Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (45 page)

15
. Several Mauritian governments have likewise rejected recognition of the Chagossians as an indigenous people or as refugees, concerned about undermining the sovereignty claim.

16
.
Regina (on the application of Bancoult) v. Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
[2006] EWHC 1038 Admin. 4093, para. 27.

17
. CRG was joined by islanders in the Seychelles eventually known as the Chagossians Committee Seychelles.

18
. Pilger,
Freedom Next Time
, 54.

19
.
Bancoult
et al.
v. McNamara et al
., 360 F.Supp. 2d (D.D.C. 2004).

20
. This analysis draws substantially on Jeffery, “The Politics of Victimhood,” 114–17.

21
. Laura Jeffery, “‘Our Right Is Our Land’: The Chagos Archipelago and Discourses on Rights to Land in the Indian Ocean,” in
Rights and Development in Mauritius—A Reader
, ed. S. Bunwaree and R. Kasenally (Reduit: OSSREA Mauritius Chapter/University of Mauritius, 2007), 10.

22
. Ibid., 11.

23
. Lindsay Collen and Ragini Kitnasamy, “Diego Garcia Visit after Lifetime Banishment Due to Bass,” press release, Lalit, Port Louis, Mauritius, March 25, 2006. Emphasis in original.

24
. Walter H. Annenberg, telegram to the Secretary of State, June 10, 1969, NARA: RG 59/150/64–65, Subject-Numeric Files 1967–1969, Box 1552.

25
. See Vine and Jeffery, “Give Us Back Diego Garcia.”

26
. When Chagossians claimed citizenship, some Mauritians criticized the move as unpatriotic and a threat to the nation’s efforts to regain sovereignty over Chagos. Some were angered when CRG members publicly celebrated their new citizenship by waving the Union Jack and pictures of the Queen.

27
. In the years following the expulsion, a handful of women had followed Mauritian or Seychellois husbands to Europe or Australia in search of work.

28
.
Chagos Islanders v. The Attorney General, Her Majesty’s British Indian Ocean Territory Commissioner
, [2003] EWHC 2222. For a discussion of all the major suits, see Christian Nauvel, “A Return from Exile in Sight? The Chagossians and Their Struggle,”
Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights
5, no. 1 (2006):111;
Chagos Islanders v. The Attorney General, her Majesty’s British Indian Ocean Territory Commissioner
, [2003] EWHC 222.

29
.
Bancoult
et al.
v. McNamara et al
.

30
. Ibid., 117 n.156.

31
. Ibid., 120.

32
. Pilger,
Freedom Next Time
, 55.

33
. Neil Tweedle, “Britain Shamed as Exiles of the Chagos Islands Win the Right to Go Home,”
Daily Telegraph
, May 11, 2006,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1552445/Chagos-Island-exiles-win-right-to-return-home.html
.

34
. In 2000, the British Government allowed Olivier Bancoult and two other Chagossian leaders to briefly visit the islands.

35
.
Regina (on the application of Bancoult) v. Secretary of State
[2006], para. 142.

36
. Paul Majendie, “Chagos Islanders Win Right to Go Home,”
Reuters
, May 11, 2006.

37
.
Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office v. The Queen (Bancoult)
[2007].

38
. Richard Gifford, press statement, May 23, 2007.

39
. Bill Rammell, Parliamentary Answer, July 12, 2004,
http://domain1164221.sites.fasthosts.com/parliamentary%20questions.htm#12jul04
.

40
. Sean Carey, “Don’t Mention the Chagossians,”
New Statesman
, November 20, 2007.

41
. Regina [2006], para. 96.

42
. The CRG also argues that Chagossians are a peaceful people wishing no harm to the United States; that Peros Banhos and Salomon are over 150 miles from
Diego Garcia, raising serious questions about the “security” argument; and that civilians live next to U.S. bases around the world (even “the enemy” in Cuba).

43
. The following paragraphs stem from Vine and Jeffery, “Give Us Back Diego Garcia.”

44
. Louis Olivier Bancoult, Chagos Refugees Group, speech, Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, July 20, 2004.

Chapter Twelve
The Right to Return and a Humanpolitik

1
. CIA Board of National Estimates, “Strategic and Political Interests in the Western Indian Ocean,” special memorandum, April 11, 1967, LBJ: NSF, Country File, India, Box 133, India, Indian Ocean Task Force, vol. II. The land area of the BIOT was described as “N/A” for not applicable. A document most like written by Stuart Barber described the population in Peros Banhos and Salomon as “minor” (see Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure).

Race and racism defined two of the main criteria for the selection of Diego Garcia as a base site: First, under the Strategic Island Concept’s criteria, islands selected for base development were to have small non-European indigenous populations that, as Horacio Rivero knew well with the Bikinians, the government could easily remove. Second, the Strategic Island Concept held that islands selected for base development had to be controlled by the United States or by a Western ally, like the United Kingdom or Australia; they could not be controlled by a non-Western, non-white government.

It’s not unreasonable to think that the World War II island-hopping campaign in the Pacific influenced more than just officials’ ideas about the importance of island bases. The island hopping is likely also to have powerfully shaped ideas about race shared by Navy officials in particular. During the campaign, Navy and other forces had what for almost all of them were their first interactions with local tropical island populations. Given popular ideas at the time (for the most part held to this day), it would have been difficult for sailors and soldiers to think of these islanders as anything but the “primitive” natives they were portrayed as by anthropologists and journalists alike. The government’s widely publicized deportation of the Bikinians after the war and its paternalistic treatment of islanders elsewhere in the Pacific would have only reinforced these views.

2
. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” in
Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology
, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 21.

3
. Mark Curtis,
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World
(London: Vintage, 2003).

