micronesia).
Coupled with the first-ever buildup of U.S. naval forces in the Indian Ocean, moreover, Diego Garcia increasingly enabled the insertion of military power into a large and increasingly unstable portion of the world (made unstable in many ways by other U.S. actions). Fearing an unknowable and threatening future in the non-Western world and increasingly in the Persian Gulf and southwest Asia, officials in the 1950s and 1960s crafted a plan for Diego Garcia to control the future through military force. As was often the case in the Cold War, the easiest “solution” was the military solution.14
One reason the military solution was often the easiest has to do with gender: It is not surprising and yet still remarkable that, as far as my research has shown, every official involved in any significant way in the development of Diego Garcia was a man.15 As in previous generations and elsewhere in the world, these gods of foreign policy were unquestionably male gods. And among these men, as we have seen, qualities of toughness, strength, efficiency, rationality, and hardness were most admired. These were “male” qualities best demonstrated by “tough” policies involving the use of military force and a fearless attitude in confronting the Soviet Union. Paraphrasing Adam Hochschild, when you came from a generation raised on war, violence, and toughness, and when war (cold and hot), violence, and toughness remained the unquestioned order of the day, wielding violence efficiently was regarded as a manly virtue.16 Any signs of weakness, doubt, or concerns for human suffering were denigrated as weak, womanly, female. This generation of foreign policy leaders demonstrated its maleness through exterior displays of force, through a war in Vietnam, and through policies like that on Diego Garcia based on the seizure and cleansing of territory and the deployment of military power, rather than, as Halberstam points out, through more interior forms of strength that might have entailed “a good deal of domestic political risk.”17
Still, the solution provided by Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept was hardly about toughness and military force alone. The intent was always political, military, and economic: Diego Garcia allowed what strategists euphemistically call “intervention” and the threat of intervention in the affairs of other nations, while also, like eighteenth-century French and British bases, helping to protect U.S. economic interests in the region. As we have seen, protecting U.S., European, and Japanese access to Middle Eastern oil was initially just one of several motivations behind the military buildup. Within a few years of the base becoming operational, however, oil was at the core of Diego Garcia’s mission.
After the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the base played a central role in the first large-scale thrust of U.S. military strength into the Middle East. To respond to any future threats to the oil supply, Presidents Carter and Reagan developed a “Rapid Deployment Force” at bases in the region, including a rapidly enlarging Diego Garcia.18 In the years that followed, the Rapid Deployment Force transformed into the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which came to lead three wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we saw in the introduction, Diego Garcia was a launchpad for bombers and prepositioned weaponry critical to each of these wars. In this evolution of the island’s role, the base was one of the first major steps by the United States to deploy its military power to defend U.S. and global oil supplies. Indeed, Diego Garcia has been central to a more than half-century-long period during which, as Chalmers Johnson says, “the United States has been inexorably acquiring permanent military enclaves whose sole purpose appears to be the domination of one of the most strategically important areas of the world.”19
The history of Diego Garcia thus suggests an important revision to how we think about the United States as an empire. Contrary to the idea stressed by some that the U.S. Empire has become an empire of economics, Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept represent a reliance on traditional imperial tools of overseas bases and military power to maintain U.S. dominance. Clearly Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept were not the only reactions to declining U.S. power during the Cold War—there were economic, political, and other military reactions as well. But they provided part of a solution to perceived threats while simultaneously answering the challenges posed by decolonization to the exercise of power through overseas bases.
That is, Diego Garcia and the Strategic Island Concept were part of the invention of a new form of empire in the postwar era, relying heavily on overseas bases and increasingly on discreet, isolated bases—often island bases—to exert power. Responding to decolonization, Diego Garcia helped initiate an ongoing shift of bases from locations near population centers to locations insulated from potentially antagonistic locals. Today one sees the realization of this model and this new kind of empire in the military’s “lily pad” basing strategy: Under the strategy, the military is creating bases that are isolated from population centers, have limited troop deployments, and instead rely largely on prepositioned weaponry for future (un)anticipated conflicts. As Mark Gillem writes, “avoidance” is the new aim. “To project its power,” the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world.20
In the words of some of the strategy’s strongest proponents, the goal is “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts” with the U.S. military serving as “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”21 With as many bases as possible, the military hopes always to be able to turn from one nation to another if it is denied base access in a time of war.
