JFK |
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA |
LBJ |
Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX |
MA |
Mauritius Archives, Cormandel, Mauritius |
NARA |
NARA and Records Administration II, College Park, MD |
NHC |
Naval Historical Center, Operational Archives Branch, Washington, DC |
PRO |
National Archives, Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, England |
SNA |
Seychelles National Archives, Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles |
UKTB |
U.K. Trial Bundle, Sheridans Solicitors, London [U.K. litigation documents] |
1. Chagossians born in Chagos spoke Chagos Kreol, one of a group of Indian Ocean French Kreol languages, including Mauritian Kreol and Seselwa (Seychellois Kreol). Their vocabulary is largely French while also incorporating words from English, Arabic, and several African, Indian, and Chinese languages; the underlying grammar for the Kreols appears to come from Bantu languages. Speakers of the various Kreols can understand each other, but Chagos Kreol is distinct in some of its vocabulary and pronunciation. Most Chagossians have lost most of the distinctive features of the language over four decades in exile. See Philip Baker and Chris Corne, Isle de France Creole: Affinities and Origins (n.p.: Karoma, 1982); Robert A. Papen, “The French-based Creoles of the Indian Ocean: An Analysis and Comparison” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1978). Throughout I use the word Kreol to identify languages and the word Creole when used to identify people of generally African ancestry who are socially categorized as such in Mauritius and Seychelles.
2. Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean, trans. June Guicharnaud (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 110.
3. David Vine, “The Former Inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago as an Indigenous People: Analyzing the Evidence,” report for Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, DC, July 9, 2003.
4. Robert Scott, Limuria: The Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976[1961]), 242.
5. Stuart B. Barber, letter to Paul B. Ryan, April 26, 1982, 3. My thanks to Richard Barber for his help with many important details about his father’s life and for providing this and other invaluable documents.
6. Ibid., 3.
7. Horacio Rivero, “Long Range Requirements for the Southern Oceans,” enclosure, memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations, May 21, 1960, NHC: 00 Files, 1960, Box 8, 5710, 2. Admiral Horacio Rivero credited Barber with doing most of the writing for the Long Range Objectives Group that produced this document.
8. Rivero, “Long Range Requirements,” 2.
9. Horacio Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure in the African-Indian Ocean Area,” enclosure, memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations, July 11, 1960, NHC: 00 Files, 1960, Box 8, 5710; see also Monoranjan Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean: The International Response (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977), 58.
10. Barber, letter to Ryan, April 26, 1982, 3.
11. Roy L. Johnson, memorandum for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans & Policy), July 21 1958, NHC: 00 Files, 1958, Box 4, A4-2 Status of Shore Stations, 2–3. See also Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 58; Vytautas B. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia: Creation of the Indian Ocean Base (San Jose, CA: Writer’s Showcase, 2001), 2.
12. Massimo Calabresi, “Postcard: Diego Garcia,” Time, September 24, 2007, 8.
13. GlobalSecurity.org, “Diego Garcia ‘Camp Justice,’” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/diego-garcia.htm.
14. See, e.g., Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky, and Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1986), 439–46.
15. Michael C. Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin American and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 152–53.
16. GlobalSecurity.org, “Diego Garcia ‘Camp Justice.’”
17. Neil Hinch, “A Time of Change,” Chagos News 24 (August 2004), 6.
18. Times Online, “The Secret Downing Street Memo,” May 1, 2005, available at http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece.
19. Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006); Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor, “Claims of a Secret CIA Jail for Terror Suspects on British Island to Be Investigated,” Guardian, October 19, 2007; Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, “Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees Involving Council of Europe Member States: Second Report,” explanatory memorandum, June 7, 2007, Strasbourg, 13.
20. Democracy Now, “CIA Admits Used UK Territory for Rendition Flights,” February 22, 2008, http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/22/headlines#6.
21. Kevin Sullivan, “U.S. Fueled ‘Rendition’ Flights on British Soil,” Washington Post, February 22, 2008, A16; Cobain and Norton-Taylor, “Claims of a Secret CIA Jail”; Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, “US Accused of Holding Terror Suspects on Prison Ships,” Guardian, June 2, 2008; Reprieve, “US Government Must Reveal Information about Prison Ships Used for ‘Terror Suspects,’” press release, June 2, 2008, available at http://www.reprieve.org.uk.
22. See Vine, “The Former Inhabitants”; David Vine, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, and Philip Harvey, “Dérasiné: The Expulsion and Impoverishment of the Chagossian People [Diego Garcia],” expert report for American University Law School, Washington, DC, and Sheridans Solicitors, London, April 11, 2005.
23. I have never been employed or paid by Tigar or anyone connected with the suits. The American University law clinic that Tigar supervises paid for some of my research expenses in 2001–2 and in 2004.
24. This book builds on David Vine, “Empire’s Footprint: Expulsion and the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2006). Despite the significant role that the British Government and its officials played in carrying out the expulsion, I focus on the U.S. role for three reasons: First, nearly all the literature on Diego Garcia has focused on the role of the British Government in organizing the removal process. The literature has not, other than in passing, examined the role of the U.S. Government in ordering and orchestrating the expulsion. This neglect has left some confusion about the role of the U.S. Government in creating the base and ordering the expulsion. Frequent historical and factual inaccuracies have also appeared in the journalistic and scholarly literature (e.g., to whom the base and the territory belong: as it should be clear by now, while the territory is technically controlled by Britain the base is controlled by the United States, with Diego Garcia de facto U.S. territory). These shortcomings have made a scholarly exploration of the history of the U.S. role long overdue. Second, because I have found that the U.S. Government ordered the expulsion, I believe any analysis of why the Chagossians were exiled must focus on the U.S. role. Third, on a personal level, as one who was born and lives in the United States, I was more immediately concerned about the U.S. Government’s role in the exile.
25. Because I think social scientists have an obligation to ensure that people participating in and assisting with our research directly benefit from the research—we certainly benefit through grant money, book contracts, articles, speaking engagements, prestige, jobs—I made small contributions of food or money to families with whom I stayed. As thanks to the Chagos Refugees Group for helping to enable my research, I periodically worked in the group’s office, primarily providing English translation and clerical assistance.
26. In this I was guided by the work of Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Carole Cohn, “‘Clean Bombs’ and Clean Language,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory, ed. Jean B. Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 33–55, Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
27. In total, I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18 former and 2 current U.S. Government officials. They included officials from the U.S. Navy, the U.S. departments of Defense and State, and the U.S. Congress. The interview sessions sought to elicit detailed histories of the decision-making process leading to the development of the base and the expulsion. Throughout, I continually asked interviewees to describe their thinking at the time of the events under discussion to identify their contemporaneous interests, motivations, assumptions, and understandings. I conducted more than 10 additional interviews of a similar nature with journalists, academics, military analysts, a scientist, and others who were involved in the history of Diego Garcia or who were knowledgeable about the base.
28. I used these sources and interviews not just to understand the history of Diego Garcia and the dynamics of U.S. Empire but also to understand more about the actors in the national security bureaucracy themselves. As Derek Gregory points out, the actions of states are not produced “through geopolitics and geoeconomics alone”; they are also produced by cultural, social, and psychological processes and practices, especially those that “mark other people as irredeemably ‘Other’” and locate both the self and others spatially. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 16, 20. The aim is not to demonize or blame particular individuals but to empathetically understand their involvement within the context in which they were living, while identifying processes and practices that conditioned their actions.
29. Stuart B. Barber, letter to Ryan, April 26, 1982.
30. Henri Marimootoo, “The Diego Files,” Week-end, serial, May–September 1997.
31. Exchange of Notes between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the United States of America concerning a limited United States Naval Communications Facility on Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory (The Diego Garcia Agreement 1972), London, October 24, 1972, 3.
32. “Guidelines for Visits to Diego Garcia,” memorandum, August 21, 1992, UKTB 3.
33. Calabresi, “Postcard,” 8. Having filed such a story when he was one of the first journalists to visit the island in at last 25 years, Calabresi calculated “the equivalent in 2007 media dollars” as “probably a box of Chablis.”
34. Letter to author, May 12, 2004.
35. Simon Winchester, The Sun Never Sets: Travels to the Remaining Outposts of the British Empire (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1985); “Diego Garcia,” Granta 73 (2001): 207–26.
36. See, e.g., La Barca: Blog, available at http://labarcaatsea.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!SCEFC52FCBOE5896!167; Diane Stuemer, “Caught in a Net of Colourful Neighbours,” The Ottawa Citizen, February 5, 2001.
37. The Department of Defense defines a “facility” as a building, structure, or utility. Department of Defense, “Base Structure Report,” 8.
38. Global Security.org, “Iraq Facilities,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/iraq.htm; “Afghanistan Facilities,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/afghanistan.htm; Patrick Cockburn, “Revealed: Secret Plan to Keep Iraq under US Control,” Independent, June 5, 2008; Joseph Gerson, “‘Enduring’ U.S. Bases in Iraq,” CommonDreams.org, March 19, 2007; Alexander Cooley, “Base Politics,” Foreign Affairs 84, no.6 (2005): 79–92; James Bellamy Foster, “A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy,” Monthly Review 58, no. 2(2006), available at http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606jbf.htm; Ann Scott Tyson, “Gates, U.S. General Back Long Iraq Stay,” Washington Post, June 1, 2007, A11.
39. Guy Raz, “U.S. Builds Air Base in Iraq for Long Haul,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, October 12, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15184773]; Tom Engelhardt, “Baseless Considerations,” Tom Dispatch.com, November 5, 2007.
40. Mark Gillem, American Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvi.
41. Engelhardt, “Baseless Considerations.”
42. See, e.g., Theresa Hitchens, Michael Katz-Hyman, and Victoria Samson, “Space Weapons Spending in the FY 2007 Defense Budget,” report, Center for Defense Information, Washington, DC, March 6, 2006.
43. E.g., David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003); Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).
44. G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2(2004): 144.
45. See, e.g., Ferguson, Colossus; Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003.
46. David Ottaway, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base,” Washington Post, September 9, 1975, A1; Washington Post, “The Diego Garcians,” editorial, September 11, 1975.
47. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975: The Debate over the Base and the Island’s Former Inhabitants,” Special Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on International Relations, June 5 and November 4, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975).
48. Catherine Lutz’s Homefront, an ethnography of Fayetteville, North Carolina and the Fort Bragg U.S. Army base, has provided a particularly effective model for exploring the costs of militarization and U.S. Empire in the United States; in many ways I sought to replicate her study with a base abroad. Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston: Beacon, 2001). See also Katherine T. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Gill, School of the Americas.
49. With few exceptions, anthropologists have been absent from the debates on empire. Amid earlier imperial arguments in the 1960s, Kathleen Gough criticized anthropology, “the child of Western imperialism,” for having “virtually failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even adequately to explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied.” More than three decades later, Catherine Lutz found there was still almost no anthropological analysis of empire. (Kathleen Gough, “New Proposals for Anthropologists,” Current Anthropology 9, no. 5 (1968): 403, 405; Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 [2002]: 732.)
While there has been some progress in recent years, there should be little surprise that a discipline rooted in the imperialism and colonialism of Europe and the United States has shied away from making empire and imperialism its immediate subject of study (see Talal Asad, “Introduction,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad [London: Ithaca Press, 1973]). Notwithstanding Mina Davis Caulfield’s critique of anthropologists’ inattention to empire and Laura Nader’s still largely ignored exhortation to study the powerful, most anthropologists have continued to study the lives of the powerless, the poor, and those whose lives have suffered the impact of large-scale forces like imperialism (Mina Davis Caulfield, “Culture and Imperialism: Proposing a New Dialectic,” and Laura Nader, “Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up,” both in Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes [New York: Pantheon Books, 1969]).
In recent years, there has been progress toward the investigation of empire, paralleling important new research on elites, policymaking, and policymakers. Catherine Lutz has called for the production of “ethnographies of empire” as a way to ethnographically explore the particularities, practices, shifts, and contradictions in empire, as well as its costs. In her ethnography of Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the Fort Bragg U.S. Army base, Lutz illustrates the domestic costs of militarization and U.S. Empire, providing an important model for investigating the international effects of militarization and empire in the lives of the Chagossians. (See Lutz, “Making War at Home”; “Empire Is in the Details,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (2006); Homefront. See also McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest; Gill, School of the Americas.)
