Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (24 page)

At least eleven others were reported to have died by suicide. “According to an enquiry made with their parents and friends,” the support group found, “the reasons behind these suicides are disgust of the life they have been living in Mauritius and of poverty: no roof, no job and uncared.
They were demoralized, and instead of living a depraved life, they found in death a remedy.”

Among the suicides were Joseph France Veerapen Kistnasamy, born on Six Islands, who “burnt himself” two days before Christmas, 1972; Syde Laurique, who had “no job, no roof, drowned herself”; Elaine and Michele Mouza, who as “mother and child committed suicide”; and Leone Rangasamy, born in Peros Banhos, who “drowned herself because she was prevented from going back.”
¹²

Other deaths seem to have been the result of Chagossians’ vulnerability to illnesses that were rare or unknown in Chagos.
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By 1975, 28 children had died of influenza: “Adults and children died of the diphtheria against which Mauritians are automatically vaccinated,” the
Manchester Guardian
wrote. “And the cultural shock of arriving in the teeming, humid, poorer quarters of Port Louis still takes its toll.”
¹⁴

At least fifteen more, in addition to Rita, were admitted for psychiatric treatment. They included one islander who “on the death of his child due to lack of food . . . burnt his wife and wanted to commit suicide.” Another “was mentally affected” after having to admit his children to a convent when he was unable to support them. Another “lost his head” on the ship and “was admitted as soon as he landed.”
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Amid their other problems, Chagossians faced a society beset by systemic unemployment and inter-ethnic tensions following gang violence and riots between Indo-Mauritian Muslims and AfroMauritians.
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British officials had long acknowledged and anticipated the difficulty of finding employment, especially given the absence of a “copra industry into which they could be absorbed.”
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Following independence in 1968, Mauritius experienced sporadic outbreaks of communal violence. By the time of the last deportations from Diego Garcia in 1971, British officials were predicting a worsening of conditions, with unemployment leading to “outbreaks of disorder, perhaps comparable to those which in September 1970 led to appeals for British military assistance.”
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With such high rates of unemployment, almost half of the islanders depended after their arrival, in whole or in part, on non-work income, including public welfare, the help of family and friends, charity, loans from moneylenders, and other sources.
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By 1975, only around one-quarter of family heads in Mauritius had full-time work. Most of those who were employed at all were working in the lowest-paid jobs as dockers and stevedores, domestic workers, fisherfolk, and truck loaders.
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According to Madeley, by mid-1975, “at least 1 in 40 [Chagossians in Mauritius] had died of starvation and disease.”
²¹
The support group’s
report describes how “The causes mostly are: unhappiness, non-adaptation of Ilois within the social framework of Mauritius, extreme poverty, particularly lack of food, house, job. Another cause of this mortality was family dispersion.” The report concludes that “The main cause of the sufferings of the Ilois was the lack of proper plan to welcome them in Mauritius. There was also no rehabilitation programme for them.”
²²

This conclusion is in fact exactly what forced displacement experts would predict for a population displaced against its will and finding no resettlement program upon arrival. Research aggregating findings from hundreds of forcibly displaced groups around the globe—pushed off their lands by dam construction, warfare, environmental disasters, and other causes—has come to an unambiguous conclusion: Absent proper resettlement programs and other preventative measures, involuntary displacement generally causes “the impoverishment of considerable numbers of people.”
²³

“HE DIDN’T RESPOND”

It was 1973 and the middle of the night when Julien nudged Rita as they slept. “He nudged me. He told me the baby woke up,” Rita remembered. Four years earlier, on July 4, 1969, she had given birth to a son Ivo, their only child born in Mauritius.

After rousing herself from an exhausted sleep and checking on Ivo, she returned and told Julien that he had a bottle and was fine. But “he didn’t respond. I didn’t realize that he was sick. I said to him, ‘I’m speaking and you, you aren’t responding.’”

When Julien still didn’t answer, Rita yelled for her uncle, who, with his wife, was living in the other room. When he came and looked at Julien, he knew right away that he was sick. “His arm, his hand, his foot, it was all dead,” paralyzed. They rushed him to the hospital. “He stayed a month, a month and fifteen days in the hospital. . . . It went on, and on, and on, until he died. He had
sagren
, David.
Sagren
is what he had.

“You know, he saw his children, every day they went without food. He didn’t have a job that he could work to be able to give them food. That’s what made him sick. He wasn’t used to life like that, you understand? Oh la la.”

Pointing to the gendered impact of forced displacement, Rita added, “What happened to me—how can I say it—I wasn’t able to bear it. But my husband, he was able to bear it even less than I was, because a man—the
load is supposed to be on him. He had six children to feed. How was he going to do it? He suffered a stroke.”

FROM UNIVERSAL EMPLOYMENT TO STRUCTURAL DISADVANTAGE

The Mauritian economy that the Bancoults and other Chagossians encountered during the late 1960s and early 1970s was undergoing massive transformations. Since the island’s permanent settlement in the eighteenth century, the economy and life of Mauritius had been dominated by sugar. By the twentieth century, Mauritius was the epitome of a colonial monocrop economy, dependent on the fluctuations of the sugar market and powerbrokers in England. When Chagossians began arriving, Mauritius’s population growth, which ranked among the highest in the world, meant that increasing numbers of working-age Mauritians were entering a labor market dominated by a sugar cane sector unable to absorb additional workers.
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In 1970, following examples in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, and Jamaica, the Mauritian Government began attempts to diversify its economy with the establishment of an export processing zone (EPZ) designed to lure foreign investment and create jobs in the production of cheap exports. Spurred by tax breaks, investment from Hong Kong and elsewhere, and loopholes in U.S. and European garment quotas, EPZ factories and employment boomed over the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s, in what some have described as one of the world’s few examples of an EPZ success strategy; we shall see how limited this success was for some in Mauritius, contrary to this popular narrative.

