13

THE COLONIAL PRESENT

The expulsion of the Chagossians during the creation of the base on Diego Garcia is no aberration. Their experiences of displacement and exile are helpful in understanding the fate of at least seventeen other peoples displaced during the creation or expansion of U.S. bases abroad since World War II. Most of the displaced have been indigenous. In most cases the displaced have ended up, like the Chagossians, deeply impoverished.

There are more than superficial connections between these cases of “base displacement” and earlier examples of bases displacing and dispossessing people in Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, and Panama at the turn of the twentieth century and the Army-led displacement of Native American peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 “Following the examples of earlier empires, the United States has adroitly practiced displacement and demolition” of others’ land, writes former Air Force officer and bases scholar Mark Gillem. “Displacements and demolitions are the norm.”²

Marie Rita Bancoult was one of the displaced. Aunt Rita, as most called her before her death in 2016, was one of the first Chagossians exiled in a multistage expulsion process between 1967 and 1973. Beginning in late 1967, she and others who left Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands for regular vacations or medical care in Mauritius were barred from returning home and marooned in Mauritius.3 When I interviewed her in 2004, I asked Rita how she felt that day in 1968 when she heard she could not return to her homeland. She said she felt like she’d been sliced open and all the blood spilled from her body. She said that for an hour she couldn’t open her mouth to tell her family. Her heart was too “swollen” with emotion. Finally, Rita told her family what the man at the steamship company had said: “Your island has been sold. You will never go there again.”

Rita; her husband, Julien; and their five children found themselves exiled, separated from their home, their land, their animals, their possessions, their jobs, their community, and the graves of their ancestors. The Bancoults had been, as Chagossians say in their Bantu- and French-based Kreol language, derasine—deracinated, uprooted, torn from their natal lands. Upon hearing the news, Rita’s husband suffered a stroke and increasing paralysis. Within a year, Rita spent several weeks in a psychiatric hospital, where she told me she received “shocks”—electroshock therapy.

In January 1971, with the Bancoults and other Chagossians already in exile, the Navy began construction on Diego Garcia. The highest-ranking admiral in the U.S. Navy, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo Russell Zumwalt, issued the final expulsion order for the remaining Chagossians. The order came in a three-word inter-office note: “Absolutely must go.”⁴

Between 1971 and 1973 British agents forced the Chagossians on Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands to board overcrowded cargo ships. As Chagossians awaited their deportation, British agents and U.S. Navy personnel herded the Chagossians’ pet dogs into sealed sheds, gassed them with exhaust from U.S. Navy jeeps, and burned the dogs’ carcasses.⁵

The ships deposited the Chagossians 1,200 miles away, on the docks of the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. They were left homeless and jobless and without almost all of their possessions. Most Chagossians had little money. The people effectively received no resettlement assistance and quickly became impoverished. In 1975 the Washington Post found Chagossians in Mauritius living in “abject poverty.” The editorial page called their expulsion an “act of mass kidnapping.”⁶

In 1973, five years after suffering his stroke, Julien Bancoult died. Rita said the cause of death was sagren—profound sorrow. In their half century in exile, many Chagossians have reported deaths from sagren. Sagren is a form of dying from a broken heart, which is not just a metaphor but a syndrome supported by a growing body of medical evidence among forcibly displaced peoples and others experiencing acute incidents of trauma.7 After Julien’s death the Bancoults’ son Alex lost his job as a dockworker. He died at thirty-eight, addicted to drugs and alcohol. Their son Eddy died at thirty-six of a heroin overdose. Another son, Rénault, died suddenly at age ten, for reasons still mysterious to the family, after selling water and begging for money at a cemetery near their home.

“My life has been buried,” Rita told me before her death, sitting on a torn brown vinyl couch in her small sitting room in Mauritius. The only compensation Rita and some (but not all) Chagossians received came five and ten years after the last deportations. It totaled about $6,000 per recipient. Rita and some families received what were generally their first proper homes after more than a decade in exile: small concrete-block houses. “What do I think about it?” Rita said of her expulsion. “It’s as if I was pulled from my paradise to put me in hell.” The Chagossians number several thousand people today, including at least four generations born in exile, and most remain impoverished. Most remain marginalized outsiders in exile, still struggling to win proper compensation and the right of return. A sign at the base on Diego Garcia reads, “Welcome to the Footprint of Freedom.”