Too often, however, many anthropological analyses treat large-scale forces and sources of power like imperialism and the U.S. Government, which shape and structure people’s lives, as abstract givens, without subjecting them to detailed analysis of any kind (Michael Burawoy, “Introduction: Reaching for the Global,” in Global Ethnography, ed. Michael Burawoy et al. [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000], 1–40). To say, as many do, that structural forces shape lives, constrain agency, and create suffering is one thing. To demonstrate how these things happen is another.
This book then is an attempt to build on the need to subject extralocal forces to ethnographic investigation and to realize a model for understanding widespread suffering developed by Paul Farmer: With suffering, “structured by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire . . . to constrain agency,” the task is to detail what the historically given, economically (and politically) driven processes and forces are, how they operate, and how they have shaped Chagossians’ lives. As Michael Burawoy says, forces “become the topic of investigation.” (See Paul Farmer, “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997], 261–83; William Roseberry, “Understanding Capitalism—Historically, Structurally, Spatially,” in Locating Capitalism in Time and Space, ed. D. Nugent (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 61-79; Michael Burawoy, “Manufacturing the Global,” Ethnography 2, no. 2 [2001]: 147–59; Burawoy, “Introduction: Reaching for the Global”; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization,” Current Anthropology 42, no. 1 [2001]: 125–38; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982].)
At the same time, this corrective would go too far to focus, like many traditional foreign policy scholars, only on the structural dynamics or even the actors of U.S. foreign policy while ignoring the effects of foreign policy. I began to see that a bifocaled approach offering roughly equal study of the Chagossians and U.S. Empire would offer the best way to understand Diego Garcia (see also Gill, School of the Americas). The book aims to contribute to scholarship on empire, militarization, and foreign policy by subjecting U.S. Empire and its actors to the same kind of ethnographic scrutiny most often reserved for imperialism’s victims, while still attending to the lives affected by the U.S. Empire so often ignored by most non-anthropologist scholars. Ultimately the book attempts to do justice anthropologically to both sides of Diego Garcia, both sides of U.S. Empire, by seeking to investigate ethnographically the experience of U.S. Government officials and the Chagossians while attending to the larger structural context in which the base was created. Bringing the two sides “into the same frame of study,” I aim to “posit their relationships on the basis of first-hand ethnographic research.” See George Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton University Press, 1998), 84.
1. On the history of Chagos, see especially former governor of colonial Mauritius Sir Robert Scott’s Limuria: The Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius, and former commissioner of the British Indian Ocean Territory Richard Edis, Peak of Limuria: The Story of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago, new ed. (London: Chagos Conservation Trust, 2004). The most important primary sources are those available in the Mauritius Archives and the Public Records Office (National Archives), in Kew, England.
2. Scott, Limuria, 68, 42–43, 48–50; Vijayalakshmi Teelock, Mauritian History: From Its Beginnings to Modern Times (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 2000), 16–17.
3. Robert L. Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 9.
4. Larry Bowman, Mauritius: Democracy and Development in the Indian Ocean (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 13. See also Teelock, Mauritian History, 104–5; Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century, 119.
5. Alfred J. E. Orian, “Report on a Visit to Diego Garcia,” La Revue Agricole et Sucrière 38 (1958): 129; Scott, Limuria, 76.
6. Iain B. Walker, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” in The Complete Guide to the Southwest Indian Ocean (Argelès sur Mer, France: Cornelius Books, 1993), 562; Scott, Limuria, 63, 69; Charles Grant, The History of Mauritius or the Isle of France and the Neighboring Islands from Their First Discovery to the Present Time (New Delhi: Asia Educational Services, 1995[1801]), 359.
7. It is possible that other enslaved people arrived as early as 1770.
8. H. Ly-Tio-Fane and S. Rajabalee, “An Account of Diego Garcia and its People,” Journal of Mauritian Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 91–92; I. Walker, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” 563; Scott, Limuria, 20; B. d’Unienville, “Notes on the Chagos Archipelago.” Mauritiana Collection, University of Mauritius, n.d.; Edis, Peak of Limuria.
9. “Diego Garcia Expedition 1786,” India Office Records, Bombay Secret and Political Consultations, Vol. 73, 1786. See also Edis, Peak of Limuria, 30–31.
10. Edis, Peak of Limuria, 31; Scott, Limuria, 75, 20; I. Walker, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” 562; “Diégo Garcia,” report, n.d. [1825–29], MA: TB 3/2.
11. Europeans had previously referred to the Indian Ocean as an “Arab Lake.” See Enseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Study of Society and History 46 (2004): 219.
12. Permits to Slave Holders to Transport Slaves between Islands, 1828, MA: IA 32. See also MA: IA 32; IG 59; IG 112/5052, 5117, 5353, 5355, 5448.
13. See Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 185–201, on naming practices during slavery reflecting the maintenance of kinship ties among African Americans.
14. Scott, Limuria, 112, 119; Donald Taylor, “Slavery in the Chagos Archipelago,” Chagos News 14 (2000): 3; Dulary Peerthum and Satyendra Peerthum, “‘By the Sweat of Their Brow’: A Study of Free and Unfree Labourers in the Chagos Archipelago, c. 1783–1880,” preliminary paper abstract, 2002; MA: IB 12/47.
15. M. N. Lucie-Smith, “Report on the Coconut Industry of the Lesser Dependencies, Mauritius,” Department of Agriculture, Port Louis, Mauritius, June 1959, 6.
16. Ly-Tio-Fane and Rajabalee, “An Account of Diego Garcia and Its People,” 92; d’Unienville, “Notes on the Chagos Archipelago”; “Diégo Garcia” (report [1825–29]); I. Walker, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” 563; Orian, “Report on a Visit to Diego Garcia,” 129. Cyclones are only known to have hit Chagos in 1891 and 1944. See Edward P. Ashe, letter to Sir A. W. Moore, November 26, 1903, PRO: ADM 123/34, 2; Edis, Peak of Limuria. “Dauquet” was perhaps spelled “Danguet” or “Dauget.” Six Islands actually includes a seventh.
17. Bowman, Mauritius, 17–18. British oversight in Mauritius and to an even greater extent in the isolated dependencies like Chagos was weak at best. The British sent the first government agent to investigate conditions in Chagos 10–15 years after taking possession of the archipelago, but otherwise simply encouraged the production of oil to supply the Mauritian market. See Scott, Limuria, 128; Ly-Tio-Fane and Rajabalee, “An Account of Diego Garcia and Its People,” 92–93.
18. Lapotaire et al., “Mémoire,” letter, October 8, 1828, MA: TB 1/41828, 13. For descriptions of life under slavery, also see Scott, Limuria, 99, 104–5, 149.
19. Lapotaire et al., “Mémoire,” 13. Scott confirms that by law, slave owners were technically required to provide basic food rations, clothing, housing, and medical care, and that “slaves were usually supplied with various vegetables . . . [and] encouraged to rear small livestock . . . either by way of incentives to good work or to place on the slaves themselves as much as possible of the onus of providing a balanced diet.” Scott, Limuria, 105.
20. Also known as the “plantation complex.” See Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area,” in Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Michael M. Horowitz (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1971), 17–46; Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1974); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and the Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Bandle, 1997).
21. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 11–13; Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 46.
22. Mintz, Carribean Transformations, 52, 54.
23. This was the case in the isolated Out Islands of the Bahamas, where similar conditions prevailed. See Howard Johnson, The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783–1933 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 50.
24. See W. J. Eccles, The French in North America, 1500–1783 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 172–74; William F. S. Miles, Elections and Ethnicity in French Martinique: A Paradox in Paradise (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), 32–34; Deryck Scarr, Seychelles since 1770: History of a Slave and Post-Slavery Society (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999).
25. Scott, Limuria, 136; Craton, Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean, 3; Eccles, The French in North America, 1500–1783, 172.
26. Eccles, The French in North America, 1500–1783, 172.
27. Scott, Limuria, 140–41.
28. L. B. Büehmüller and André Büehmüller, census record, April 8, 1861, MA: TB 3/1. The extent and rate at which Indian labor was introduced in Chagos is unclear. A visiting magistrate’s report from 1880 says that there were on the order of 10 Indians in all of Chagos, a figure almost certainly far too low. See J. H. Ackroyd, “Report of the Police and Stipendary Magistrate for the Smaller Dependencies 1880,” Magistrate for Lesser Dependencies 1880, Port Louis, Mauritius, March 22, MA: RA 2568, 11. Some claim a figure of 40 percent Indian descent by the 1960s, which may accurately reflect the percentage tracing at least some Indian ancestry. See Francoise Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community and the ‘Ilois’ Women,” unpublished MS, 1980; Iain B. Walker, “Zaffer Pe Sanze”: Ethnic Identity and Social Change among the Ilois in Mauritius (Vacoas, Mauritius: KMLI, 1986).
29. Marina Carter and Raymond d’Unienville, Unshackling Slaves: Liberation and Adaptation of Ex-Apprentices (London: Pink Pigeon Books, N.D), 57.
30. See Thomas V. Bulpin, Islands in a Forgotten Sea ([no city], Netherlands: Howard Timmins, 1958), 314; H. Labouchere, letter to Governor Higginson, February 26, 1857, MA: SA 57/47, and letter to Governor Higginson, August 20, 1857, MA: SA 59/19; Scott, Limuria, 263; Ackroyd, “Report of the Police and Stipendary Magistrate,” 8.
31. Charles Anderson to Colonial Secretary, September 5, 1838, MA: RD 18.
32. G. Meyer, “Report on Visit to Chagos Archipelago,” Port Louis, Mauritius, Labour Office, May 23, 1949, PRO: CO 859/194/8, 1.
33. Bulpin, Islands in a Forgotten Sea, 28, 314; Ackroyd, “Report of the Police and Stipendary Magistrate,” 11; Scott, Limuria, 162.
34. Scott, Limuria, 162–65.
35. Ackroyd, “Report of the Police and Stipendary Magistrate,” 11. Without hearing from Chagossians at the time, however, one must be careful about drawing conclusions based on these uncorroborated official reports.
36. Scott, Limuria, 253; Warner, “Report of Mr. Warner on the Dependencies of Mauritius,” Port Louis, Mauritius, MA: TB 1/3.
37. H. J. Holland, letter to Colonial Secretary, February 7, 1887, MA: SA 167/25.
38. Ivanoff Dupont, “Report of the Acting Magistrate for the Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius on Diego Garcia,” Bambous, Mauritius, June 4, 1883, MA: SA 142/9, 2–5; Scott, Limuria, 169–78.
39. Papen, “The French-based Creoles of the Indian Ocean”; John Holm, Pidgins and Creoles, vol. 2: Reference Survey (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989), 403–4.
40. Also Ilwa. See Roger Dussercle, Archipel de Chagos: En mission, novembre 10, 1933–janvier 1934 (Port Louis, Mauritius: General Printing and Stationery, 1934), 9; John Madeley, “Diego Garcia: A Contrast to the Falklands,” The Minority Rights Group Report 54, London: Minority Rights Group Ltd, 1985 [1982], n. 5.
41. Ly-Tio-Fane and Rajabalee, “An Account of Diego Garcia and Its People,” 105; Scott, Limuria, 182.
42. For a concise description of copra processing, see I. Walker, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” 563.
43. The account and all quotations in this section come from W. J. Hanning, “Report on Visit to Peros Banhos,” parts I and II, March 29, 1932. PRO: CO 167/879/4 102894. Unfortunately I was unable to ask Rita and other older Chagossians about the events described.
44. Ibid., I:6.
45. Ibid., I:5.
46. Ibid., I:6.
47. Ibid., I:8.
48. Ibid., I:8–9.
49. Ibid., I:9–10.
50. Ibid., attachment.
51. Ibid., II:1–3.
52. John Todd, “Notes on the Islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory,” report, January 10, 1969. SNA, 33; “Notes on a Visit to Chagos by the Administrator, British Indian Ocean Territory,” report, July 30, 1969, PRO, 3; Dalais 1935:18.
53. R. Lavoipierre, “Report on a Visit to the Mauritius Dependencies: 16th October–10th November, 1953,” Port Louis, Mauritius, December 7, 1953, PRO: CO 1023/132 1953:5; Mary Darlow, “Report by Public Assistance Commissioner and Social Welfare Advisor,” Port Louis, Mauritius, December, PRO: CO 1023/132 1953; Scott, Limuria, 7.