While the reliance on smaller bases may sound preferable to the huge bases that have caused so much harm and anger in places like South Korea and Okinawa, the construction of lily pads in an increasingly long list of nations including Ghana, Gabon, Chad, Niger, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Aruba, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland represents the growing militarization (and likely destabilization) of even larger swaths of the globe and a dramatic expansion of an imperial vision to dominate the world militarily.22 And, as the once “austere” base on Diego Garcia shows, installations that might start out as lily pads can quickly grow into massive behemoths.
To be clear, the U.S. Empire has been characterized to a significant degree by economic forms of Open Door imperialism. However, the history of Diego Garcia shows that the U.S. Empire has relied in important ways on the continued use of military force and on increasingly discreet overseas bases in particular to maintain its dominance. This is not to deny the significance of economics to the U.S. Empire, only to shift the focus toward the relatively underexplored military dimensions. Diego Garcia suggests a more balanced perspective on U.S. Empire, highlighting how overseas bases, along with other military and political tools, have worked in tandem with and undergirded economic forms of power.
In the face of Chagossians’ struggle to return (and to work on, not remove, the base), the intransigence of the U.S. and U.K. governments is striking for a facility that was a product of the Cold War. Interestingly as well, Diego Garcia only saw its first significant use as a base with the Cold War’s end.23 Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the base has indeed become a pivot point of U.S. strategy for the control of areas from the Persian Gulf to east Asia. Prior to the 2003 Iraq war and September 11, 2001, the U.S. military was in the process of turning Diego into one of four major “forward operating locations” for “expeditionary” Air Force operations. Along with Guam, the island was selected as a recipient of an eastward shift of materiel and weaponry from Cold War European bases. For many in the military (especially the Air Force) the dream is to be able to strike any location on the planet from Diego, Guam, and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. As I quoted military analyst John Pike at the outset, the military’s aim is “to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us” from every other base in the hemisphere.
These trends suggest that Diego Garcia reveals something fundamental about U.S. Empire, beyond the Cold War era alone: While previous empires generally sought to dominate as much of the globe as possible through the direct control of territory, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the U.S. Empire has increasingly accomplished the same not only through economic and political tools but also through a global network of extraterritorial U.S. military installations that allow the control of territory vastly disproportionate to the land actually occupied.
Viewed geographically, one sees how the small-scale acquisition of territory for island bases has allowed the United States, like empires before it, to dominate large swaths of ocean territory upon which global trade and economic expansion relies. Coupled with a powerful navy, an island base provides the force to effectively rule areas of ocean and transiting military or commercial traffic. In the Pacific, controlling bases from Okinawa and Japan’s main islands to Guam and Pearl Harbor has allowed the U.S. Navy to make the ocean an “American lake.” Maintaining a base on Diego Garcia has helped the United States exert similar control in the Indian Ocean, particularly over oil traffic from the Persian Gulf. In the role that island bases and navies play in patrolling sea lanes and protecting oceangoing commerce, one sees a very direct way in which overseas bases undergird the economics of U.S. Empire.24
