Det finnes tydeligvis ingen grenser for hva politikere og embedsmenn
vil foreta seg for å tekkes militære interesser. USA motsetter seg
fremdeles at «rensingen» av de innfødte fra Chagos-arkipelet
(«steriliseringen» av øyene som en embedsmann i det britiske
finansdepartementet kalte det) skal omgjøres.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,392685,00.html
Evicted islanders to go home
Cook caves in, allowing return
Ewen MacAskill Diplomatic editor
Saturday November 4, 2000
The Guardian
The Foreign Office suffered a humiliating blow yesterday when the high
court in London ruled that Indian Ocean islanders were unlawfully
evicted 30 years ago to make way for a US air base.
The islanders are now free to return.
In a stunning turnaround the Foreign Office - after six hours of
considering whether to appeal - caved in last night and began
preparations to allow the islanders to go back.
The US state department had vehemently opposed resettlement, claiming
it would create a security risk to their huge air base on Diego
Garcia, one of the 65 islands that make up the Chagos archipelago, a
British dependency. The US leases the island from Britain.
The Foreign Office, intent on ending an issue that has been a running
sore, was last night working on a compromise that would see the
islanders, most of whom were moved to Mauritius, return to two islands
on the archipelago: Penhos Banhos and Salomon - but not Diego Garcia.
The Foreign Office still faces the prospect of hefty payments in
compensation to the islanders. It is thought between 400 and 4,000
islanders might want to return.
Olivier Bancoult, who led the campaign on behalf of the islanders,
insisted he was not interested merely in compensation but in going
home: "We want to return to our motherland as quickly as possible," he
said outside court yesterday.
The court awarded the islanders the costs.
Lord Justice Laws ruled that a British ordinance of 1971 used to evict
the islanders had been an "abject legal failure". He said the British
government at the time had claimed the ordinance was to make laws for
"the peace, order and good government of the territory".
"I cannot see how the wholesale removal of a people from the land
where they belong can be said to conduce to the territory's peace,
order and good government," he said.
Hundreds of previously secret Foreign Office papers that emerged
during the trial show the British and US governments cheated the
islanders out of their homes with a colonial disdain more appropriate
to the 19th century than the latter part of the 20th, and then lied
about it in parliament and Congress for years.
One British diplomat referred in a memo to the islanders as "a few
Tarzans or Men Fridays".
Mr Justice Gibbs said in the judgment: "It is clear from some of the
disclosed documents that, in some quarters, official zeal in
implementing those policies went beyond any proper limits. It would be
no answer to say that these documents reflected the standards of a
different period.
"I venture to think that the impression on right-thinking people upon
reading them would have been similar then as now."
The court ruling was a potential embarrassment for the foreign
secretary, Robin Cook, who in opposition had supported the islanders
but in government found himself caught between the rights of the
islanders and objections to their return from the US.
But Mr Cook escaped by pressing the US into accepting the
compromise. He pointed out that Britain's treaty obligations covered
only Diego Garcia and the US had no legal claim to the rest of the
archipelago.
In a statement issued last night, he said: "I have decided to accept
the court's ruling and the government will not be appealing."
He distanced himself from previous governments, Labour as well as
Tory: "The government has not defended what was done or said 30 years
ago. As Lord Justice Laws recognised, we made no attempt to conceal
the gravity of what happened."
The Foreign Office ordered a feasibility study this year into whether
the islands could practically sustain repopulation. The first stage
suggested they could if new infrastructure was put in place.
For it to become habitable again, the islanders will need a new jetty,
houses, a water purification scheme and some form of employment,
either fishing or a resumption of the coconut trade. The biggest item
will be a connection with the outside world.
Thirty years of lies, deceit and trickery that robbed a people of
their island home
Ewen MacAskill and Rob Evans
Saturday November 4, 2000
The Guardian
Olivier Bancoult, cleared from his Indian Ocean home by the British
government 32 years ago, dropped to his knees and kissed the ground
when he returned this June. Mr Bancoult, who was only four when he
left, was in tears, as were two older islanders accompanying him:
"After not being able to see the motherland for so long, it was
something very emotional."
Mr Bancoult and his companions were allowed three days on the islands
to gather material for yesterday's successful legal challenge to the
Foreign Office. He was hugged by fellow islanders outside the high
court in London after winning the right to return home.
Their return - or at least adequate compensation - would bring an end
to a shameful episode in British and US history in which both
governments tricked the islanders out of their homes to make way for a
US military base. The numbers involved are small - anywhere between
400 and 4,000 islanders might want to go home - but the issues raised
are not.
The episode highlights the ease with which politicians and diplomats
in Britain and the US lied; their determination to keep their
duplicity hidden from parliament, Congress and the UN; the extent to
which the US dictates British foreign policy; and, above all else, how
two powers abused the trust of the islanders.