54. The plantation company had the power—and at times exercised it—to deport workers that management considered troublesome. Otherwise, everyone living on the islands was guaranteed work. The following description of working and living conditions comes from many sources, including interviews and conversations with Chagossians and other plantation employees. See also Scott, Limuria; I. Walker, Zaffer Pe Sanze, “British Indian Ocean Territory”; the reports of J. R. Todd; and a series of magistrate reports on Chagos dating to the nineteenth century.
55. See, e.g., Todd, “Notes on the Islands of the BIOT.”
56. Scott, Limuria, 285.
57. Ibid., 266–67.
58. Ibid., 242.
59. Hilary Blood, “The Peaks of Lemuria,” Geographical Magazine 29 (1957): 522.
60. Scott, Limuria, 184, 24.
61. Auguste Toussaint, Histoire des Iles Mascareignes (Paris: Editions BergerLevrault, 1972), 18.
62. Scott, Limuria, 293. Scott meant his description to apply also to the people of the other Lesser Dependencies like Agalega.
1. Interview with U.S. Navy historian Jeffery Barlow, August 2005. This chapter’s title owes a debt to Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” March 2002, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm. There are few histories of how the U.S. and U.K. governments created the base on Diego Garcia and expelled the Chagossians. Works by Bandjunis (Diego Garcia) and Bezboruah (U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean), based in part on interviews with some of the key U.S. Government officials involved, provide the best accounts. The latter, by a retired naval officer who participated in the development of the base and who also had access to relevant Navy documents, is a detailed insider’s account of the history. The self-published book has been indispensable to my reconstruction of the history but is not the work of a professional historian.
2. The idea is indicated by a curious three-sentence memorandum from shortly before the 1960 elections, found in the Navy archives without its originally attached proposal. The first and key sentence reads, “The attached proposal by Stuart Barber was intended as an idea to be fed, somehow, to both Presidential candidates.” The memorandum’s subject line reads “South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force.” See Op-61, “South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force,” memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations, August 2, 1960, NHC: 00 Files, 1960, Box 8, 5710. I am inferring the contents of the proposal from the subject line.
3. Long-Range Objectives Group, Director, “Annual Statement of Long-Range Navy Objectives,” report to Chief of Naval Operations, 1956, NHC: 00 Files, 1956, Box 1, A1 Plans, Projects, and Developments, 1.
4. U.S. Naval Institute, “Reminiscences of Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired), oral history vol. 3,” Annapolis, MD, U.S. Naval Institute, May 1978, 300–301.
5. R. L. Johnson, memorandum for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans & Policy), 2. All signs indicate that Barber drafted the memo.
6. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 2.
7. Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire.”
8. The Department of Defense acknowledges having 909 bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. This list strangely omits many well-known bases, including all those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well secret bases unacknowledged by the DOD. An estimate of around 1,000 thus seems fair. The definitions and even the terminology surrounding bases (forts, camps, stations, etc.) are notoriously elusive. I generally use the term base and generally call anything the DOD refers to as a site a base. See Department of Defense, “Base Structure Report Fiscal Year 2007 Baseline (A Summary of DoD’s Real Property Inventory),” 2007; C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire.
9. I define imperialism as the creation and maintenance of hierarchical relationships of formal or informal rule, domination, or control by one people or sociopolitical entity over a significant part of the life of other peoples or sociopolitical entities such that the stronger shapes or has the ability to shape significant aspects of the ways of living (political, economic, social, or cultural) of the weaker. Empire is then the designation reserved for states and other entities practicing imperialism.
10. E.g., Harvey, The New Imperialism; Smith, American Empire; Ferguson, Colossus; C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire.
11. Ferguson, Colossus; Ignatieff, “The Burden.”
12. Ferguson is ultimately skeptical that the nation has the proper will and “imperial cast of mind” to play such a role. See Ferguson, Colossus, 2, 25, 29.
13. Ignatieff, quoted in Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 73–74.
14. E.g., William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962); Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. La Feber, and Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the U.S. Empire, vol. 1: U.S. Diplomatic History to 1901, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1976); Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. La Feber, and Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the U.S. Empire, vol. 2: U.S. Diplomatic History since 1893, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1976); Smith, American Empire.
15. Smith, American Empire, 360.
16. See e.g., Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy; Gardner et al., Creation of the U.S. Empire, vols. 1–2; Harvey, The New Imperialism.
17. Sydney Lens, Permanent War: The Militarization of America (New York: Schocken Books, 1987); Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadows of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire; C. Johnson, Nemesis; Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire”; Tom Engelhardt, “Gunboat Diplomacy,” Mother Jones, April 1, 2004, http://www.motherjobes.com/news/dailymojo/2004/04/03_667.html 2004; and even Smith, American Empire, 349.
18. James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990), 29.
19. Scholars in the basing literature may have underestimated the number of pre–World War II bases. Given the frequency of major U.S. military interventions in Latin America before the war and occupations in Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, bases and garrisons (as well as U.S. naval power) likely played a key role in the maintenance of U.S. dominance in the region. See, e.g., Carolyn Hall and Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America, cartographer John V. Cotter (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 288.
20. William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), ix; Richard W. Van Alstyne, The Rising U.S. Empire (New York: Norton Library, 1960), 8; see also Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), viii, 5–6.
21. Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 141, 157; Gillem, American Town, 18–19.
22. Anni P. Baker, American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 4; Gillem, American Town, 19.
23. Francis Paul Prucha, A Guide to the Military Posts of the United States 1789–1895 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964), 10–11.
24. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970).
25. Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, vol. 1: To 1877, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 306.
26. D. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 7.
27. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry purchased a $50 plot of land on what is now called Chi Chi Jima, near Iwo Jima in the western Pacific, which he intended to become a U.S. coaling station. A. M. Jackson, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 7, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1965, Box 26, 11000/1B, 2; Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy: 1898–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5.
28. Philip A. Crowl, “Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age,” ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 455.
29. Ibid., 444–77; see also Hall M. Friedman, Creating an American Lake: United States Imperialism and Strategic Security in the Pacific Basin, 1945–1947 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 2–3.
30. Stephen A. Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 86–87.
31. Ibid., 48.
32. See Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy; Gardner et al., Creation of the U.S. Empire, vols. 1–2; Smith, American Empire.
33. For an interesting discussion of how the United States learned the value of a more discreet, indirect form of imperialism avoiding sovereignty over dependent lands, see Christina D. Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 779–805.
34. John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16–17; Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America, 209; Brinkley, American History, 767.
35. Hall and Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America, 228.
36. Ibid., 228; Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 27.
37. C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140.
38. Friedman, Creating an American Lake, 3.
39. See Desch, When the Third World Matters; Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons; Blaker, United States Overseas Basing, 29.
40. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing.
41. Desch, When the Third World Matters, 183 n.123; Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 45.
42. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons, 4–5.
43. Ibid., 4–6.
44. Hayes et al., American Lake, 18–19.
45. David Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory 1944–1982 (Honolulu, HA: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 24–26.
46. Although U.S. histories of this and other battles in the Pacific always note the “bloody” nature of the fighting, the attention is almost always on the (relatively few) U.S. soldiers who died, not on the Japanese and certainly not on the Marshallese.
47. Jonathan Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 43.
48. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing, 23, 9.
49. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons, 59.
50. Hayes et al., American Lake, 23–24.
51. Donald F. McHenry, Micronesia: Trust Betrayed (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1975), 67, 66.
52. Friedman, Creating an American Lake, 1–2.
53. Hayes et al., American Lake, 28.
54. Stanley de Smith, quoted in Roy H. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Mururoa (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 42.
55. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing, 32.
56. George Stambuk, American Military Forces Abroad: Their Impact on the Western State System (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963), 9.
57. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons, 21, 101.
58. Hayes et al., American Lake, 25.
59. Smith, American Empire, 2, 14–16, 21.
60. Carole McGranahan, “A Nonviolent History of War: Global Politics, Refugee Activism, and Forgetting Tibet,” conference paper, “Forgotten Conflicts, Permanent Catastrophes?” Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, April 2007.
61. Smith, American Empire; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Empire (New York: Metropolitan/Owl, 2004[2000]), “America’s Empire of Bases,” http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid1181, January 15, 2004; Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire.”
62. Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire.”
63. Joseph Gerson, “The Sun Never Sets,” in The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases, ed. Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 14; see also Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire.”
64. Lutz, “Empire Is in the Details.”
65. Smith, American Empire, 349, 360.
66. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing, 32. For military and civilian leaders, the war further cemented the importance of maintaining large bases in the eastern Pacific, on Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan, on Guam, and in South Korea—a pattern that remains in place to this day. Hayes et al., American Lake, 29–30, 45.
67. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing, 32.
1. Edis, Peak of Limuria, 63, 109 n.1; Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 13.
2. Edis, Peak of Limuria, 62–64, 68; Ashley Jackson, War and Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 42, 44–47.
3. See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
4. Ibid., 90–91.
5. Claude Ricketts, Study on Strategic Requirements for Guam, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, February 21, 1963, NHC: 00 Files, 1963, 11000/1, Tab B.
6. Stambuk, American Military Forces Abroad, 13.
7. Baker, American Soldiers Overseas, 49.
8. Lutz, Homefront, 86.
9. Ibid., 47–48.
10. Sherry, In the Shadows of War; Lens, Permanent War.
11. Lens, Permanent War, 22.
12. Sherry, In the Shadows of War, 235.
13. Lutz, Homefront, 9.
14. Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 59, 83, 227; Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 1.
15. Barber, letter to Ryan, April 26, 1982, 2.
16. Ibid., 2.
17. Stuart B. Barber, letter to Senator Ted Stevens, October 3, 1975.
18. Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 58.
19. The United States had major advantages in bombers, air defenses, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and thus in first and second strike nuclear capabilities. The United States had its unparalleled system of bases, a navy with uncontested control of the seas, and a related ability, unmatched by any other competitor, to deploy its military power almost anywhere in the world. Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 14, 4–10.
20. Ibid., vii–1. Although my interviewees almost all stressed the importance of the Cold War to understanding Diego Garcia, strikingly absent from their comments and the archival record is any concern among officials about the reaction of the Soviet Union or China to U.S. plans for Diego. Government officials were unworried that the Soviets or Chinese would respond militarily by creating bases of their own, increase their naval presence, or make other military moves to resist the creation of a base in a neighboring region. The only fear expressed was that the Soviets and others might inflict some political or propaganda damage on the United States for militarizing a previously peaceful ocean.
21. Thomas H. Moorer, memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations, January 2, 1962, NHC: 00 Files, 1962, Box 12, 11000, 2.
22. Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure,” 5. Stu’s memory and Bandjunis’s history are in disagreement about the timing of the survey. Bandjunis says it took place in the summer of 1957, when the Navy sent Admiral Jerauld Wright, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and Supreme Allied Commander for the Atlantic, to the island. Stu’s recollection is that he began work on the idea in 1958. See Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 2.
23. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads, 32.
24. Naval Historical Center, “Admiral Horacio Rivero, United States, Navy, Retired,” biographies, July 26, 1972 NHC: Operational Archives Branch.
25. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads, 32, 328 n. 41.
26. Ibid., 32–33.
27. Ibid., 106–7.
28. Ibid., 107–8.
29. Ibid., 308–9.
30. Ibid., 309–14.
31. Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia, 186.
32. See Weisgall, Operation Crossroads, 302–5.
33. E.g., Robert C. Kiste, The Bikinians: A Study in Forced Migration (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publishing, 1974); Catherine Lutz, “Introduction,” in Micronesia as Strategic Colony: The Impact of U.S. Policy on Micronesian Health and Culture, ed. Catherine Lutz, Cultural Survival Occasional Papers, 12 (Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, 1984).
In 1968, President Johnson allowed the Bikinians to return to their islands after a cleanup. They returned in 1969, although they were shocked to find the islands decimated, many parts having disappeared altogether. In 1978, medical tests revealed that the cleanup had been inadequate and that “the people may have ingested the largest amounts of radioactive material of any known population.” They were again moved. After fifteen years of lawsuits and negotiations, the Bikinians received a $75 million settlement for the taking and use of their islands. $110 million was put into a trust for the decontamination and resettlement of the islands. After an extensive cleanup, some have now returned. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads, 314–15.