Similar histories have unfolded for those who suffered through other cases of base displacement. In Hawaiʻi during World War II, the Navy turned the entire island of Kahoʻolawe into a weapons-testing range and forced its inhabitants to leave.⁸ In colonial Alaska the military displaced Aleutian islanders from their homelands in 1942, fearing a Japanese attack on Alaska. The government forced the Aleuts to live in abandoned canneries and mines. They lived there for three years, even after Japan no longer posed a threat. The government also removed the Aleutian people of Attu Island for their protection but prevented them from returning in peacetime when the government built a Coast Guard station and designated Attu a wilderness area. In 1988 Congress provided limited restitution and acknowledged, “The United States failed to provide reasonable care for the Aleuts, resulting in illness, disease, and death.”⁹

Before the U.S. entrance into World War II, the military displaced thousands in Trinidad, Newfoundland, and Puerto Rico. On Puerto Rico’s Vieques the Navy displaced thousands in the 1940s, seizing three-quarters of the small island. Productive local economies gave way to economic stagnation, poverty, unemployment, prostitution, and violence.10 On the smaller neighboring island of Culebra, the Navy took over one-third of the land and the entire coastline by 1950, encircling civilians with a bombing range and a mined harbor. The Navy halted plans for a full expulsion only after protests by locals and the Puerto Rican independence movement. In 1953 the U.S. Air Force and the Danish government gave an entire community of 150 indigenous Inughuit (Inuit) people four days’ notice before displacing them from their homeland in Thule, Greenland, to expand a nuclear weapons base.¹¹

Indigenous CHamorus on Guam suffered through thirty-one months of brutal Japanese occupation during World War II, including internment in concentration camps, widespread rape, forced prostitution and other forced labor, and hundreds murdered by machine gun, grenade, and sword.¹² CHamorus expected their bravery and loyalty to the United States to be rewarded with U.S. citizenship and self-rule. Instead, the Navy reestablished military rule and took around 60 percent of their land after the war.¹³ Civil disobedience and threats of a general strike forced the Truman administration to transfer control of Guam from the Navy to the Department of the Interior in 1951.¹⁴ Congress made Guam an “unincorporated territory” with limited rights to self-governance. The Department of the Interior described Guam as an “area in which the United States Congress has determined that only selected parts of the United States Constitution apply.”¹⁵

Guam is still on the United Nations’ list of territories that are not self-governing, along with American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The military still controls almost one-third of the island. To this day the people of Guam and the other colonies have third-class U.S. citizenship: they have neither a presidential vote nor voting representation in Congress (residents of Washington, DC, have had second-class citizenship since gaining the presidential vote in 1961). The people of American Samoa have fourth-class citizenship because they don’t even get automatic U.S. citizenship.

Map 19. Base Displacement since 1898.

Bases and other military facilities whose creation or expansion displaced locals outside U.S. states are shown. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bases in North America also helped enable the displacement, dispossession, and deaths of millions of Native American people. Oceans not to scale. See Vine, Base Nation, chap. 3.

The base buildup on Okinawa displaced around 250,000 Okinawans, or nearly half the island’s population; amid growing overcrowding, U.S. authorities sent 3,218 “volunteers” about eleven thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean to jungled-covered land in Bolivia.16 Elsewhere in the Pacific, the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands system provided a new colonial mechanism to hold on to more land and more islands, complete with basing rights, even as the Territory was dissolving. In the 1970s representatives from the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated their islands’ departure from the Trust Territory. The Northern Marianas became a U.S. commonwealth (like Puerto Rico) but had to give the military the entire island of Farallon de Medinilla as a bombing range and two-thirds of the island of Tinian. CHamorus in the Northern Marianas got the same third-class U.S. citizenship as fellow CHamorus in Guam and the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