The behaviour of the governments is laid bare in hundreds of pages of
correspondence, never published before and almost all of it marked
secret. Many were unearthed by the Guardian in the Public Records
Office at Kew, others were presented as evidence in court.
Unwelcome questions
One of them, an internal Foreign Office memo in 1980, recommended to
the then foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, that "no journalists should
be allowed to visit Diego Garcia" and that visits by parliamentarians
or congressmen be kept to an absolute minimum in order to keep out
those "who deliberately stir up unwelcome questions".
The US first took an interest in 1962 in the Chagos islands, a
beautiful archipelago of 65 islands that includes Diego Garcia, Penhos
Banhos and Saloman, halfway between Africa and India. The US, fixated
on the communist threat at the height of the cold war, was alarmed by
a Chinese attack on India that year and wanted to plug the gap in its
strategic deployment as it had no base between the Mediterranean and
the Philippines.
Britain and the US entered into secret negotiations in 1964. The
Chagos islands were - and continue to be - part of Britain's dwindling
empire. Under the deal, Britain would lease Diego Garcia to the US to
use as a base. The US wanted not only Diego Garcia but the surrounding
islands free of people for security reasons. The only problem was that
there were people on them. Britain agreed. A Foreign Office memo,
marked secret, written by P. B. Porter of the East Africa department
on February 13, 1969, disclosed that at a Whitehall meeting the
Treasury representative "greatly preferred the ideal of a complete
sterilisation of the islands."
How to achieve this? British civil servants hit on the solution of
denying that the islanders were permanent residents and insisting they
were temporary contract workers, employed on the copra
plantations. This was the line that both the British and US
governments were to maintain for years, even though they knew it was
untrue. One Whitehall document, dated January 1970, is even subtitled
Maintaining the Fiction.
Some of those working on the islands were, as Britain and the US
insisted, temporary residents, brought in from Mauritius and the
Seychelles to work on the copra plantations. But about 400, as the
British government disclosed in memos but not in public, had lived on
the islands for at least two generations.
Britain and the US were worried that if this emerged, they would be in
trouble with the UN. Instead, they hit on the ruse of categorising
them as "transient" workers with no rights of residence and had them
shipped to Mauritius, even though internal memos admitted it was an
unsuitable cultural and economic environment. Britain paid Mauritius
£650,000 to help them settle.
The Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, then as now a nuisance to government, had
been tabling questions. The Foreign Office, in a memo distributed
round Whitehall on November 13, 1970, said: "We would not wish it to
become general knowledge that some of the inhabitants have lived on
Diego Garcia for at least two generations and could, therefore, be
regarded as 'belongers'. The memo, written by E. J. Emery of the
Foreign Office's Pacific and Indian Ocean department, added: "We
shall, therefore, advise ministers in handling supplementary questions
about whether Diego Garcia is inhabited to say that there is only a
small number of contract labourers from the Seychelles and Mauritius
engaged to work on the copra plantations on the island."
Detailed guidance notes were issued to Foreign Office and Ministry of
Defence press officers telling them to mislead the media if asked.
Why did British governments go to such trouble? The obvious reason was
that both governments would have faced public outcry if it had come
out at the time and would have been in contravention of UN treaties
respecting the rights of indigenous people.
But there were further implications. Foreign Office documents marked
"top secret" reveal that, in return for granting the US the base,
Washington waived £5m Britain owed to the US for the Polaris nuclear
missile. The deal was signed by the Labour foreign secretary, George
Brown.
The US initially asked for the deal to be kept secret and the then
Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, complied, lying in public.
On April 18, 1967, C.H. Henn, sent a memo from the Foreign Office to
the US government: "Ultimately, under extreme pressure, we should have
to deny the existence of a US contribution in any form, and to advise
ministers to do so in [parliament] if necessary. Clearly, we should do
more confidently if you could confirm that the US would take a similar
line under pressure."
Financial agreement
But the US began to wobble. A Foreign Office memo to the British
embassy in Washington on June 2 1967, advised the British ambassador
to Washington in 1976 to stress personally to the US secretary of
state, Dean Rusk, that "if the Americans, under pressure, reveal the
existence of the financial agreement, then we should be in acute
parliamentary and constitutional difficulties."
Politicians and diplomats will go to extraordinary lengths to explain
away their lies. Michael Stewart, then Labour foreign secretary, wrote
in a memo on April 21 1969: "The Americans did not make a direct
contribution: we have merely paid less than we would have otherwise
... there is thus no question of the House of Commons having been
misled."
Every government since the 1960s has connived in this injustice. The
foreign secretary, Robin Cook, supported the cause of the islanders in
opposition but his position now is unclear. The Foreign Office
yesterday distanced itself from the events of 30 years ago but it is
the same Foreign Office that fought the islanders in court.
Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2000
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| jon | jonivar skullerud |
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