34. U.S. Naval Institute, “Reminiscences of Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr.,” 302–3.
35. See also Vine, “Empire’s Footprint,” for a full discussion of these dynamics.
36. Kinzer, Overthrow, 15. I have recently learned of land expropriations and possible displacements in the Waikane and Makua valleys.
37. Cheryl Lewis, “Kaho’olawe and the Military,” ICE case study, Washington, DC, Spring 2001, http://www.american.edu/ted/ice/hawaiibombs.htm.
38. Globalsecurity.org, “Guam,” 2003, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/guam.htm; James Brooke, “Threats and Responses: U.S. Bases,” New York Times, March 10, 2003.
39. Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle, 28–29, 42–43, 192.
40. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, 9; Anna Piatek, “Displacement by Military Bases,” unpublished paper, George Washington University, April 2006; Roland G. Simbulan, The Bases of Our Insecurity (Manila: BALAI Fellowship, 1985).
41. Barbara Rose Johnston, “Reparations and the Right to Remedy,” contributing paper, World Commission on Dams, July 1, 2000.
42. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, 38–39.
43. Ibid., 70–72.
44. By 1995, about 800 remained in Bolivia with their offspring. Okinawa remains home to 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan, though it represents only 1 percent of Japanese land. It also remains the poorest of Japan’s prefectures. C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 50–53, 200; C. Johnson, Blowback, 11; Kensei Yoshida, Democracy Betrayed: Okinawa under U.S. Occupation (Bellingham, WA: Western Washington University, n.d.[2001]); Kozy K. Amemiya, “The Bolivian Connection: U.S. Bases and Okinawan Emigration,” in Okinawa: Cold War Island, ed. Chalmers Johnson (n.p.: Japan Policy Research Institute, 1999), 63.
45. Aqqaluk Lynge, The Right to Return: Fifty Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland (n.p: Atuagkat Publishers, 2002); D. L. Brown, “Trail of Frozen Tears,” Washington Post, October 22, 2002, C1; J. M. Olsen, “US Agrees to Return to Denmark Unused Area near Greenland Military Base,” Associated Press Worldstream, September 24, 2002.
46. Lynge, The Right to Return, 10, 27, 32–36.
47. Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia, 189–91, 201–2.
48. Ibid., 193; Peter Marks, “Paradise Lost; The Americanization of the Pacific,” Newsday, January 12, 1986, 10.
49. PCRC, “The Kwajalein Atoll and the New Arms Race: The US Anti-Ballistic Weapons System and Consequences for the Marshall Islands of the Pacific,” Indigenous Affairs 2 (2001): 38–43. U.S. Representative John Seiberling, visiting the atoll in 1984, summed up the conditions in Ebeye by comparing them to those on the base: “The contrast couldn’t be greater or more dramatic. Kwajalein is like Fort Lauderdale or one of our Miami resort areas, with palm-lined beaches, swimming pools, a golf course, people bicycling everywhere, a first-class hospital and a good school; and Ebeye, on the other hand, is an island slum, over-populated, treeless filthy lagoon, littered beaches, a dilapidated hospital, and contaminated water supply, and so forth.” Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia, 201.
50. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 54, 3–4.
51. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest, 9–10.
52. In the case of Fayetteville, North Carolina’s Fort Bragg Army base, the location of the base was determined in no small part by the ease with which the government could evict black, Scotch, and Native American farmers and sharecroppers, as well as smallholders and renters, the majority of the population in the area. Lutz, Homefront, 26–27.
53. U.S. Naval Institute, “Reminiscences of Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr.,” 301.
54. Barber, letter to Ryan, April 26, 1982, 3.
55. U.S. Naval Institute, “Reminiscences of Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr.,” 302–3.
56. Attachment to Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure.”
57. Claude Ricketts, “Memorandum of Understanding Resulting from the CNO-First Sea Lord Discussions of October 31 and November 1,” memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations, 1960, NHC: 00 Files, 1960, Box 8, 5710.
58. Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 58–59; see also P. B. Ryan, “Diego Garcia,” Proceedings 110, no. 9/979 (1984): 133.
59. Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 58. See also Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 1–3; Michael A. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America’s Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833–1992 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 95; Ryan, “Diego Garcia,” 133; P. S. Mewes, letter to Mr. Gwynn, April 22, 1971, PRO.
60. F. J. Blouin, memorandum for the Director, J-5, November 23, 1960, NARA: JCS, 4920, November 1960.
61. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 3.
62. Barber, letter to Ryan, April 26, 1982. See also Ryan, “Diego Garcia,” 133.
63. Black, memorandum to William Lang, April 15, 1961, NARA: R6330/490 ASD/ISA Decimal File, 1961, 680.1 January–March, 471.6-821, Box 27.
64. Henry S. Rowen, memorandum for Bundy, Rostow, McGhee, Amory, Bissell, and Nitze, March 31, 1961, NARA: RG 330/490, ASD ISA Decimal Files 1961, 680.1 January–March, Box 27.
65. Thomas H. Moorer, memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations, January 2, 1962, NHC: 00 Files, 1962, Box 12, 11000, 1.
66. William P. Bundy, memorandum for Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 5, 1962, enclosure, NARA: RG 330/490, ASD ISA Decimal Files 1962, 680.1 January–July, Box 72:1–2.
67. The following quotations come from a 1970 oral history interview conducted from Komer’s RAND Corporation office in Santa Monica, California.
68. Robert W. Komer, Sixth Oral History Interview, Dennis J. O’Brien, interviewer, JFK, Boston, MA, January 30, 1970, 28.
69. CINCPACFLT, memorandum to CINCPAC, August 13, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1964, Box 20, 11000/1A, Tab-B.
70. Ibid.
71. Paul H. Nitze, memorandum for record, October 2, 1962, NARA: RG 330/490, ASD ISA Decimal Files 1962, Box 106, UK 333 September–December.
72. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Decision on JCS 570/548, a Report by the J-5 on Base Rights in the Indian Ocean Area,” report, January 11, 1962, NARA 1962, 3930–3933.
73. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 19: South Asia, ed. Louis J. Smith (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1996), 565.
74. Ibid., 19:623–24.
1. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, new ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 42–44.
2. Ibid., 48, 69–70.
3. Ibid., 70.
4. Tim Weiner, “Robert Komer, 78, Figure in Vietnam, Dies,” New York Times, April 12, 2000, A29.
5. Robert W. Komer, Oral history interview, interviewer Joe B. Frantz, January 30, 1970, LBJ: AC 94-1, 1–2.
6. Komer, Oral history interview, January 30, 2–3.
7. Robert W. Komer, Oral history interview, interviewer Joe B. Frantz, August 18, 1970, LBJ: AC 94-1, 71.
8. Weiner, “Robert Komer.” In the words of Halberstam, Komer, “anxious to show everyone in town how close he was to the President (six photographs of Lyndon Johnson on his office wall, a Saigon record), had gone around to dinner parties telling reporters that he had assured the President that the war would not be an election issue in 1968. It was not one of his better predictions.” Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 738.
9. Komer, Sixth Oral History Interview, 29.
10. Ibid., 28–34.
11. Robert W. Komer, memorandum for the President, June 19, 1963, JFK: NSF, Komer, Box 422, India Indian Ocean (IOTF) 1963.
12. Ibid.
13. Robert W. Komer, Maritime Strategy or Coalition Defense (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1984), xvi.
14. Robert W. Komer, Fourth Oral History Interview, interviewer Elizabeth Farmer, October 31, 1964, JFK; Komer, Sixth Oral History Interview, 32.
15. John F. Kennedy, letter to Robert S. McNamara, July 10, 1963, LBJ: NSF, Komer, Indian Ocean Dec 63-Mar 66 (including IOTF), Box 26, #75.
16. Komer, Sixth Oral History Interview, 29.
17. Dean Rusk, letter to Robert S. McNamara, August 17, 1963, JFK: NSF, Komer, Box 422, India Indian Ocean (IOTF) 1963, 2–3.
18. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 3–5; Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 58–59.
19. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, 19:653–54.
20. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Secretary of State, August 26, 1963, NARA: RG 59/250/5/13/6, Subject Numeric Files 1963, Box 3745.
21. Ibid.
22. Robert W. Komer, letter to McGeorge Bundy, September 6, 1963, JFK: NSF, Komer, Box 422, India Indian Ocean (IOTF) 1963 [White House Memoranda].
23. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 21: Near East Region Arabian Peninsula, ed. N. D. Howland (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2000), 83–86.
24. Ibid., 85.
25. ADMINO CINCUSNAVEUR, telegram to RUECW/JCS, February 25, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1964, Box 20, 11000/1B.
26. U.K. Colonial Office, “Defence Interests in the Indian Ocean,” memorandum, October 20, 1964, PRO.
27. David Bruce, memorandum to Secretary of State, February 27, 1964, NHC: OAB, 00, 1964, Box 20, 11000/1B.
28. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Secretary of State, February 27, NHC: 00 Files, 1964, Box 20, 11000/1B, 1–2.
29. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 25.
30. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Secretary of State, March 3, 1964, enclosure, “U.S. Defence Interests in the Indian Ocean,” NARA: RG 59/250/6/23/3–4, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1638:2–3.
31. “Defence Interests in the Indian Ocean” [author unknown], memorandum, 1965?. PRO: FO 371/184522, 37868.1965.
32. UK Foreign Office 1966: para. 10–11.
33. U.K. Foreign Office, “Steering committee on international organisations presentation of British Indian Ocean Territory in the United Nations,” September 8, 1966, PRO: para. 10–12.
34. Alan Brooke-Turner, “British Indian Ocean Territory,” memorandum, March 18, 1966, UKTB. John Pilger says, “Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984 could not have put it better.” See Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 23.
35. S. J. Dunn, “Shore up the Indian Ocean,” Proceedings 110, no. 9/979 (1984): 131.
36. U.S. officials suggested that facilities for the islands might include prepositioned military stockpiles; an air base for 2–4 air squadrons and supporting cargo planes, troop carriers, air tankers, antisubmarine patrols, and air logistics operations; an anchorage for an aircraft carrier task force; a communications station; an amphibious staging area; a space tracking facility; fuel and ammunition storage; and secondary support anchorages and logistics runways. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Secretary of State, March 3, 1964.
37. Jeffery C. Kitchen, memorandum to the Secretary [of State], March 3, 1964, NARA: RG 59/250/6/23/3–4, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1638, 3.
38. USUN, telegram to RUEHCR/SECSTATE, May 30, 1964, NARA: RG 59/250/6/23/3–4, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1551, 1–4.
39. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:91–93; see also Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 10–11.
40. Emphasis in original. A supporting document underlined this point further: “We have carefully chosen areas where there is a limited number of transients or inhabitants (e.g. 100–200 people).” See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:91, 93.
41. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 14.
42. CINCUSNAVEUR, telegram to RUECW/CNO, August 4, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1964, Box 20, 11000/1B.
43. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 14.
44. Robert Newton, “Report on the Anglo-American Survey in the Indian Ocean,” 1964, PRO: para. 25.
45. Robert H. Estabrook, “U.S., Britain Consider Indian Ocean Bases,” Washington Post, August 29, 1964, A1, A6.
46. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Department of State, August 28, 1964, NARA: RG 59/250/6/23/3–4, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1638.
47. U.S. Department of State, “Memorandum of Conversation, Islands in the Indian Ocean,” April 15, 1965, LBJ: NSF, Country File, Box 207, UK Memos vol. III 2/65–4/65.
48. United Nations Declaration 1514 (XV), “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” December 14, 1960, sec. 6.
49. E. H. Peck, “Defence Facilities in the Indian Ocean,” May 7, 1965, PRO.
50. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to RUEHCR/Secretary of State, May 10, 1965. LBJ: NSF, Country File, Box 207, UK Memos vol. IV 5/65–6/65.
51. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to RUEHCR/Secretary of State, May 15, 1965, NARA: RG 59/250/6/23/3–4, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1638.
52. Llewellyn E. Thompson, memorandum to the Secretary [of State], May 1, 1965, LBJ: NSF, Komer, Box 26, Indian Ocean, December 1963–March 1966.
53. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21: 97; Jeffery C. Kitchen, memorandum to the Secretary [of State], August 17, 1965, NARA: RG 59/250/6/23/3–4, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1638, 1–3.
54. See Marimootoo, “Diego Files.”
55. James Calvert, memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, September 29, 1965, NHC: 00 Files, 1965, Box 40, 5710/1–2.
56. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 25.
57. The British Indian Ocean Territory Order 1965, statutory order, No. 1920, 1965.
58. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 24–25.
59. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2066, “Question of Mauritius,” December 16, 1965.
60. Robert W. Komer, memorandum to Jeffery Kitchen, 10 November 1965, LBJ: NSF, Files of Robert W. Komer, Box 26.
61. James Calvert, memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, January 10, 1966, NHC: 00 Files, 1966, Box 23, 5710.
62. Thomas D. Davies, memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, January 27, 1966, NHC: 00 Files, 1966, Box 32, 11000/1.
63. Paul H. Nitze, memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, February 4, 1966, NHC: 00 Files, 1966, Box 32, 11000/1.
64. Catherine Lutz suggested this might be called “casino militarism” (email to author August 2006). Investment banking and of course hedge funds—not so far removed from the world of the casino—also make good analogies.
65. Nitze memorandum for the Secretary of Defense.
66. Ibid.
67. John T. McNaughton, memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, February 19, 1966, NHC: 00 Files, 1966, Box 32, 11000/1.
68. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 20.
69. The previous year McNamara had denied an initial Air Force request for funding. See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:94–96.
70. Lyndon B. Johnson, Recording of Telephone Conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara, July 29, 1966, 10:51 AM, LBJ: Citation #10446, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings.
71. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 20.
72. Agreements governing every detail of an overseas military facility, from their use in times of war to peacetime criminal prosecution of soldiers, were standard practice for overseas bases and the specialty of the Kitchen’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the State Department.
73. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Secretary of State, November 16, 1966, NARA: RG 59/250/7/11/7, Central Foreign Policy Files 1964–1966, Political and Defense, Box 1695, Def UK-US.
74. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “Availability of Certain Indian Ocean Islands for Defense Purposes,” exchange of notes, December 30, 1966, 1–2.
75. T. J. Brack, letter to Mr. Barratt and Mr. Unwin, April 20, 1971, PRO. Emphasis in original.
76. “British Indian Ocean Territory,” memorandum, December 14, 1966, PRO, 2. Emphasis in original.
77. Chalfont, letter to David K. E. Bruce, December 30, 1966, NARA: RG 59/150/64–65, Subject-Numeric Files 1964–1966, Box 1552.
1. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest; Monthly Review, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire.”
2. A comparative study of maritime empires notes, “navies, like their governments, regard any political upheaval as dangerous to imperial stability. Rebels cannot be tolerated if order (or ‘peace’) is to prevail.” Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing, 1983), 7.
3. Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 52, 54, 58, 60.
4. Ryan, “Diego Garcia,” 133.
5. UKTB 4-132.
6. Secretary of State for the Colonies, telegram to Commissioner, British Indian Ocean Territory, February 25, 1966, UKTB.
7. Brooke-Turner, “British Indian Ocean Territory.”
8. Ibid.
9. Queen v. Secretary of State ex parte Bancoult 2006: para. 27, emphasis in original.
10. Ibid., para. 27.
11. Anthony Aust, “Immigration Legislation for BIOT,” memorandum, 16 January 1970.
12. The British Government also acquired the islands of Desroches from Paul Moulinie (the primary owner in Chagos), and Farquhar from another private owner (Aldabra was already Crown territory belonging to the Queen).
13. Some may have been prevented from returning prior to this date.
14. The contract also established the number of workers allowed on the islands, working hours, and wages.
15. See also Mauritius Ministry of Social Security, letter, July 19, 1968, PRO: FCO 31/13. This history of the expulsion process builds on Vine et al., Dérasiné, and is drawn from several sources. Many published accounts of the expulsion exist: see, e.g., Ottaway, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base”; Winchester, The Sun Never Sets; Madeley, “Diego Garcia.” Most provide a broad overview of the expulsion. To document the expulsion accurately and verifiably and with more detail than previous histories, this history draws almost exclusively on primary sources: interviews and conversations with Chagossians and others in Mauritius and the Seychelles who witnessed events; court documents; and contemporaneous British Government documents describing many of the events of the expulsion as they occurred. Although I have relied on Chagossians’ eyewitness accounts, I have tried to verify their accounts with published sources as cited.
16. UKTB 5-578. In January 1969, a joint State Department–Defense Department message indicated the U.S. Government’s displeasure with a new request by the BIOT administrator to rehire fifty “Chagos-born laborers” in Mauritius for work on Diego Garcia. See William P. Rogers, telegram to the U.S. Embassy London, January 31, 1969, NARA: RG 59/150/64–65, Subject-Numeric Files 1967–1969, Box 1551, 4.
17. A. Wooler, letter to Eric G. Norris, August 22, 1968, attachment to Eric G. Norris, note to Mr. Counsell, September 9, 1968, PRO: FCO 31/134.
18. John Todd, “Tour Report—Chagos May 1967,” report, May 1967, British Indian Ocean Territory, PRO. 5.
19. John Todd, “Chagos,” report, British Indian Ocean Territory, September 1968, PRO, 4.
20. Todd, “Tour Report—Chagos May 1967,” 3; Todd, “Chagos.”
21. The school later seems to have briefly reopened before closing permanently.
22. Todd, “Tour Report—Chagos May 1967,” 3; Todd, “Notes on the Islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory,” 33; “Notes on a Visit to Chagos by the Administrator, British Indian Ocean Territory,” 3; “Notes on a Visit, July 17th to August 2nd,” 1970, PRO, 2.
23. Draft contract between the Crown and Moulinie and Company (Seychelles) Limited, 1968, PRO: WO 32/21295.
24. See, e.g., Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 4.
25. K. R. Whitnall, letter to Mr. Matthews, Miss Emery, May 7, 1969, UKTB: 6-755.
26. David Greenaway and Nishal Gooroochurn, “Structural Adjustment and Economic Growth in Mauritius,” in Rajen Dabee and David Greenaway, eds., The Mauritian Economy: A Reader (Houndsmill, UK: Palgrav, 2001), 67; Ramesh Durbarry, “The Export Processing Zone,” in Dabee and Greenaway, The Mauritian Economy, 109.
27. Wooler, letter to Norris, August 22, 1968.
28. E.H.M. Counsell, “Defence Facilities in the Indian Ocean; Diego Garcia,” letter to Mr. Le Tocq, 1969, PRO: FCO 31/401.
29. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:103–5.
30. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 254–55.
31. Ibid., 257.
32. Cohn, “‘Clean Bombs’ and Clean Language”; also Gusterson, Nuclear Rites.
33. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:108.
34. James W. O’Grady, memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, September 19, 1967, NHC: 00 Files, 1967, Box 74, 11000/2.
35. F. Pearce, “An Island of No Importance,” New Scientist, February 7, 2004, 48.
36. Ibid. Stoddart has long been troubled by his role in saving Aldabra and inadvertently helping to clear the way for the Diego Garcia removals. Since the 1970s, he has expended large amounts of his time and money collecting documents about the creation of the base and the expulsion, provided assistance to the Chagossians’ struggle to return, and written detailed letters to politicians in the United States and United Kingdom advocating on their behalf. See also Charles Douglas-Home, “Scientists Fight Defence Plans for Island of Aldabra,” Times (London), August 16, 1967.
1. Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 138.
2. Ibid., 140, 139.
3. Ibid., 141; Bob Thompson, “Arsenal of Words,” Washington Post, 29 October 2007, C2.
4. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:92–93, 109–17; Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 30.
5. FRUS, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:109–12; James W. O’Grady, memorandum to Op-002, May 2, 1968, NHC: 00 Files, 1967, Box 74, 11000/3.
6. O’Grady, memorandum to Op-002, 3.
7. Alain Enthoven, memorandum for Secretary of Defense, May 10, 1968, NHC: 00 Files, 1967, Box 74, 11000/3.
8. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, 21:113–14.
9. Earl C. Ravenal, “American Strategy in the Indian Ocean: The Proposed Base on Diego Garcia,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 93rd Congress, March 14, 1974.
10. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 35–36.
11. U.S. Department of State, “Senior Interdepartmental Group, Chairman’s Summary,” December 24, 1968, NARA: CIA records, 7.
12. Ravenal, “American Strategy in the Indian Ocean.”
13. Dean Rusk, telegram to U.S. Embassy London, August 7, 1968, NARA: RG 59/150/64–65, Subject-Numeric Files 1967–1969, Box 1552.
14. Ibid. At times the U.S. Government has argued that it did not know there was an indigenous population in Chagos and that it thought the population was composed of transient workers. This argument is difficult to believe. Any cursory inspection of writings on Chagos (most importantly Scott, Limuria; Blood, “The Peaks of Lemuria”) would have revealed the existence of generations of Chagossians living on the islands. Even without reading a word, it is hard to imagine that the Navy’s first reconnaissance inspection of Diego Garcia in 1957 would have overlooked hundreds of families (unusual in the case of migrant workers) and a fully functioning society complete with nineteenth-century cemeteries and churches and people tracing their ancestry back as many as five generations in Chagos. The British were clearly well aware of the indigenous population, as their extensive discussions on the subject in memos and letters throughout the 1960s reveal. A secret 1969 letter from the U.S. Embassy in London to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Department confirms U.S. knowledge of “Chagos-born laborers” (Gerald G. Oplinger, letter to Richard A. Sykes, February 3, 1969, PRO).
15. U.S. Embassy London, telegram to Secretary of State, August 9, 1968, NARA: RG 59/150/64–65, Subject-Numeric Files 1967–1969, Box 1551, 1.
16. R. S. Leddick, memorandum for the Record, November 11, 1969, NHC: 00 Files, 1969, Box 98, 11000.
17. R. S. Leddick, memorandum for the Record, December 3, 1969, NHC: 00 Files, 1969, Box 98, 11000; Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 37.
18. Tazewell Shepard, memorandum for Harry D. Train, January 26, 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 111, 11000.
19. Robert A. Frosch, memorandum for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, February 27, 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 111, 11000; John H. Chafee, memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, January 31, 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 111, 11000.
20. Throughout the development of Diego Garcia and BIOT, U.S. and U.K. government officials sought at least in public to describe the military activities there not as a “base” but as a “station,” a “facility,” or a “post.” They usually linked these terms with adjectives like “austere,” “limited,” or “modest.” From early in the development of Diego Garcia, however, the Navy and later the Department of Defense and the Air Force had large visions for the island: first, for naval communications in the Indian Ocean (including the coordination of nuclear submarines newly deployed there to strike the Soviet Union and China); second, as a large harbor for Navy warships and submarines, with enough room to protect an aircraft carrier task force; and third, as an airfield intended first for Navy reconnaissance planes and later for nuclear-bomb-ready B-52 bombers and almost every other plane in the Air Force arsenal (see Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 8–14; U.K. Colonial Office; J. H. Gibbon et al., “Brief on UK/US London Discussions on United States Defence Interests in the Indian Ocean,” memorandum, March 6, 1964, PRO: CAB 21/5418, 81174, 1–2). Faced with the potential for growing opposition, U.S. and U.K. officials insistently avoided describing plans for Diego Garcia as a “base.” With the British soon committing to withdraw its troops east of the Suez Canal by 1971, the U.K. Government did not want to be involved in any development perceived to be a new base. See Mewes, 1. U.S. officials faced opposition to their expansion into the Indian Ocean in Congress, from nations around the Indian Ocean like India, and even within the Pentagon. This opposition was especially intense in reaction to the escalating war in Vietnam; as in southeast Asia, this would also be a move into a region almost entirely without a prior U.S. presence.
21. See attachment, Op-605E4, “Proposed Naval Communications Facility on Diego Garcia,” briefing sheet, [January] 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 111, 11000.
22. Walter H. Annenberg, telegram to the Secretary of State, July 12, 1970, library of David Stoddart (see also NARA: RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files, 1970–1973 1970); Greene, telegram to the Secretary of State, December 16, 1970, library of David Stoddart (see also NARA: RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files, 1970–1973).
