U.S. Forcibly Deported Islanders And Gassed Their Dogs To Make Way For Diego Garcia Military Base

[Orwellian_Ghost]

In order to convert the sleepy, Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia into a dominating military base, the U.S. forcibly transported its 2,000 Chagossian inhabitants into exile and gassed their dogs.

By banning journalists from the area, the U.S. Navy was able to perpetrate this with virtually no press coverage, says David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University and author of “Island of Shame: the Secret History of the U.S. Military on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press).”

“The Chagossians were put on a boat and taken to Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles away, where they were left on the docks, with no money and no housing, to fend for themselves,” Vine said on the interview show “Books Of Our Time,” sponsored by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

“They were promised jobs that never materialized. They had been living on an island with schools, hospitals, and full employment, sort of like a French coastal village, and they were consigned to a life of abject poverty in exile, unemployment, health problems, and were the poorest of the poor,” Vine told interview host Lawrence Velvel, dean of the law school. Their pet dogs were rounded up and gassed, and their bodies burned, before the very eyes of their traumatized owners, Vine said.

“They were moved because they were few in number and not white,” Vine added. The U.S. government circulated the fiction the Chagossians were transient contract workers that had taken up residence only recently but, in fact, they had been living on Diego Garcia since about the time of the American Revolution. Merchants had imported them to work on the coconut and copra plantations. Vine said the U.S. government induced The Washington Post not to break a story spelling out events on the island.

...

http://bbvm.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/u-s-forcibly-deported-islanders-and-gassed-their-dogs-to-make-way-for-diego-garcia-military-base/

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mJV_6MPwK9A/SgLks1BudsI/AAAAAAAABu4/-E5MmIrWwjI/s400/Diego+Garcia.jpg

Above is a aerial photograph supposedly taken in 1980 of the American naval air station on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The central hub of the U.S. war on terror, the island houses a massive complex of refueling and staging capacities that are as important to the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq as Hawaii was to the Pacific Campaign during World War II. On top of all that, it's a top-top-secret facility that no journalist has ever been allowed to visit, which makes it handy as a rendered terror suspect black site.

A new book by David Vine called Island of Shame lays out the ugly history of American involvement at Diego Garcia. As discussed in the New York Review of Books by Jonathan Freedland, what Vine uncovered was nothing less than an imperialistic land-grab (as happened on other islands of strategic interest fro Okinawa to Vieques) that threw thousands of natives off their island paradise and dumped them into slums in Mauritius.

Freedland relates the experience of a British member of Parliament who was allowed to visit some years back:

"It is quite an astonishing sight," he told me. "There's a vast American fleet anchored offshore, ships containing a division's worth of armor and artillery." He estimated that as many as 150 tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery, and engineering vehicles were kept in the hold of cargo vessels, safely away from the corrosive sea air. Every year or so, Mates was told, the entire fleet is sailed back to the US, where the vehicles are unloaded, driven around to make sure they still work properly, then reloaded onto the ships and sailed back to Diego Garcia. "The expense of it is mind-boggling," he says.

So the empire is alive and well. Only unlike the Romans and British before us, we like to keep ours as hidden as possible.

http://vastwasteland.blogspot.com/2009/05/from-department-of-pax-americana-above.html

[joeycola]

1. but global warming is karma is this case as the island is sinking

into the water--or the shores are shrinking. It won't be long now. I read a story about this just a few days ago.

[imdjh]

5. LOL "I read a story about this just a few days ago."

Diego Garcia is not sinking nor is the ocean threatening to submerge it anytime soon. Even John Pilgar acknowledges that and he makes his money by portraying himself as the head bleeding heart in a heartless world of American and British imperialism. In short, he's a lying piece of shit, but he doesn't claim that Diego Garcia is sinking, which is good because apparently, it isn't.


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/despite-popular-opinion-and-calls-to-action-the-maldives-is-not-being-overrun-by-sea-level-rise/

[unhappycamper]

2. I remember watching a documentary on what the Chagossian inhabitants

did after they were evicted from their land. (This is the same shit we did to the American Indians.)

[imdjh]

7. Wrong. The American Indians were natives.

There were treaties with the American Indians. The former inhabitants of DG have no claim on DG, never owned a bit of it, weren't native to it, had no claims whatsoever to it.

[ProleNoMore]

3. If Americans Only Knew the Horrors Committed In Our Name

eom

[imdjh]

4. Anti-american propaganda, but it's interesting with each dishonest telling. nt

[unhappycamper]

6. Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

Diego García is a coral atoll and the largest island in terms of land area, of the Chagos Archipelago. It is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. The island is located in the Indian Ocean, about 1,600 km (1,000 mi) south of the southern coast of India.<1> The closest other countries to Diego Garcia are Sri Lanka and Maldives.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach and explore the island of Diego Garcia, with the discovery attributed to the navigator Pêro de Mascarenhas while sailing in a fleet under Dom Garcia de Noronha's leadership during 1512 and 1513.

In the 1960s, the Chagos archipelago was secretly leased to the United Kingdom and detached from Mauritius with the intention of expelling its entire population and establishing a military base. In 1971 the United Kingdom and United States entered an agreement under which the latter would set up a military base in Diego Garcia.

Since then, the United Kingdom enforced the highly controversial depopulation of Diego Garcia, forcing the deportation of the island's entire 2,000 inhabitants, descendants of African slaves and Hindu laborers brought to the islands by the French in the 18th century, to the surrounding islands including Mauritius, located 1,200 miles away. In their place a joint British-American military base was established.

