Three forgotten, grainy films shot more than 40 years ago reveal the
evidence of a crime committed by British governments against some of its
most vulnerable citizens. What they tell is a shocking, almost
incredible story in which the Blair Government has played a major part.
One of the films, made in 1957 by the government’s Colonial Film Unit,
shows the people of the Chagos islands, a British Crown colony in the
Indian Ocean. The setting is idyllic; a coral archipelago lying midway
between Africa and Asia: a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace where,
says the commentator, “most of the people have lived for generations”.
There are thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a
railway, docks, a copra plantation. In the second film, shot by
missionaries, the islanders’ beloved dogs splash in a sheltered,
palm-fringed lagoon catching fish; and there is a line of proud mothers,
in their finery, with their babies awaiting their baptism. Here surely
was Britain’s Empire at its most benign.
The third film marks the end of all this: an act of ruthlessness and
duplicity with few Imperial parallels. The year is 1961; a stocky man
strides ashore in Diego Garcia, the main island of the Chagos group. He
is Rear-Admiral Grantham of the US Navy and his visit is followed by a
top secret Anglo-American survey of the island for a military base – one
of the biggest American bases outside the United States: what the
Pentagon in Washington calls an “indispensable platform” for policing
the world.
Today on Diego Garcia there are more than 2,000 American troops,
anchorage for 30 ships, including nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, a
satellite spy station and two of the world’s longest runways from which
B-52 and Stealth bombers have attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. Through the
vapour haze as the bombers take off you can just see, on the other side
of the lagoon, the broken villages: the houses claimed by the jungle,
some still with their furniture, pictures and other personal belongings
that were left the day the people were expelled.
Roaming wild are their donkeys and dogs that are now feral, but there
are few of these descendants of the islanders’ pets. As the Americans
began to build their billion-dollar base 30 years ago Sir Bruce
Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the
dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1,000 pets were gassed with
exhaust fumes. “They put the dogs in a furnace where the people
worked”, Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, “and when their dogs were
taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried.” Sir Bruce
had been given responsibility for what the Americans called “cleansing”
and “sanitising” the islands; and the killing of the pets was taken by
the islanders as a warning. For what had been agreed between Washington
and Whitehall in secrecy was that the 2,000 Chagos islanders would be
forced from their homeland.
A 1965 Foreign Office memorandum describes how the Americans made the
expulsion of the entire population “virtually a condition of the
agreement”. As for the gentle Creoles they were throwing out, “these
people have little aptitude for anything other than growing coconuts”.
They are, wrote Sir Bruce Greatbatch, “unsophisticated and untrainable”.
In other words, expendable.
Files found in the National Archives in Washington and Public Record
Office in London provide clear evidence of a conspiracy between the
Labour government of Harold Wilson and two American administrations in
the form of a searing narrative of official lying that will be all too
familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq. The conspiracy
got under way with the creation of a fake colony called the British
Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT. The sole purpose of this was to get rid
of the people.
To do it, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders
were transient contract workers who could be “returned” to Mauritius and
the Seychelles, 1,000 miles away. This was the equivalent of
“returning” the majority of Australians, whose ancestry dates from 1770,
the same year the first islanders settled in the Chagos. The aim, wrote
a Foreign Office official in 1966, “is to convert all the existing
residents into shortterm, temporary residents”. What the files also
reveal is an attitude of brutality and contempt.
In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the
Foreign Office, wrote: “We must surely be very tough about this. The
object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours.
There will be no indigenous population except seagulls.” At the end of
this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill of
Harrow. “Along with the birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays?” Under the
heading Maintaining The Fiction, another official urges his colleagues
to reclassify the islanders as “a floating population” and to “make up
the rules as we go along”.
As for the United Nations and international law, which invested in
the remaining colonial powers a “sacred trust” to protect the basic
human rights of their citizens in dependent territories, a senior
Foreign Office official proposed “a policy of ‘quiet disregard’ – in
other words, let’s forget about this one until the United Nations
challenge us on it”. Reading these documents, I could find not a single
word of concern for the suffering caused or even recognition that
Britain was, in effect, kidnapping its own citizens. There is worry
about the press finding out and “damaging publicity” and now and then
the conspirators appear to get the wind up. “This is all fairly
unsatisfactory,” wrote one official, “We propose to certify these
people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else?”
The cover-up went right to the top. In 1968 Foreign Secretary Michael
Stewart wrote that “by any stretch of the English language, there was
an indigenous population and the Foreign Office knew it”. Yet on April
21, 1969, in a secret minute to Harold Wilson, Stewart proposed that the
government lie to the UN “by present(ing) any move as a change of
employment for contract workers – rather than as a population
resettlement.”
Five days later Wilson gave his approval, which was copied to senior
members of the Cabinet. At first the islanders were tricked into
leaving; those needing urgent medical care in Mauritius were prevented
from returning home. There is a photograph taken outside the
administrator’s office on Diego Garcia. It is a haunting image, taken in
1973, not long after the massacre of the dogs. The stunned crowd has
just been told their islands have been sold and they are to be expelled.
They could take only one suitcase. On one journey in rough seas the
copra company’s horses occupied the deck, while women and children slept
on a cargo of bird fertiliser.
Arriving in the Seychelles they were held in a prison until they were
transported to Mauritius. In the first years of exile suicides were
common. “Elaine and Michel Mouza: mother and child committed suicide,”
said a report in 1975. “Josie and Maude Baptiste: poverty – no roof, no
food, committed suicide.” Lisette Talatte lost two children. “The doctor
said he cannot treat sadness,” she told me. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost
two daughters and a son; she told me that when her husband was informed
the family could never return home, he suffered a stroke and died.
Only after more than a decade did the islanders receive compensation:
less than £3,000 each. In 2000 the High Court ruled their expulsion
illegal. However, the Blair Government, although it did not appeal the
decision, blocked them from going home by conjuring up a “feasibility
study” to determine whether the islands could be resettled. It found
they were “sinking” – perhaps under the weight of the thousands of US
servicemen, their bars, barbecues and bombers. In 2003 the islanders
were denied compensation in a now notorious High Court case, with the
judge referring to “we” as if the Foreign Office and the court were on
the same side.
Last June the Government invoked a “royal prerogative” – a decree –
to overturn the 2000 decision, bypass Parliament and ban the islanders
from ever going home. Last week, after the screening of my documentary
on ITV, this epic struggle turned yet another corner when the High Court
agreed to a judicial review of the royal decree. The islanders, led by
Olivier Bancoult, who went into exile as a child, and their
extraordinary London lawyer, Richard Gifford, say that if this fails
they will head for the European Court of Human Rights. Article Seven of
the new International Criminal Court leaves little doubt that what was
done to these gentle, tenacious people was a crime against humanity. As
Bush’s bombers take off from their homeland, his collaborator in Downing
Street might reflect on that.