23. F. J. Blouin, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 28, 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 115, 11000.
24. William P. Rogers, telegram to the U.S. Embassy London, June 19, 1970, library of David Stoddart (see also NARA: RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files, 1970–1973).
25. Ibid.
26. Walter H. Small, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 11, 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 115, 11000.
27. William P. Rogers, telegram to the U.S. Embassy London, June 19, 1970, library of David Stoddart (see also NARA: RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files, 1970–1973).
28. Greene, telegram to the Secretary of State, December 16, 1970, library of David Stoddart (see also NARA: RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files, 1970–1973).
29. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 46.
30. William P. Rogers, telegram to the U.S. Embassy London, December 14, 1970, NARA: RG 59/150/67/1/5, Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973, Box 1744.
31. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., On Watch: A Memoir (New York: Quadrangle, 1976), 17–19. Matching his own elite background, Zumwalt married Mouza Coutelais-du-Roche, a woman of French and Russian parentage, whom he met at the end of World War II among the White Russian community-in-exile in Harbin, Manchuria.
32. Ibid., 203–4.
33. Ibid., 27–29.
34. Ibid., 34.
35. Ibid., 28.
36. U.S. Naval Institute, “Reminiscences by Staff Officers of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., U.S. Navy, vol. I,” Annapolis, MD, U.S. Naval Institute, 1989, 311–12.
37. Ibid., 313.
38. J. H. Dick, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 18, 1970, NHC: 00 Files, 1970, Box 115, 11000.
39. I. Watt, letter to Mr. D.A. Scott, Sir L. Monson, and Mr. Kerby, January 26, 1971, PRO: T317/162, 1–2.
40. Blouin, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 28, 1970.
41. Attachment to Walter H. Small, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, January 11, 1971, NHC: 00 Files, 1971, Box 172, 11000. See also Walter H. Small, memorandum for the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, January 28, 1971, NHC: 00 Files, 1971, Box 172, 11000.
42. Small, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, January 11, 1971, 1.
43. Attachment to Small, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, January 11, 1971.
44. John Todd, letter to Allan F. Knight, February 17, 1971, PRO: T317/1625.
45. According to Madeley, “One Ilois woman, Marie Louina, died on Diego when she learned she would have to leave her homeland.” Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 5. I have been unable to confirm this account.
46. See also Sunday Times, “The Islanders that Britain Sold,” September 21, 1975, 10.
47. Marcel Moulinie, statement of Marcel Moulinie, application for judicial review, Queen v. The Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, ex parte Bancoult, 1999.
48. Small, memorandum for the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, January 28, 1971, 1.
49. U.S. Department of State, telegram to U.S. Embassy Port Louis, U.S. Embassy London, February 4, 1971, library of David Stoddart. See also NARA: RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973.
50. Bruce Greatbatch, FCO Telno BIOT 52, telegram to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, August 26, 1971, PRO.
51. Attachment to E. L. Cochrane, Jr., memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans and Policy), March 24, 1971, NHC: 00 Files, 1971, Box 174, 11000, 2.
52. Ibid., 1.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid. The Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans and Policy explained to Zumwalt that Diego’s inhabitants were a mix of Ilois, Mauritians, and Seychellois. He also explained the Navy’s position on employing any locals: “The decision not to hire local labor, even for domestic work, was made on the basis that no local economy dependent on the facility should be created. To do so would make it more difficult to remove the workers when the facility becomes operational. If a native community of bars, laundries, etc. grew and then was required to be disbanded, the resultant publicity could become damaging. Another important factor is that presentations to Congress have stressed that there will be no indigenous population and no native labor utilized in the construction.” Zumwalt scrawled the following in response: “Better than I had hoped.” See Blouin, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 28, 1970.
1. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 47.
2. Ibid., 47–49.
3. See also Marimootoo, “Diego Files,” 46, 48.
4. Ottaway, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base.”
5. D. D. Newsom, letter to James K. Bishop, Jr., February 1, 1972, NARA: RG 59/150/67/1/5, Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973, Box 1715, 1.
6. Bruce Greatbatch, FCO Telno BIOT 52, telegram to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, August 26, 1971, PRO.
7. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 61.
8. See also Marcel Moulinie, “Statement of Marcel Moulinie,” application for judicial review, Queen v. The Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, ex parte Bancoult [1999], para. 14; Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 26–27, 35.
9. Moulinie, “Statement,” para. 14. See also Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 4–5.
10. Some of the voyages to the Seychelles took as many as six days. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 28.
11. Moulinie “Statement,” para. 16.
12. Greatbatch, FCO Telno BIOT 52, August 26, 1971; Dale, telegram to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Telno personal 176, September 23, 1971, PRO.
13. William D. Brewer, memorandum to Department of State, December 20, 1971, NARA: RG 59/150/67/27/6, Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973, Box 3010, 4.
14. Ibid., 1, 4.
15. Ibid., 1, 3.
16. Ibid., 5, 1.
17. William D. Brewer, letter to Herman J. Cohen, January 5, 1972, NARA: RG 59/150/67/1/5, Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973, Box 1715, 2, 5. Although Brewer’s State Department superiors knew the Air Force undersecretary was being “intemperate and at times illogical,” they chose not to challenge him (and the Air Force) on an issue they considered minor and which they perceived might harm other departmental priorities. See Herman J. Cohen, letter to David D. Newsom, January 20, 1972, NARA: Subject-Numeric 1970–1973, 59/150/67/1/5.
18. Brewer, letter to Cohen, January 5, 1972.
19. Ibid., 1.
20. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 121–22. The possibility that others might have challenged the expulsion becomes more improbable when one considers that to challenge any policy of the U.S. Government is not simply to challenge one’s immediate superior or an office within the Government, but to challenge one’s entire department, the department’s secretary, and to a significant extent the U.S. Government as a whole. This lesson is communicated explicitly in most telegrams, which, in the case of the State Department, for example, deliver most orders and instructions not in the name of a State Department superior but in the name of the “Department of State,” under the signature of the Secretary of State. This contributed to the feeling among many officials that they were carrying out the policy dictates of the U.S. Government writ large, matters about which they generally believed they had no input.
21. Charles Lemert, Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 119.
22. U.S. Department of State, telegram to U.S. Embassy London, February 5, 1972, NARA: RG 59/150/67/27/6, Subject Numeric Files 1970–1973, Box 3010.
23. Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, “Pentagon Papers (2): The Human Reality of Realpolitik,” Foreign Policy 4 (1971): 159. See Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Perennial, 2002), 365.
24. PRO: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Overseas Development Administration, London, 1972; Henry Precht, airgram to Department of State, May 2, 1972, NARA: RG 59/150/67/1/5, Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973, Box 1715, 2.
25. John Todd, letter to Allan F. Knight, June 17, 1972, PRO.
26. UKTB: M. T. Mein, 2002, para. 14.
27. C. A. Seller, Letter to Morris, June 20, 1967, PRO: T317/1347.
28. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 49, 58.
29. Ibid., 62.
30. C. S. Minter, Jr., memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations, July 20, 1972, NHC: 00 Files, 1972, Box 161, 11000.
31. Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 64–71.
32. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 12
33. See Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 309.
34. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 41.
35. Ibid., 42.
36. Ibid., 42–45.
37. Ibid., 79.
38. Ibid., 66.
1. Anahita World Class Sanctuary Mauritius, “Paradise Found,” available from http://www.anahitamauritius.com/anahita_location.php?langue=uk.
2. Susan Hack, “Butlers, Beaches, and Bubble Baths,” Condé Nast Traveler, August 2004, 93. Elsewhere Hack unconsciously captures some of the colonialist tinge of the tourist industry when she remarks, “Encountering a butler in the flesh, I savor the strange power of making demands on a man who lives to obey my orders.”
3. Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 5.
4. Sunday Times (London), “The Islanders that Britain Sold,” September 21, 1975, 10.
5. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 114–21. The persistence of poor housing standards left Chagossians vulnerable to new displacements and renewed homelessness, especially to the cyclones that periodically strike Mauritius with especially ferocious effects on the homes of poor families. A 1975 interview with a Chagossian from Diego Garcia describes the damage of the cyclone on a family of nine: “The five [chickens] that were left and the coop were lost in February in Cyclone Gervaise. She also lost during the cyclone her two coconut-straw mattresses that she brought from Diego. She tried to save them, but the wind became too strong and she and the children had to flee to a neighbor’s house. When she returned, the mattresses, and most of the iron sheets from the house, were gone. Now she has to gather grass for the children to sleep on.” Ibid., 111.
6. Richard M. Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith, Social Policies and Population Growth in Mauritius (London: Frank Cass, 1968).
7. V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon (New York: Vintage, 1984).
8. Titmuss and Abel-Smith, Social Policies and Population Growth, 7.
9. African Research Group, “BIOT: Health & Mortality in the Chagos Islands,” report, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, London, October 2000, 3, 5.
10. Comité Ilois Organisation Fraternelle, “Paper Prepared by the Comité Ilois Organisation Fraternelle,” Port Louis, Mauritius, n.d.: 2–5.
11. Ibid., 3–5.
12. Ibid., 2–3.
13. I. Walker, Zaffer Pe Sanze, 14.
14. Martin Walker, “Price on Islanders’ Birthright,” Manchester Guardian, November 4, 1975.
15. Comité Ilois Organisation Fraternelle, “Paper Prepared by the Comité Ilois,” 2.
16. See, e.g., Sydney Selvon, A Comprehensive History of Mauritius (Mauritius: Mauritius Printing Specialists, 2001), 394.
17. A. Wooler, letter to Eric G. Norris, August 22, 1968, attachment to Eric G. Norris, letter to Mr. Counsell, September 9, 1968, PRO: FCO 31/134.
18. I. Watt, letter to D. A. Scott, L. Monson, and Mr. Kerby, January 26, 1971, PRO: T317/1625, 3.
19. Vine et al., Dérasiné, 114.
20. Ottaway, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base”; See H. Siophe in U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 112–21.
21. Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 5. These reports seem clearly to suggest increased mortality compared with life in Chagos. Yearly average death figures during the last years in Chagos for individuals born there are 0.75 per year in Diego Garcia, 4.75 in Peros Banhos, and 2.33 in Salomon. See “B.I.O.T. Death Peros-Banhos, Solomon Island, Diego-Garcia 1965–1971,” death records, SNA.
22. Comité Ilois Organisation Fraternelle, “Paper Prepared by the Comité Ilois,” 3.
23. Michael Cernea, “Anthropological and Sociological Research for Policy Development on Population Resettlement,” in Anthropological Approaches to Resettlement: Policy, Practice, and Theory, ed. Michael M. Cernea and Scott E. Guggenheim (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 12. Research in India, for example, has shown that the country’s “development” programs have displaced more than 20 million over four decades and that 75 percent have ended up worse off than before their displacement. Cernea writes, “Their livelihoods have not been restored; in fact, the vast majority . . . have become impoverished.”
24. Titmuss and Abel-Smith, Social Policies and Population Growth.
25. See, e.g., Durbarry; “The Export Processing Zone”; Bowman, Mauritius; Kevin Ramkalaon, “Post-Independence Mauritius: An Economic Vision,” in Colouring the Rainbow: Mauritian Society in the Making, ed. Marina Carter (Port Louis, Mauritius: Centre for Research on Indian Ocean Societies, 1998), 27–32; Berhanu Woldekidan, “Export-led Growth in Mauritius,” Indian Ocean Policy Papers 3, Australia, National Center for Development Studies, 1994.
26. Pacific & Indian Ocean Department, “BIOT Working Papers: Paper No. 5—Evacuation and Resettlement of Inhabitants of Chagos Archipelago,” 1969, PRO, paras. 6, 8.
27. See, e.g., Marion Benedict and Burton Benedict, Men, Women and Money in Seychelles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982); Raphael Kaplinsky, “Prospering at the Periphery: A Special Case—The Seychelles,” in African Islands and Enclaves, ed. Robin Cohen (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), 195–215; Ronny Gabbay and Robin Ghosh, “Tourism in Seychelles,” in Tourism and Economic Development: Case Studies from the Indian Ocean Region, ed. R. N. Ghosh, M. A. B. Siddique, and R. Gabbay (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 104–27.