This island has one of the five monitoring stations assisting the operation of the Global Positioning System, the others being on Ascension Island, Hawaii, Kwajalein Atoll and in Colorado Springs.

It is covered in luxuriant tropical vegetation. It is 60 kilometres (37 mi) long, with a maximum elevation of 6.7 metres (22 ft), and nearly encloses a lagoon about 19 kilometres (12 mi) long and up to 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) wide. Depths in the lagoon extend to 30 metres (98 ft), and numerous coral heads present hazards to navigation. Shallow reefs surround the island on the ocean side. The channel and anchorage area are dredged, while the old turning basin can also be used.

[Pavulon]

10. UK, like the UK and not the US...

we removed people from bikini and other islands.

[imdjh]

11. Really.

While breathlessly written, it fails to note that Mauritius was a British possession until 1965. The UK didn't steal anything. In fact, it has paid a small fortune in this process.

[1776Forever]

8. This article says the inhabitants were moved by the UK government between 1965 and 1973 - Link....

US Navy air support base on Diego Garcia 'unaffected' by ruling on islanders' right to return
DATE:11/05/06
SOURCE:Flight International

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2006/05/11/206555/us-navy-air-support-base-on-diego-garcia-unaffected-by-ruling-on-islanders-right-to.html

The highest UK court has ruled that former inhabitants of an Indian Ocean island archipelago removed to make way for a US air base base may be permitted to return.

The UK High Court ruled in favour yesterday of families exiled from the Chagos islands by the UK government between 1965 and 1973. The evacuation came as part of a deal to lease the island of Diego Garcia to the US government for the construction of a joint UK-US navy support facility. Prior to the lease, around 1,400-2,000 local inhabitants lived on the islands and were relocated to the Seychelles or to Mauritius.

(more at link)

...........

:hide: Either way it wasn't right.

[Pavulon]

9. Horse shit.

Diego is a british installation used by the US and other NATO nations. The information is just wrong.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

14. It was a joint operation

You might consider reading the book or at least getting more information on the matter.

This is the story laid bare in Island of Shame, a meticulously researched, coldly furious book that details precisely how London and Washington colluded in a scheme of population removal more redolent of the eighteenth or nineteenth century than the closing decades of the twentieth. It reconstructs, memo by memo, how the deed was plotted, how it was done, and how it was denied through lies told to both politicians and public. Above all, it serves as a case study for the way contemporary empire operates, exploding the myth that the United States differs from its British, Spanish, and Roman predecessors by eschewing both the brute conquest of land and the dispossession of those unfortunate enough to get in the way.

...

What becomes clear is that doggedness is the primary quality of any Beltway warrior. The Strategic Island Concept found its champion in Paul Nitze, who, even when rebuffed by his boss at the Department of Defense, Robert McNamara, would not let the idea drop. He simply presented the scheme in new language, with new budgets or a new rationale. Once offered as a communications facility, Diego Garcia was reproposed as a refueling station for ships. Sheer persistence eventually wore down the resistance of the Pentagon, the executive branch, and Congress.

...

But the greatest deceit related to the people of the Chagos Islands. Mindful that international law required them to regard the interests of a territory's permanent inhabitants as paramount, US and UK officials lighted upon a device Vine rightly describes as "Orwellian." They would simply pretend that the Chagossians were not a permanent population with homes, deep roots, traditions, and ancestral burial places on the island, but a "floating" group of "transient workers" eligible for none of the UN's safeguards. This, the officials themselves recognized, was nothing more than a "fiction."

...

Wasting no time, the British began ridding Chagos of its people. First those luckless enough to be away from home were told they could not return: their islands were now closed. Those still on the archipelago were then informed that it was a criminal offense to be living in Chagos—a place that most of them had never left—without a permit. Next they were, in effect, starved out, as British officials deliberately ran down supplies of food and medicine. Salvage crews came to dismantle the plantations: there would be no work and no rations. Then, in a demonstration of US and UK resolve, the commissioner of the British Indian Ocean Territory, as it was now renamed, gave the order for the islanders' pet dogs to be killed; after US soldiers armed with M16 rifles failed to shoot them all, the animals were gassed as their owners looked on.

...

The above from:


Which is linked here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22691

Footnote:
<2>See Robert D Kaplan, "Center Stage for the Twenty-first Century: Power Plays in the Indian Ocean," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2009. In explaining the importance of the Indian Ocean, Kaplan notes that its western reaches "include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan—constituting a network of dynamic trade as well as a network of global terrorism, piracy, and drug smuggling. Hundreds of millions of Muslims...live along the Indian Ocean's eastern edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia." He adds that 90 percent of global commerce still travels by sea, with fully half of the world's container traffic—and 70 percent of the total trade in petroleum products—passing through the Indian Ocean.

[imdjh]

15. You have to admit, the population of Diego Garcia was somewhat unique.

It's rare that an entire population has no ownership interest in the region they occupy, are not indigenous to that region, and live in the region at the pleasure of the owners of the land who are also more or less their employers or as someone else described it "velvet glove slavery".

It's also unique that the population in question is in no way native to the island and the island has never been self sufficient.

[imdjh]

16. BTW, Before you shed too many tears for these folks, remember that this is about money.

[imdjh]

12. What was your purpose in posting this?

[juno jones]

13. K&R!

Just to be contrary.

I don't fucking care if the UK or the US did it. I don't care how much they paid the government or rulers, etc. People who had bee peacefully living there as long, if not longer than many people's families have been in the US were rounded up and sent into exile.

What the fuck was right about it to begin with? Imperialism dies hard, obviously.

[Vidar]

17. We stole most of a continent. What's an island?