Bringing us back to Iraq and Afghanistan, the base helps show how these wars were not the aberrant actions of a single presidential administration but were instead, in important ways, the fulfillment of a strategic vision for controlling a large swath of Asia and, with it, the global economy, dating to at least World War II (and significantly advanced by Diego Garcia). As others have shown, the wars have significantly advanced the pursuit of U.S. control over Central Asian and Persian Gulf oil and natural gas supplies through the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and private military contractors and the creation or expansion of bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The strategic logic of Diego Garcia, of using bases to control resource-rich regions, becomes even clearer when one considers reports that the United States has been exploring plans to develop a new base off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, on one of the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Currently, oil imports from the Gulf of Guinea account for 15 percent of the U.S. total. Many predict that the share will grow to 20 percent by 2010 and 25 percent by 2015. Continent-wide, the Council on Foreign Relations has suggested, “By the end of the decade sub-Saharan Africa is likely to become as important as a source of U.S. energy imports as the Middle East.”25 Indeed, this may have already come to pass. Looking at São Tomé, at least one U.S. official has described the proposed base as “another Diego Garcia.”26
The story sounds eerily familiar: In July 2002, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. European Command visited the islands. The next month, then-President of São Tomé and Príncipe, Fradique de Menezes, told Portuguese television that he “received a call from the Pentagon to tell me that the issue [was] being studied.” He added, “It is not really a military base on our territory, but rather a support port for aircraft, warships, and patrol ships.”27 Since 2002, several U.S. companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Noble Energy, have won oil exploration concessions in the Gulf of Guinea.28 At the end of 2006, the military built a radar installation on the islands. The following March, 200 U.S. marines conducted four days of military exercises. Months earlier, the U.S. military announced the creation of its first-ever “Africa Command” (AFRICOM) to oversee military operations on the continent. Elsewhere, U.S. officials are considering the creation of or have already established bases in Algeria, Djibouti, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda.29 Officials have repeatedly denied having any interest in a base on São Tomé.
The expansion of Diego Garcia into a major naval and air base fulfilled the hopes of many in the U.S. Navy and elsewhere in the national security bureaucracy, including Stu Barber, Horacio Rivero, Arleigh Burke, Robert Komer, Paul Nitze, and Elmo Zumwalt. So too the base was the realization of French lieutenant La Fontaine’s vision from two centuries earlier for having “a great number of vessels” at anchor in Diego Garcia’s lagoon.30
Viewed from this long-term perspective, Diego Garcia points to both shifts and continuities in the evolution of U.S. Empire and empire more broadly. On the one hand, Diego Garcia and the base network represent several long-standing imperial trends, including the persistence of traditional imperial tools of territorial acquisition and displacement, the development of modes of increasingly informal and indirect rule, and the continued use of a handful of remaining colonies and colonial relationships—Diego Garcia, Guam, Puerto Rico, Thule, Okinawa, South Korea among them—to exert dominance.31 This suggests that there is more continuity between the U.S. Empire and previous empires than has been acknowledged.
Diego Garcia and much of the U.S. global basing network are to some extent a return to an earlier form of imperialism when Britain and France were first interested in colonizing Diego Garcia and other islands in the Indian Ocean. In the eighteenth century, islands were initially valued for their military and not their economic value. Bases in Mauritius and Réunion hosted warships used to secure trade with India and later to subdue the subcontinent.
Three centuries later, weapons and supplies from Diego Garcia were among the first arriving in the Persian Gulf to link with U.S. soldiers preparing for war in Iraq. Once the war was underway, B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers based on Diego Garcia dropped hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance on Iraq’s battlefields, killing thousands. From this perspective the Chagossians’ expulsion is unsurprising: Their ancestors’ enslaved arrival in Chagos was the result of a European empire’s efforts to claim bases in a strategic ocean; their removal was the result of a similar search by a new empire two centuries later.