28. Benedict and Benedict, Men, Women and Money in Seychelles, 161.
29. Marcus Franda, The Seychelles: Unquiet Islands (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 16, 81, 84–85.
30. M. Walker, “Price on Islanders’ Birthright.”
31. Ranjit Nayak, “Risks Associated with Landlessness: An Exploration toward Socially Friendly Displacement and Resettlement,” in Michael Cernea and Christopher McDowell, Risks and Reconstruction: Experiences of Resettlers and Refugees (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000), 103.
32. Jean-Claude Lau Thi Keng, “Intégration/Exclusion,” in Etude pluridisciplinaire sur l’exclusion à Maurice, ed. Issa Asgarally (Réduit, Mauritius: Présidence de la République, 1997), 17–48.
33. Roland Lamusse, “Macroeconomic Policy and Performance,” in Dabee and Greenaway, The Mauritian Economy, 41.
34. Rosabelle Boswell, “Views on Creole Culture, Economy and Survival,” Revi Kiltir Kreol 1 (2002): 15–26.
35. Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 27.
36. Herve Sylva, “Report on the Survey on the Conditions of Living of the Ilois Community Displaced from the Chagos Archipelago,” report, Mauritius, April 22, 1981, 2–3, 11–13.
37. Prostitution appears as an ongoing employment opportunity of last resort for Chagossians with few other opportunities. Botte’s 1980 study of islander women found at least 23 engaged in prostitution (in Chagos, by contrast, “prostitution as a trade did not exist”). Although few were eager to discuss this subject, my research in Mauritius suggested that prostitution remains a source of employment for some. See Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 41–42. On prostitution and other illegal activities, see also Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 6; Sylva, “Report on the Survey on the Conditions of Living,”; Comité Ilois Organisation Fraternelle, “Paper Prepared by the Comité Ilois.”
38. Chagos Refugees Group, Port Louis, Mauritius; N. C. Aizenman, “New High in U.S. Prison Numbers,” Washington Post, February 29, 2008. Based on CRG registration statistics, there were around 4,000 Chagossians age 12 and older in 2001; thus the 38 adults incarcerated easily represented more than 1 in 100 adults.”
39. Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 30–31.
40. Ibid., 30–31; I. Walker, Zaffer Pe Sanze, 17.
41. Boswell, “Views on Creole Culture,” 19–21.
42. See, e.g., Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 47. See also Boswell, “Views on Creole Culture,” for more on this phenomenon among the poor of Mauritius generally, and Elizabeth Colson, The Social Consequences of Resettlement: The Impact of the Kariba Resettlement upon the Gwembe Tonga (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), on the phenomenon among involuntary displacees as a group.
43. Michael Cernea, “Risks, Safeguards, and Reconstruction: A Model for Population Displacement and Resettlement,” in Cernea and McDowell, Risks and Reconstruction, 26–27.
1. This accounts for some of the inspiration behind the adoption of the term Chagossian.
2. I. Walker, Zaffer Pe Sanze, 24.
3. Nearly two-thirds (65.5 percent) of the first generation and almost half of second-generation respondents (44.7 percent) said they had been a victim of verbal abuse. See Vine et al., Dérasiné, 125.
4. Ottaway, “Islanders Were Evicted for U.S. Base.”
5. In my 2002–3 survey, half of those surveyed from the generation born in Chagos and one-third of the second generation reported suffering job or other discrimination as a Chagossian. See Vine et al., Dérasiné, 125; see also, Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 38–39; I. Walker, Zaffer Pe Sanze, 21–22; Tania Dræbel, “Evaluation des besoins sociaux de la communauté déplacée de l’Archipel de Chagos, volet un: santé et education,” report, Le Ministère de la Sécurité Sociale et de la Solidarité Nationale, Mauritius, December 1997, 36.
6. Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 39, 25; see also I. Walker, Zaffer Pe Sanze, 16.
7. For an interesting comparison in another island nation with strikingly similar historical and demographic conditions, see Viranjini Munasinghe’s description of the emergence of stereotypical, racialized discourses about peoples of African and Indian descent in Trinidad and Tobago. Viranjini Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
8. Franda, The Seychelles.
9. Issa Asgarally, ed., Étude pluridisciplinaire sur l’exclusion à Maurice (Réduit, Mauritius: Présidence de la République, 1997).
10. Thomas Hyland Eriksen, “Creole Culture and Social Change,” Journal of Mauritian Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 59.
11. Similarly in the Seychelles, most Chagossians are recognized as belonging to a stigmatized darker-complexioned minority.
12. Differences between peoples of Indian, African, and European descent are generally perceived locally in terms of race, as being fixed in biology; to avoid reifying race as a legitimate, scientifically accurate concept based in biological reality, it is useful to introduce the language of ethnicity.
13. Larry W. Bowman and Jeffery A. Lefebvre, “The Indian Ocean and Strategic Perspectives,” in The Indian Ocean: Perspectives on a Strategic Arena, ed. William L. Dowdy and Russell B. Trood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), n. 28; Pranay B. Gupte, “Dispossessed in Mauritius Are Inflamed,” New York Times, December 14, 1982, A5; 60 Minutes, “Diego Garcia,” CBS Television, prod. Andrew Tkach, June 15, 2003. At least one grandchild of someone born in Chagos has worked on the base in the laundry and in other jobs. His obtaining a job seems to support the claim that Chagossians have been disqualified from employment on the basis of their place of birth or their parents’ place of birth.
14. Utterances in italics like this one are quotations where I was not absolutely certain to have recorded every word spoken. These quotations are not reconstructions or paraphrases but instead indicate instances where I could not ensure that I had recorded a direct quotation word for word (although at their least accurate they are missing only few words). All other quoted utterances are direct word-for-word quotations recorded either electronically or by hand during research.
15. Durbarry, “The Export Processing Zone,” emphasis added.
16. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 115–16.
17. Ibid., 118–19.
18. Dræbel, “Evaluation des besoins sociaux”; Sheila Bunwaree, “Education in Mauritius since Independence: More Accessible But Still Inequitable,” in Consolidating the Rainbow: Independent Mauritius, 1968–1998, ed. Marina Carter (Port Louis, Mauritius: Centre for Research on Indian Ocean Societies, 1998).
19. Text translated from French by the author.
20. Interview with Seychelles government official, September 28, 2004.
21. Elizabeth Colson, “Overview,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 1–16.
22. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
23. She is not far off in her estimate: The base area of Diego Garcia resembles, if not the Seychelles, a small town in the United States.
24. Thayer Scudder, “The Human Ecology of Big Projects: River Basin Development and Resettlement,” Annual Review of Anthropology 12 (1973): 51.
25. Colson, The Social Consequences of Resettlement.
26. Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 38.
27. Mauritius Legislative Assembly, “Report of the Select Committee on the Excision of the Chagos Archipelago,” Port Louis, Mauritius, June 1983, 3–5.
28. Botte, “The ‘Ilois’ Community,” 29, 30; Sylva, “Report on the Survey on the Conditions of Living,” 3.
1. Dræbel, “Evaluation des besoins sociaux”; see also Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 10–11.
2. Vine et al., Dérasiné, 174–87.
3. Ibid., 116–19.
4. Dræbel, “Evaluation des besoins sociaux,” 15–16.
5. This figure is a revision of an earlier finding after final data cleaning and analysis. See Vine et al., Dérasiné, 116–19.
6. Dræbel, “Evaluation des besoins sociaux.”
7. Ibid., 18–25, 34.
8. Ibid., 26–35.
9. Vine et al., Dérasiné, 213.
10. Ibid., 229.
11. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do about It (New York: One World, 2004), 224.
12. Chagos Refugees Group statistics.
13. Dræbel, “Evaluation des besoins sociaux,” 25.
14. Fullilove, Root Shock, 11.
15. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 173–87. The analysis in this chapter was unconsciously influenced by Scheper-Hughes; only after returning to reread Death without Weeping did I recognize how her remarkable work shaped my own.
16. Thayer Scudder and Elizabeth Colson, “From Welfare to Development: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Dislocated People,” in Involuntary Migration and Resettlement: The Problems and Responses of Dislocated Peoples, ed. A. Hansen and A. Oliver-Smith (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 269.
17. Ilan S. Wittstein et al., “Neurohumoral Features of Myocardial Stunning Due to Sudden Emotional Stress,” New England Journal of Medicine 352, no. 6: 539–48; Scott W. Sharsky et al., “Acute and Reversible Cardiomyopathy Provoked by Stress in Women from the United States,” Circulation 111: 472–79.
18. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: The Noonday Press, 1997), 188.
19. Nayak, “Risks Associated with Landlessness,” 95–96.
20. Scudder, The Human Ecology of Big Projects.
21. Saminaden et al., Petition to British Government.
22. Nayak, “Risks Associated with Landlessness,” 96.
23. Translation by author.
24. Nayak, “Risks Associated with Landlessness,” 96.
25. Mimose Bancoult Furcy, Grup Tambour Chagos, Grup Tambour Chagos, Island Music Productions, 2004. Translation by author.
26. Fullilove, Root Shock, 12.
27. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
28. Ibid., xxi–xxiv.
29. See Laura Jeffery, “The Politics of Victimhood among Displaced Chagossians in Mauritius” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2006).
30. The words point to a common narrative of the expulsion and to the injuries experienced in exile. Among other purposes that the shorthand serves is to allow people to allude to the expulsion and other painful experiences of suffering without having to recite the entirety of the narrative or the specifics of their own painful injuries (including rape, hunger, and crime). See Jeffery, “The Politics of Victimhood.”
31. Charles Taylor, “A Different Kind of Courage,” review of Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, New York Review of Books 54, no. 7 (April 26, 2007).
1. Le Mauricien, “150 ‘Ilois’ expulsés refusent de débarquer à P-L,” May 4, 1973, 4.
2. L’Express, “L’accueil aux îlois: le PM donne des précisions,” May 10, 1973, 1. Parts of this chapter draw on David Vine, “Challenging Empires: The Struggle of the People of Diego Garcia,” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics, and Society (forthcoming, 2008), and David Vine and Laura Jeffery, “Give Us Back Diego Garcia: Unity and Division among Activists in the Indian Ocean,” in Undermining the Bases of Empire: Social Movements against U.S. Overseas Military Installations, ed. Catherine Lutz (Ithaca, NY: Pluto Press, 2008).
3. Saminaden et al., Petition to British Government.
4. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975.”
5. A.R.G. Prosser, “Visit to Mauritius, From 24 January to 2 February: Mauritius-Resettlement of Persons Transferred from Chagos Archipelago,” report, Port Louis, Mauritius, September 1976, p. 6.
6. Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 7.
7. Le Mauricien, “Trois des sept grévistes de la faim admiser à l’hôpital Civil,” September 21, 1978, 4.
8. Madeley, “Diego Garcia,” 7.
9. Ibid., 6, 8, 15.
10. They also asked for recognition as refugees, a demand which was immediately rejected by the Mauritian Government, which considered Chagossians to be Mauritians who could not be refugees on Mauritian soil.
11. Le Mauricien, “Nouvelle manifestation des ilois, hier: épreuve de force avec la police,” March 17, 1981, 1, 4; Lalit, Diego Garcia in Times of Globalisation (Port Louis, Mauritius: Ledikasyon pu Travayer, 2002), 113–17.
12. This section draws on Jeffery, “The Politics of Victimhood,” 93–97.
13. Lassemillante and the CSC argue that the expulsion and continued exile of the Chagossians is contrary to UN declarations on human and indigenous rights.
14. At the time Gifford worked for the London law firm of Bernard Sheridan, the attorney who represented the islanders’ aborted efforts to gain compensation in 1979. Gifford says that part of his inspiration to take up the case was his interest in his firm’s role in the Chagossians’ saga.
15. Several Mauritian governments have likewise rejected recognition of the Chagossians as an indigenous people or as refugees, concerned about undermining the sovereignty claim.
16. Regina (on the application of Bancoult) v. Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2006] EWHC 1038 Admin. 4093, para. 27.
17. CRG was joined by islanders in the Seychelles eventually known as the Chagossians Committee Seychelles.
18. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 54.
19. Bancoult et al. v. McNamara et al., 360 F.Supp. 2d (D.D.C. 2004).
20. This analysis draws substantially on Jeffery, “The Politics of Victimhood,” 114–17.
21. Laura Jeffery, “‘Our Right Is Our Land’: The Chagos Archipelago and Discourses on Rights to Land in the Indian Ocean,” in Rights and Development in Mauritius—A Reader, ed. S. Bunwaree and R. Kasenally (Reduit: OSSREA Mauritius Chapter/University of Mauritius, 2007), 10.