In other Trust Territory islands, years of nuclear weapons testing displaced the people of the Bikini Atoll and at least four other island groups in the Marshall Islands. Bikini experienced complete contamination. Hundreds were irradiated across the Marshalls. The military displaced hundreds more to create a missile-testing base in the Marshalls’ Kwajalein Atoll. In addition to deaths and disease directly linked to radiation exposure, the deportations led to similar effects as those suffered by others displaced: declining social, cultural, physical, and economic conditions; high rates of suicide; poor infant health; and the proliferation of slum housing, among other debilitating effects.¹⁷ Most of the displaced have ended up on Ebeye, which observers have called the “ghetto of the Pacific” and “the most congested, unhealthful, and socially demoralized community in Micronesia.”¹⁸

The Marshall Islands, along with Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, eventually left the Trust Territory and gained formal independence. U.S. government officials found a way to retain military control over the islands by signing “compacts of free association” with the new nations. The compacts gave responsibilities for defense to the United States, which allowed the military to retain bases, training areas, and wartime base-construction rights in exchange for yearly aid packages and greater immigration to the United States.¹⁹ As recently as 2008, displacement continued when South Korean authorities displaced villagers south of Seoul to help U.S. officials expand Camp Humphreys, now the largest U.S. base overseas.20

“The fact is,” former Pentagon official Gary Sick said of the Chagossians, “nobody cared very much about these populations.” Sick testified to Congress about the Chagossians’ expulsion in 1975, on the one day Congress has ever examined the issue. “It was more of a nineteenth-century decision—thought process—than a twentieth- or twenty-first-century thought process,” Sick said. “I think that was the bind they got caught in. That this was sort of colonial thinking after the fact, about what you could do.”²¹

The displacement of the Chagossians, of the Bikinians and other Marshallese, of Okinawans, of Inguhuit, of Viequenses, and of others like them demonstrates the vulnerability of isolated, mostly indigenous, non-European peoples who have suffered the effects of U.S. imperialism. In her study of Vieques, Katherine McCaffrey notes that “bases are frequently established on the political margins of national territory, on lands occupied by ethnic or cultural minorities or otherwise disadvantaged populations.”²² While strategic geographic considerations generally shape decisions about which regions should have bases, within a region the selection of specific base locations is heavily influenced by the ease of land acquisition. The ease with which the military can acquire land tends to be strongly linked to the relative power or powerlessness of that land’s inhabitants. This, in turn, is usually linked to factors such as the people’s nationality, economic power, population size, and skin color.

In the minds of many U.S. officials, the supposed gains to be realized from a base justified what they saw as the limited impact of removing what they considered to be an insignificant number of people. Removing locals promised the ultimate in stability and freedom from what government officials considered “local problems.” U.S. officials displaced the Chagossians, the Bikinians, the CHamorus, and others because the military prefers not to be bothered by local populations and because government officials have the power to enforce that preference. Sociologist Frances Fox Piven put it to me simply: U.S. officials displaced the Chagossians “because they could.”23

Despite the supposed end of colonialism, despite the decolonization process, despite changing public attitudes about race in the United States, the displaced were easy targets for removal. The pattern of who was displaced strongly suggests that high-ranking U.S. officials saw the displaced as insignificant and “negligible” in no small part because U.S. officials were almost exclusively Euro-American white men and the displaced were non-European peoples of color. The five hundred people displaced from Argentia, Newfoundland, before the official U.S. entrance into World War II is the only case I have found outside formal wartime of a white, European-descended people displaced by a base abroad.²⁴

In 1946, in Japan’s Ogasawara (or Bonin) Islands, U.S. officials actually helped around 130 displaced Euro-American islander families return to live next to a naval base. The Japanese government had removed the families and other islanders of Japanese descent for protection during World War II. While the Navy allowed the descendants of nineteenth-century Euro-American immigrants to return home, they barred those of Japanese ancestry from returning.²⁵

That the Chagossians and others displaced were generally small in number, economically poor, and living on isolated islands contributed to U.S. officials’ attitudes. But race played a fundamental role. Because they were Africans, Asians, or indigenous Americans, planners could regard them as insignificant, as people whose existence and concerns could be overlooked entirely. U.K. Foreign Office official Denis Greenhill revealed some of the racism of officials on both sides of the Atlantic when he described the Chagossians in a memo as “some few Tarzans” and, using a racist Robinson Crusoe reference, “Men Fridays.”²⁶

Since the invention of the idea of race in the seventeenth century, racism was fundamental to European empires’ colonial conquest in the Americas. It was fundamental to the colonial conquest of the U.S. Empire that followed in North America. Racism has continued to play a fundamental role in the U.S. Empire in ways that connect the displacement and dispossession of the Cherokee, the Crow, and other Native American peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the displacement and dispossession of the Chagossians, the CHamorus, and others in the twentieth century.