On the other hand, Diego Garcia shows us how the U.S. Empire is a dramatically new kind of empire. Unlike its predecessors, the United States exercises control over other nations and peoples not primarily through colonies but through its base network and a range of other military, economic, and political tools. Anthropologist Enseng Ho explains that the United States has become an empire symbolized by invisibility and remote control. “The passing of the baton” from previous empires, he writes, “is marked by the progress from gunboat diplomacy to aerial bombing.” Now “remote control bombers fly ever higher out of sight, while military advisors disappear into the Filipino jungles, Yemeni mountains, and Georgian gorges. As well, security, military, and colonial functions are farmed out to private companies, removing them from political oversight.”32
That the United States has become an empire of invisibility goes further: As the power of the United States has grown since World War II, the Chagossians and increasing numbers of people around the world have found themselves subject to the actions of the U.S. Government but lack legal recourse to challenge their treatment in U.S. courts. The government and its officials have thus increasingly conducted activities that, while illegal in the United States, are invisible to the U.S. Constitution and U.S. laws when conducted abroad. Recent examples include the decision to hold terrorist suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. At Guantánamo, the Bush administration and later Congress withheld from detainees the habeas corpus right to a trial and other rights generally due people on U.S. soil. Similarly, the CIA’s use of “extraordinary rendition,” sending detainees to nations known to use torture as an interrogation technique, allowed the agency and its employees to attempt to circumvent laws and treaties banning torture. “In consequence,” Ho says, “the U.S. enjoys rights in [other] lands but owes no legally demandable obligation to foreigners there. . . . Without recourse to U.S. law, prisoners at Guantánamo are subject to the unchecked and therefore tyrannical power of the U.S. president.”33
So it is for most U.S. military bases and troops abroad where status of forces agreements generally give the United States, its troops and civilians, broad powers little constrained by local, U.S., or international law.34 Maintaining this immunity from prosecution overseas is precisely one of the reasons why the Bush administration prevented the United States from joining the International Criminal Court.
And so it is for the Chagossians, as well as for any prisoners currently or previously held on Diego Garcia: If such acts had taken place within the United States, the U.S. Government, its executive agencies or officials could likely be challenged for violating U.S. law and the Constitution. Because the acts that were committed against the Chagossians took place outside U.S. soil, however, courts have upheld total federal and individual immunity. “Living outside of direct colonial rule,” the islanders have fallen “within the purview of its empire” but are “condemned to invisibility by the U.S. Constitution.”35 So far U.S. courts have allowed them no legal recourse whatsoever; those responsible for their expulsion have gotten off scot-free.
We are the descendants of slaves. Our skin is black. We don’t have blue eyes. . . . Whether we are black, whether we are white, whether we are yellow, we all must have the same treatment. That is the treatment that the Chagossian community is asking for. At least give us our chance to live. Give us our chance to live like every other human being. Stop all the injustices that have been committed against us.
—Olivier Bancoult, President, Chagos Refugees Group, 2004
As we consider the empire that the United States has become, we must face the damage that the nation has inflicted on families like Rita Bancoult’s and so many others. We cannot allow the harmful effects of U.S. Empire, too often ignored or given short shrift by empire’s proponents and others, to continue. We cannot continue to allow claims of “national interest” to justify the destruction of the lives of others.
The story of Diego Garcia is in many ways a story of just that: how we have allowed empire and militarism to trump human lives.36 “The military expansionists in our Defense and State Departments push on inexorably like a giant bulldozer,” Iowa Senator John Culver testified on the one day Congress has ever thought about the Chagossians, “oblivious to diplomatic options, oblivious to violations of human rights. . . . What happens is the means become the end and military expansionism in effect assumes command of our foreign policy.”37
To unmake the ways in which our ability to make both war and money has trumped human lives, we must shift U.S. foreign policy and the national security bureaucracy that runs it away from deep-seated imperial instincts, away from the pursuit of economic and military interests benefiting the few, away from engrained hierarchical notions that some human lives are more valuable than others. We must shift our foreign policy toward a consideration of people’s lives and the impact of the nation’s actions on human beings above all else. We must begin to pursue a “humanpolitik”—a human-centered foreign policy based around international cooperation and diplomacy that places human lives, regardless of nation, above perceived and shortsighted notions of national interest and security. Self-described “realists” will say that such an approach isn’t realistic. The Chagossians and more than half a century of this aggressive and tragic form of U.S. Empire, which has brought death and destruction abroad and helped create unparalleled inequality and bankruptcy at home, demand that we ask, “Realistic for whom?”