22. Ibid., 11.
23. Lindsay Collen and Ragini Kitnasamy, “Diego Garcia Visit after Life-time Banishment Due to Bass,” press release, Lalit, Port Louis, Mauritius, March 25, 2006. Emphasis in original.
24. Walter H. Annenberg, telegram to the Secretary of State, June 10, 1969, NARA: RG 59/150/64–65, Subject-Numeric Files 1967–1969, Box 1552.
25. See Vine and Jeffery, “Give Us Back Diego Garcia.”
26. When Chagossians claimed citizenship, some Mauritians criticized the move as unpatriotic and a threat to the nation’s efforts to regain sovereignty over Chagos. Some were angered when CRG members publicly celebrated their new citizenship by waving the Union Jack and pictures of the Queen.
27. In the years following the expulsion, a handful of women had followed Mauritian or Seychellois husbands to Europe or Australia in search of work.
28. Chagos Islanders v. The Attorney General, Her Majesty’s British Indian Ocean Territory Commissioner, [2003] EWHC 2222. For a discussion of all the major suits, see Christian Nauvel, “A Return from Exile in Sight? The Chagossians and Their Struggle,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 5, no. 1 (2006):111; Chagos Islanders v. The Attorney General, her Majesty’s British Indian Ocean Territory Commissioner, [2003] EWHC 222.
29. Bancoult et al. v. McNamara et al.
30. Ibid., 117 n.156.
31. Ibid., 120.
32. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 55.
33. Neil Tweedle, “Britain Shamed as Exiles of the Chagos Islands Win the Right to Go Home,” Daily Telegraph, May 11, 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1552445/Chagos-Island-exiles-win-right-to-return-home.html.
34. In 2000, the British Government allowed Olivier Bancoult and two other Chagossian leaders to briefly visit the islands.
35. Regina (on the application of Bancoult) v. Secretary of State [2006], para. 142.
36. Paul Majendie, “Chagos Islanders Win Right to Go Home,” Reuters, May 11, 2006.
37. Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office v. The Queen (Bancoult) [2007].
38. Richard Gifford, press statement, May 23, 2007.
39. Bill Rammell, Parliamentary Answer, July 12, 2004, http://domain1164221.sites.fasthosts.com/parliamentary%20questions.htm#12jul04.
40. Sean Carey, “Don’t Mention the Chagossians,” New Statesman, November 20, 2007.
41. Regina [2006], para. 96.
42. The CRG also argues that Chagossians are a peaceful people wishing no harm to the United States; that Peros Banhos and Salomon are over 150 miles from Diego Garcia, raising serious questions about the “security” argument; and that civilians live next to U.S. bases around the world (even “the enemy” in Cuba).
43. The following paragraphs stem from Vine and Jeffery, “Give Us Back Diego Garcia.”
44. Louis Olivier Bancoult, Chagos Refugees Group, speech, Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, July 20, 2004.
1. CIA Board of National Estimates, “Strategic and Political Interests in the Western Indian Ocean,” special memorandum, April 11, 1967, LBJ: NSF, Country File, India, Box 133, India, Indian Ocean Task Force, vol. II. The land area of the BIOT was described as “N/A” for not applicable. A document most like written by Stuart Barber described the population in Peros Banhos and Salomon as “minor” (see Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure).
Race and racism defined two of the main criteria for the selection of Diego Garcia as a base site: First, under the Strategic Island Concept’s criteria, islands selected for base development were to have small non-European indigenous populations that, as Horacio Rivero knew well with the Bikinians, the government could easily remove. Second, the Strategic Island Concept held that islands selected for base development had to be controlled by the United States or by a Western ally, like the United Kingdom or Australia; they could not be controlled by a non-Western, non-white government.
It’s not unreasonable to think that the World War II island-hopping campaign in the Pacific influenced more than just officials’ ideas about the importance of island bases. The island hopping is likely also to have powerfully shaped ideas about race shared by Navy officials in particular. During the campaign, Navy and other forces had what for almost all of them were their first interactions with local tropical island populations. Given popular ideas at the time (for the most part held to this day), it would have been difficult for sailors and soldiers to think of these islanders as anything but the “primitive” natives they were portrayed as by anthropologists and journalists alike. The government’s widely publicized deportation of the Bikinians after the war and its paternalistic treatment of islanders elsewhere in the Pacific would have only reinforced these views.
2. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 21.
3. Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World (London: Vintage, 2003).
4. W.E.B. DuBois, The World and Africa, expanded ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1965[1946]); Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951).
5. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” 19.
6. Leith Mullings, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 684.
7. Gillem, American Town, 37.
8. Catherine Lutz, “A U.S. ‘Invasion’ of Korea,” Boston Globe, October 8, 2006; KCTP English News, “When You Grow Up, You Must Take the Village Back,” http://www.antigizi.or.kr/zboard/zboard.php?id=english_news&page=1&sn1=&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&
select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc&no=204.
9. Kiste, TheBikinians, 198.
10. Stuart B. Barber, letter to the editor of the Washington Post, unpublished, March 9, 1991.
11. A. M. Jackson, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 7, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1965, Box 26, 11000/1B, 3–4.
12. The U.S. Government did not, however, grant the islanders’ requests for U.S. citizenship, finding them to be Japanese nationals. In 1961, the U.S. Government paid the islanders of Japanese ancestry $6 million in compensation in the (ultimately failed) hope of stemming their repatriation claims. The U.S. Government maintained the policy of refusing repatriation to those of Japanese descent until 1968, when under continued pressure the islands were returned to Japanese sovereignty. See ibid.
At least one similar case exists, on Ascension Island, part of the British territory of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. There, about 1,000 islanders who are mostly of mixed ancestry, the descendants of English settlers and enslaved Africans, live and work next to a U.S. base in place since World War II. Together the Bonin-Volcanos and Ascension underline how the pattern of base displacement has been shaped to some extent by population size but as importantly by a closely intertwined nexus of one’s skin color, status in the colonial hierarchy, and relative wealth and power.
13. Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure”; see also Bezboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean, 58.
14. Richard Rhodes has made this argument. See Thompson, “Arsenal of Words,” C2.
15. This analysis builds on Cynthia Enloe’s critical insistence that scholars make the gender of foreign policy actors a visible part of foreign policy analysis. See, e.g., Enloe, “Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy.”
16. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 123.
17. Halberstam, TheBest and the Brightest, 746. A less aggressive solution to ensure long-term base occupancy would have been to adjust U.S. relations with nations hosting bases or the policies affecting such relationships. This was apparently never considered. Even if taking control of Diego Garcia had remained the policy, the expulsion was again the toughest of policy options in privileging the military’s interests over the Chagossians’ rights and any policy of coexistence (as was explored in the Bonin-Volcano islands and elsewhere).
18. See Bandjunis, Diego Garcia, 167–262.
19. C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 253.
20. Gillem, American Town, 263, 272, 17.
21. C. Johnson, Nemesis, 148–49, quoting Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.
22. Ibid., 147–49.
23. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the base served as a runway for surveillance planes.
24. Seeing the ways in which the United States enjoys a significant degree of de facto sovereignty over the world’s oceanic territory points to the further similarity (albeit a more hidden one) between the U.S. Empire and the European territorial empires of the past. This also points to how the ability of the U.S. Navy to provide unchallenged control of the Earth’s major bodies of water since World War II has been another underappreciated pillar of U.S. Empire. As Admiral Mahan pointed out, since the beginning of European expansion in the fifteenth century, with few exceptions, empires have been naval powers. Air forces are increasingly playing a parallel role, but navies have been a critical tool for empires to send troops to conquer foreign lands, to dominate the flow of trade, and to exert political and economic influence over other nations by threat or actual attack. While interest in Diego Garcia shifted from spices to oil, the base illustrates the continuing centrality of naval power to empire, linking the naval empires of France and Britain to the naval empire of the United States, which finally built the base its predecessors coveted. Similarly, Diego Garcia shows how the “geopolitical attractiveness” of island bases has resonated across the centuries. Island bases have been attractive as protected oases from which empires can use their navies to defend oceangoing commerce. As Stuart Barber realized, without large populations or hinterlands to govern, small islands generally have little vulnerability to attack, making them a cost-effective way to support a navy. See George H. Quester, ed., Sea Power in the 1970s, Conference on Problems of Naval Armaments, Ithaca, NY, 1972 (New York: Kennikat Press, 1975), 162.
25. Foster, “A Warning to Africa.”
26. VOAnews.com, “Sao Tome Sparks American Military Interest,” http://www.voanews.com, November 12, 2004, http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2004-11/2004-11-12-voa42.cfm?CFID=134408071&CFTOKEN=70993939.
27. BBC News, “US Naval Base to Protect Sao Tome Oil,” August 22, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2210571.stm.
28. IRIN, “Sao Tome and Principe: Attorney General Finds ‘Serious Flaws’ in the Award of Oil Exploration Contracts,” November 15, 2005, http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=57579.
29. Cooley, “Base Politics”; Foster, “A Warning to Africa.”
30. Scott, Limuria, 68.
31. The creation of a base as part of Britain’s last colony, the BIOT, itself created through the dismemberment of the colonies of Mauritius and the Seychelles, suggests ways in which the imperial past lives on in the overseas base network as part of the “imperial present.” See Gregory, The Colonial Present. (Thanks to Neil Smith for his suggestion of this phrase playing off Gregory’s title.) Many other important U.S. bases are located in colonies or what have recently been colonies, including the bases in Thule, Okinawa, and Britain’s Ascension island. Several key bases likewise exist in remaining U.S. colonial possessions, including those in Guam, Puerto Rico (until recently in Vieques), and prior to post–World War II statehood, Hawai‘i and Alaska.
Elsewhere in the Pacific after World War II, the United States won basing rights and other colonial rights when the UN granted it trusteeship over the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, previously “mandated” to Japan after World War I. In the Marshall Islands, the United States conducted its nuclear testing in the Bikinis and retained an important missile testing facility in the Kwajalein Atoll after the islands gained formal independence in 1986 but entered into a protectorate-like “compact of free association” with the United States. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons, 36.
Other overseas bases exist largely because of relationships between former European powers and their colonies. Bases acquired through lend-lease are a prime example, where the U.S. Government negotiated continued occupation deals after World War II with the help of the still-ruling British. The same is true for post-war French bases in Morocco. In Panama and the Philippines, the United States has benefited from its own neocolonial relationships to maintain important bases near the Panama Canal and in East Asia. The maintenance of U.S. bases in these nations often represents a continuation of colonial relationships in a different form. See Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons, 13.
32. Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes,” 232, 238–39. On the privatization of the military, see, e.g., Clifford Rosky, “Force, Inc.: The Privatization of Punishment, Policing, and Military Force in Liberal States,” Connecticut Law Review 36 (2004): 879–1032.
33. Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes,” 230.
34. C. Johnson, Nemesis, 171–207. Precedent for this kind of “extraterritoriality” goes back at least to the 1839–1842 Opium War in China. See Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes,” 232.
35. Ibid., 230.
36. My thanks to Hugh Gusterson and others for stressing this point.
37. U.S. Congress, House, “Diego Garcia, 1975,” 46.
38. The issue of who is a Chagossian should be left to those who self-identify as Chagossians. I would suggest, however, that many long-term Chagos residents who happened, for various reasons, not to have been born in Chagos, but who in some cases were the descendants of people born in Chagos, should be considered eligible for compensation of some kind.
39. Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr., letter to Robert N. Culshaw, April 29, 2004.
40. E.g., Gerson, “The Sun Never Sets”; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); “Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory, ed. Jean B. Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 189–206; The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Lutz, Homefront; Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons; Baker, American Soldiers Overseas; Gillem, American Town.
1. Barber, unpublished letter to the editor of the Washington Post, March 9, 1991.
2. Madeley, “Diego Garcia.”
3. Stuart B. Barber, letter to Aryeh Neier [executive director, Human Rights Watch], February 23, 1993.
4. Barber, letter to Senator Ted Stevens, October 3, 1975.
5. Richard Barber, email, February 24, 2008.