Beginning in the 1970s, Mauritius further diversified its economy with a major expansion of its tourist industry. While sugar cane remained a dominant part of the economy, the two new sectors grew, largely on the basis of Mauritius’s supply of cheap, relatively well-educated female labor. (In recent years, the government has attempted to diversify the economy again, encouraging “offshore” foreign financial investment, higher-end export development, and information-based technology industries, following the Indian model.)
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Over the same period, the economy of the Seychelles underwent a similar transformation. Prior to the 1970s, the Seychelles had an even more stagnant colonial economy dependent on a handful of globally insignificant agricultural exports like cinnamon. Unemployment was “even worse than that in Mauritius,” reaching as high as 27.5 percent.
²⁶
In 1971, the
Seychelles opened its first international airport, built, as we have seen, by the United Kingdom as compensation for taking three island groups for the BIOT. Weekly tourist arrivals jumped from numbers in the tens to numbers in the thousands; the airport’s opening allowed the explosion of a tourism industry that continues to drive the Seychelles economy to this day. (More recently, the Seychelles has tried to develop its substantial fishing resources and to become, like Mauritius, a center for offshore finance and high-tech services, while continuing to expand its tourism industry.)
²⁷

Although the economic booms in Mauritius and the Seychelles have made both nations more economically prosperous on a per capita basis than almost any other nations in all of Africa, Chagossians for the most part have not shared in this prosperity. The experience of expulsion has left the Bancoults and others structurally disadvantaged in Mauritius and the Seychelles in a variety of ways that has largely prevented their benefiting from wider economic prosperity.

Perhaps most importantly, Chagossians arrived in Mauritius and the Seychelles before the major economic changes were underway or before they had taken hold. They arrived in one country, Mauritius, that had a sugar cane monocrop economy unable to absorb additional workers and in another, the Seychelles, described by anthropologists Burton and Marion Benedict as a “rundown plantation,” with even higher unemployment than Mauritius.
²⁸
And they arrived, for the most part, with few employable skills. Mauritius had no copra industry (except for a small one in its dependency Agalega, where a few Chagossians relocated). Though copra had been the main export in the Seychelles since the 1840s, the industry was diminishing rapidly in the period when the islanders arrived (overall agricultural employment declined 10 percent from 1971 to 1977, by which point just 2.8 percent of households were earning their primary income from farming).
²⁹

Some of the other skills the islanders brought with them were also rendered economically useless. The talents of Chagossian marine carpenters and boat builders were of little commercial use in countries where wood-based boat construction was nearly obsolete. Chagossians’ fishing skills were relatively—but only relatively—more useful after the expulsion, and fishing has remained a source of employment for some to this day. A 1975 article illustrated some of the difficulty in trying to make a living from fishing in Mauritius: “Michel tried to become a fisherman when exiled, but the local [small-scale] fishermen, themselves unable to compete with the new fishing fleets with refrigerated holds, do not welcome further competition.”
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With such competition, earning a profitable living in the fishing industry in Mauritius (and to a lesser extent in the Seychelles) increasingly meant working for the long-distance fleets that cruise away from Mauritius for several months at a time. Employment on these ships thus resulted in further (temporary) displacement and the separation of families for significant parts of each year. One man, for example, left his family every year for six months at a time to work on a fishing boat, returning to work in temporary jobs for the rest of the year, mostly in construction.

Two of the most economically successful Chagossians who now are among the rare few to have secure, unionized jobs at the port of the Mauritian capital gained their starts at relative prosperity by finding jobs in the merchant marine. This came at the cost of separation from their families for far longer periods, lasting years at a time. One said he “sacrificed” eleven or twelve years of his life away from his parents, sending a portion of every paycheck back to them in Mauritius. As displacement expert Ranjit Nayak explains of many displaced peoples, “Certain occupations . . . may involve further expulsion. These occupations are taken . . . not by choice, but because of compulsion to earn their livelihood.”
³¹

The conventional, and idealized, view of the economic boom in Mauritius is that the nation achieved full employment by the late 1980s. Though unemployment decreased significantly as a result of the growth in EPZ and tourist industry employment, unemployment and underemployment have remained problems. For many poor Mauritians, and especially for Chagossians, moving from unstable, insecure jobs to stable employment has proved impossible.
³²
Even near the height of Mauritian employment growth, in 1986, more than 30 percent of the labor force was working in the informal sector.
³³
In short, most Chagossians joined other AfroMauritians making up a largely invisible army of low-wage, easily hired and fired workers upon which the Mauritian economy continues to depend. “While Mauritius made remarkable economic progress in the 1980s and a majority of Mauritians benefited from the island’s development,” anthropologist Rosabelle Boswell explains, “a significant heterogeneous [AfroMauritian] minority of Mauritians, known locally as Creoles, have not profited from Mauriti[an] economic success.”
³⁴

A 1980 survey found 85.8 percent of male Chagossians underemployed and 46.3 percent of women completely unemployed. “The economic situation of the Ilois community,” observed a social worker, was (and we shall see, is) characterized “by low wages, unemployment, [and] underemployment” for people with skills still ill suited for the Mauritian labor market.
³⁵
Another 1981 survey showed a male unemployment rate of 41 percent and
female unemployment at 58 percent. Most of the few families who had “satisfactorily remunerated jobs” were among a relatively small cohort who arrived in Mauritius prior to 1960 and married Mauritians.
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