As a start, here is some of what we should do to redress the damage and prevent future harm.
As with other victims of base displacement, the United States and the United Kingdom must immediately restore the right to return, in this case to all of Chagos including Diego Garcia. Because this is a largely symbolic right without the infrastructure to support life on the islands or the means to return, the two nations should, under the direction of the islanders, commence reconstruction of inhabitable islands and finance resettlement for those wishing to return.
Consultants working with the people as well as four decades of military habitation on Diego Garcia have already demonstrated the feasibility of restoring and maintaining life in Chagos. The islanders are exploring plans for tourism, fishing, and coconut industries; with lodging in private island hotels and beachside resorts going for upwards of $7,000 a night in Mauritius and the Seychelles just imagine the possibilities in the even more exclusive Chagos.
Making resettlement feasible would necessitate the cooperation of the U.S. Government and the base. In line with long-term Chagossian demands, the U.S. military and its contractors should immediately cease all employment discrimination barring islanders from civilian employment on the base. The military and its contractors should take further compensatory steps to hire any members of the community interested in working on the base, to establish a permanent employment preference for Chagossians, and to create a comprehensive training program to prepare islanders for skilled base and other employment.
To enable the importation of materials necessary for reconstruction of the islands’ infrastructure, the U.S. military should allow use of the airport on Diego Garcia or finance the creation of a civilian runway elsewhere in the archipelago. In addition to opening up existing civilian housing on the base to newly employed Chagossian workers, both the U.S. and U.K. governments should enable the resettlement of parts of the eastern arm of Diego Garcia that are unused by base operations and far from the base itself. In an ironic and unintended monument to the expulsion, base employees already groom and maintain much of the islanders’ village at East Point for the recreation of off-duty troops.
A return to Diego Garcia and the rest of Chagos raises questions about islander self-determination and the life of the base. As in its other “overseas territories” and as mandated by the UN, the United Kingdom should assist with the creation of forms of local self-governance. As democratic rule develops, the continued tenancy of the base, and any conditions thereof, as well as the islands’ sovereignty, should be matters of local self-determination.
While the above steps are crucial to enable a return, resettlement should be treated as only one part of a proper reparations agreement. Given the responsibility of both governments for orchestrating and carrying out the expulsion and for the impoverishment that has followed, both nations should finance a significant compensation fund. This should include a lifetime pension and a comprehensive lifetime social services package for all Chagossians, whether born in Chagos or in exile.38 Like any resettlement program or reparations effort (and in contrast to previous compensation), the people themselves should determine how monies will be distributed and spent and what social services (education, housing, health care, training, employment assistance, and others) will help guarantee their long-term security.
Indeed, as recently as 2004, British and U.S. officials have secretly discussed the creation of a “compensatory trust fund to alleviate the poverty of the most needy former Islanders.” In response to a British proposal, however, a recently declassified State Department letter indicated that while the U.S. Government shared British “concern for the plight of the former Chagos Islanders. . . . we must respectfully decline participation in this fund because, after careful review, we are unable to resolve complications this initiative would cause in our budget process and our own equities relative to this complex issue.”39 British officials have never discussed the proposal publicly.
For too long both governments have denied and hid from their responsibility. For too long they have allowed the Chagossians to languish in exile. Now is the time for both governments to rectify the injustice they have done to the Chagossians. Now is the time when both governments, both nations must bring the cruel irony that is the Footprint of Freedom to an end.