Racism, however, played a different role in older forms of empire than in the displacement of the Chagossians and others like them. Racism was the explicit ideology of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and U.S. imperialism.27 In more recent history racism has played a prominent role in structuring the vulnerability of those displaced. It has also served as a more subtle, internal ideological influence, allowing officials to “assume the license” to displace those racialized as “non-white” and thus, according to the racialized worldview (that remains endemic today), inherently less than.²⁸

Racism has played a similar role in almost all of the United States’ post–World War II wars. Racism was, for example, a pervasive feature of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, which was waged at the same time as U.S. officials were orchestrating the expulsion of the Chagossians. The frequent use of racial slurs, such as “gooks,” to describe the Vietnamese followed a long history of racializing enemies in wartime. Racist propaganda targeted “Japs” during World War II, while U.S. troops called Filipinos “n****rs” and “gugus” during the war in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Long-standing racist ideas about a Chinese or Asian “yellow peril” shaped U.S. and European responses to the Chinese “Boxer” Rebellion around the same period.

The racist, savage targeting of supposed Indian “savages” during the wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reverberates to this day in the military’s appropriation of Native American peoples’ names as celebrations of the killing prowess of military weaponry, such as the Apache helicopter and Tomahawk cruise missile. (Widespread anti-indigenous racism also surfaces in the racist names, mascots, and rituals of U.S. professional sports teams, such as the Washington “R******s,” the Cleveland Indians’ “Chief Wahoo,” and the “tomahawk chop” of the Atlanta Braves, Florida State Seminoles, and Kansas City Chiefs.) The widespread use of racist slurs for Iraqis and Afghans (“towel heads,” “Hajjis,” “camel jockeys,” “sand monkeys,” “sand n****rs”) reflects how central racism has remained in U.S. imperialism.²⁹

The violence of U.S. wars and the violence that displaced the Chagossians and others like them are connected by what anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois call a “continuum of violence.” The violence continuum links the most extreme forms of violence in war with a range of daily humiliations and degradations, dehumanization and social exclusion, and assault and rape inflicted on those deemed inferior and “less than” in a society. The violence continuum draws inspiration from Franco Basaglia’s idea of “peacetime crimes” that “imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war.”30 The idea of peacetime crimes shows how the distinction between wartime and peacetime is, in many ways, artificial and often causes us to overlook the violence of everyday life, of supposed peacetime, that’s committed against the most vulnerable and that makes wartime violence possible.

The displacement of local peoples during the creation or expansion of U.S. bases abroad is one such peacetime crime—a crime that generally has taken place outside officially declared wartime but that has direct connections along a continuum of violence with the violence of war. Locals living near U.S. bases abroad have consistently experienced a range of other well-documented peacetime crimes. Just a few include cases of robbery, assault, rape, and murder regularly committed by military personnel; support for illegal and exploitative sex work industries; and widespread environmental damage caused by everyday military operations and the intentional disposal of toxic materials in other people’s soil and water.³¹