4
. W.E.B. DuBois,
The World and Africa
, expanded ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1965[1946]); Hannah Arendt,
Imperialism
, part II of
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951).

5
. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” 19.

6
. Leith Mullings, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
34 (2005): 684.

7
. Gillem,
American Town
, 37.

8
. Catherine Lutz, “A U.S. ‘Invasion’ of Korea,”
Boston Globe
, October 8, 2006; KCTP English News, “When You Grow Up, You Must Take the Village Back,”
http://www.antigizi.or.kr/zboard/zboard.php?id=english_news&page=1&sn1=&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&
select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc&no=204
.

9
. Kiste,
TheBikinians
, 198.

10
. Stuart B. Barber, letter to the editor of the
Washington Post
, unpublished, March 9, 1991.

11
. A. M. Jackson, memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations, December 7, 1964, NHC: 00 Files, 1965, Box 26, 11000/1B, 3–4.

12
. The U.S. Government did not, however, grant the islanders’ requests for U.S. citizenship, finding them to be Japanese nationals. In 1961, the U.S. Government paid the islanders of Japanese ancestry $6 million in compensation in the (ultimately failed) hope of stemming their repatriation claims. The U.S. Government maintained the policy of refusing repatriation to those of Japanese descent until 1968, when under continued pressure the islands were returned to Japanese sovereignty. See ibid.

At least one similar case exists, on Ascension Island, part of the British territory of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. There, about 1,000 islanders who are mostly of mixed ancestry, the descendants of English settlers and enslaved Africans, live and work next to a U.S. base in place since World War II. Together the Bonin-Volcanos and Ascension underline how the pattern of base displacement has been shaped to some extent by population size but as importantly by a closely intertwined nexus of one’s skin color, status in the colonial hierarchy, and relative wealth and power.

13
. Rivero, “Assuring a Future Base Structure”; see also Bezboruah,
U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean
, 58.

14
. Richard Rhodes has made this argument. See Thompson, “Arsenal of Words,” C2.

15
. This analysis builds on Cynthia Enloe’s critical insistence that scholars make the gender of foreign policy actors a visible part of foreign policy analysis. See, e.g., Enloe, “Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy.”

16
. Hochschild,
King Leopold’s Ghost
, 123.

17
. Halberstam,
TheBest and the Brightest
, 746. A less aggressive solution to ensure long-term base occupancy would have been to adjust U.S. relations with nations hosting bases or the policies affecting such relationships. This was apparently never considered. Even if taking control of Diego Garcia had remained the policy, the expulsion was again the toughest of policy options in privileging the military’s interests over the Chagossians’ rights and any policy of coexistence (as was explored in the Bonin-Volcano islands and elsewhere).

18
. See Bandjunis,
Diego Garcia
, 167–262.

19
. C. Johnson,
The Sorrows of Empire
, 253.

20
. Gillem,
American Town
, 263, 272, 17.

21
. C. Johnson,
Nemesis
, 148–49, quoting Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.

22
. Ibid., 147–49.

23
. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the base served as a runway for surveillance planes.

24
. Seeing the ways in which the United States enjoys a significant degree of
de facto
sovereignty over the world’s oceanic territory points to the further similarity (albeit a more hidden one) between the U.S. Empire and the European
territorial
empires of the past. This also points to how the ability of the U.S. Navy to provide unchallenged control of the Earth’s major bodies of water since World War II has been another underappreciated pillar of U.S. Empire. As Admiral Mahan pointed out, since the beginning of European expansion in the fifteenth century, with few exceptions, empires have been naval powers. Air forces are increasingly playing a parallel role, but navies have been a critical tool for empires to send troops to conquer foreign lands, to dominate the flow of trade, and to exert political and economic influence over other nations by threat or actual attack. While interest in Diego Garcia shifted from spices to oil, the base illustrates the continuing centrality of naval power to empire, linking the naval empires of France and Britain to the naval empire of the United States, which finally built the base its predecessors coveted. Similarly, Diego Garcia shows how the “geopolitical attractiveness” of island bases has resonated across the centuries. Island bases have been attractive as protected oases from which empires can use their navies to defend oceangoing commerce. As Stuart Barber realized, without large populations or hinterlands to govern, small islands generally have little vulnerability to attack, making them a cost-effective way to support a navy. See George H. Quester, ed.,
Sea Power in the 1970s
, Conference on Problems of Naval Armaments, Ithaca, NY, 1972 (New York: Kennikat Press, 1975), 162.

25
. Foster, “A Warning to Africa.”

26
. VOAnews.com, “Sao Tome Sparks American Military Interest,”
http://www.voanews.com
, November 12, 2004,
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2004-11/2004-11-12-voa42.cfm?CFID=134408071&CFTOKEN=70993939
.

27
. BBC News, “US Naval Base to Protect Sao Tome Oil,” August 22, 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2210571.stm
.

28
. IRIN, “Sao Tome and Principe: Attorney General Finds ‘Serious Flaws’ in the Award of Oil Exploration Contracts,” November 15, 2005,
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=57579
.

29
. Cooley, “Base Politics”; Foster, “A Warning to Africa.”

30
. Scott,
Limuria
, 68.

31
. The creation of a base as part of Britain’s last colony, the BIOT, itself created through the dismemberment of the colonies of Mauritius and the Seychelles, suggests ways in which the imperial past lives on in the overseas base network as
part of the “imperial present.” See Gregory,
The Colonial Present
. (Thanks to Neil Smith for his suggestion of this phrase playing off Gregory’s title.) Many other important U.S. bases are located in colonies or what have recently been colonies, including the bases in Thule, Okinawa, and Britain’s Ascension island. Several key bases likewise exist in remaining U.S. colonial possessions, including those in Guam, Puerto Rico (until recently in Vieques), and prior to post–World War II statehood, Hawai‘i and Alaska.