The Chagossians and the fifteen other cases of base displacement are but an extreme example of a larger well-documented pattern of damage that overseas bases inflict on local populations. The harmful impacts of bases include economic, social, cultural, health, and environmental harms, the exploitation of women, increased crime, loss of self-determination, and support for dictators and repressive undemocratic regimes. In too many recurring cases, soldiers overseas have raped, assaulted, or killed locals, most prominently of late in South Korea, Okinawa, and Italy.40
These and other forms of harm that the Chagossians and hundreds of other local populations suffer on a daily basis should force us to question the legal, political, and moral legitimacy of maintaining many, if not all, of the United States’ overseas bases. A first step would be to properly redress the damage caused by the United States during the development of its base network. As the Chagossians show, such damage is generally ongoing—which makes it possible and necessary for the United States to prevent future harm. This should come in the form of some kind of independent congressional investigation to expose past harms caused by overseas bases and current impacts on host communities. While the issue of financial reparations would be the most contentious, some kind of limited claims tribunal might satisfy locals and improve the accountability of extraterritorial facilities.
Just as critically, we must acknowledge how bases like Diego Garcia and occupying U.S. troops have become a major “face” of the United States, damaging the nation’s reputation, engendering grievances and anger, and generally creating antagonistic rather than cooperative relationships between the United States and others. Most dangerously, as we have seen in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the existence of foreign bases creates breeding grounds for radicalism, anti-Americanism, and attacks on the United States, reducing, rather than improving, U.S. national security.
With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq hopefully underway by the time this book goes to press, now is the time for Congress to initiate a major reassessment of global troop deployments and our 1,000 overseas bases. Now is the time for Congress to demand the closure and consolidation of bases abroad that have silently spread around the world, causing harm to local peoples like the Chagossians and undermining U.S. and global security.
Indeed, the United States undermines its own international legitimacy and ultimately its own security so long as the bases claimed to be so critical to the nation’s security continue to depend on the insecurity of others.
When the Chagossians finally return to Chagos, there will be jubilation but there will be no storybook ending. Too many have died in exile. Too many lives, like those of Julien, Alex, Eddy, and Rénault Bancoult, have been cut short. Too many have suffered the sagren of expulsion for too long.
Still, taking in the whole of the history of the Chagossians as a people, the islanders’ struggle represents a challenge not just to U.S. imperial power but to more than five centuries of injustice tied to the global expansion of European empires. In the words of their 1975 petition proclaiming, “Our ancestors were slaves on those islands, but we know that we are the heirs of those islands,” the Chagossians’ struggle says that the governments of Great Britain and the United States can’t get away with just one of the most recent injustices befalling non-European peoples.
“We are reclaiming our rights, our rights like every other human being who lives on the Earth has rights,” Olivier told me. “A right to liberty, a right—I was born on that land, my umbilical cord is buried on that land, I have a right to live on that land. It cannot be that a foreigner profits from all my wealth, profits from my sea, profits from my beaches, profits from my coconuts, profits from it all, while I’m left with nothing.”
“Chagossians are not asking for charity,” Olivier explained. “Chagossians are asking for our due for what has happened since we were deracinated. . . . For all the damages that we’ve suffered. To recognize, to give reparation. To give reparation for all the suffering that we have experienced during these years.” But, he added, “We are not only asking for money. . . . We are also asking for our islands, our fundamental rights, and our dignity.”
Although the task before us of restraining the power of the military and U.S. Empire may sound daunting; although guaranteeing fundamental rights for all human beings may sound difficult; although realizing the highest ideals of the United States may sound like blind idealism; although restoring the true meaning of freedom—freedom for all, not just for some—may sound like a dream, the Chagossians can give us hope: five thousand people. Five thousand abused people in the Indian Ocean, led by a group of determined women and one of their sons, every day taking on the distant power of the United States and Great Britain. And winning. Five thousand people.
“I will never give up the struggle!” Rita told me. “I’ve suffered, suffered, suffered so much. And I’m still suffering.” But when they finally do win, she said, she’ll write a sega so that everyone can remember the victory.
* As I wrote earlier, there is no biological validity to the concept of “race” or to supposed racial groups like this one. They are as fictitious biologically and scientifically as the fictions invented about the Chagossians. At the same time, as we see in this case, race and the separation of peoples into supposed racial groups are deeply real social phenomena, engrained in the minds of most human beings the world over and shaping fundamental issues like who gets protected in their homes and who gets displaced.