The violence continuum connecting these peacetime crimes to the violence of war shapes the violence that humans can inflict on others. The violence continuum “refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license—even the duty—to kill, maim, or soul murder,” write Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois.³² Importantly, the men who made the decision to displace the Chagossians and others were, in many cases, the same men making decisions about waging war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The men in the offices of the Pentagon, the Navy, the State Department, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA were the same men who made decisions about forcibly displacing South Vietnamese villagers into “strategic hamlets”, about assassinating tens of thousands of accused South Vietnamese communists with little or no evidence as part of the Phoenix Program, about destroying forests and bodies with napalm and Agent Orange, and about dropping millions of tons of bombs on soldiers and civilians alike in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Former Nixon administration military officials Anthony Lake and Roger Morris describe the geographic and “spiritual” distance between the government offices in Washington, DC, where “affable, authoritative and always urbane men” made decisions about war and the “piles of decomposing bodies in a ditch outside Hue or a village bombed in Laos, the burn ward of a children’s hospital in Saigon, or even a cemetery or veteran’s hospital here.”33 This “spiritual” distance—which is shaped by ideas about race, nationality, religion, class—between the lives of decision makers and those affected by their decisions makes it easier for humans to inflict violence on other humans. So too, how much easier does it become to deploy the violence of war when you have deployed violence outside a war zone or during supposed peacetime? Does this not lower the bar on what you can do to another human being? If officials can see it as their duty to displace people from their homes to build a base without the justification of a hot war, how much easier is it for officials to justify displacing people from their homes during wartime or targeting them with bullets, bombs, and napalm?

Of course, the violence continuum flows in both directions: how much easier must it have been to displace the Chagossians and others like them when U.S. officials had participated in so much violence in Southeast Asia or the war in Korea or World War II and when U.S. officials had the justification of the supposedly “Cold War” with the Soviet Union? The violence continuum extends in many ways to people of color in the United States, including, for example, the displacement, dispossession, and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the systemic torture of African Americans in, for example, Chicago by former Vietnam military police interrogator Jon Burge, or the extrajudicial killing of African Americans and other people of color.³⁴

The pattern of forcibly displacing “not white,” non-European, numerically small, colonized peoples to build bases is connected to many forms of violence that tend to afflict the darker, the poorer, and the less powerful. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois explain that processes of dehumanization lead whole societies to treat entire groups as “rubbish people.” Erik Eriksen, they note, called it “pseudo-speciation”: the “human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human.”35

Across history and geography the Chagossians and others displaced by U.S. bases abroad are thus linked along a continuum of violence to the victims of war in Southeast Asia, Iraq, and Afghanistan; to Native American peoples displaced, dispossessed, and murdered; to Angolans and Mozambicans kept under Portuguese colonial rule for decades with U.S. aid exchanged for Azores basing rights; to Indonesians slaughtered in a U.S.-supported genocide; to Cubans and Haitians and many others killed during dozens of U.S. invasions in Latin America; to Guatemalans and Chileans tortured, assassinated, and disappeared during U.S.-backed coups; to the enslavement, murder, and disenfranchisement of African Americans over centuries; to attacks on immigrants and religious and sexual minorities in the United States; and to the poor in the United States whose bodies are so often ground up by the workings of everyday capitalism and the U.S. wars they are so often sent to fight.

“Inexcusably inhuman wrongs” is how one observer described the treatment of the Chagossians when he learned of their fate years later. Thanks to the letters that Stuart Barber’s son shared with me, I learned that the author of those words was none other than Stuart Barber. In another letter, written in 1975, Barber admitted the expulsion of the Chagossians “wasn’t necessary militarily.” He called for providing as much as $40–$50 million in compensation and allowing them to return home.³⁶

To this day Chagossians and many others among the displaced are struggling to return home, to win some justice and recompense for what they have suffered. “We are reclaiming our rights, our rights like every other human being who lives on the Earth has rights,” Rita’s son Olivier Bancoult, a prominent Chagossian leader, told me at his home in exile. “A right to liberty, a right—I was born on that land; my umbilical cord is buried on that land; I have a right to live on that land,” said Olivier.³⁷

Rita, Olivier, and other Chagossians have tried petitions, protests, hunger strikes, negotiations, and lawsuits against both the U.S. and U.K. governments. They have won three suits against the British government, pressured the United Kingdom into giving them full U.K. citizenship, and had the International Court of Justice and UN General Assembly rule and vote overwhelmingly in their favor in 2019.38 They are still not home. While the Chagossians have endured more than fifty years of impoverished exile, their island, Diego Garcia, has been at the center of a multibillion-dollar base buildup across the Greater Middle East. The deadly consequences of this buildup for the region and the world are still being felt today in ways that are difficult to exaggerate.