#chagossians

David Lammy, a descendant of enslaved people, has taken office as United Kingdom Foreign Secretary and said he wants to rebuild the UK’s relations with the Global South.

He has an immediate opportunity to meaningfully address the legacies of UK imperial atrocities, starting with an ongoing colonial crime that he could end immediately – the UK’s forced displacement of the Chagossian people.

The Chagos islands, in the Indian Ocean, were governed under UK colonial rule from the island of Mauritius. The Chagossians, an Indigenous people, are the descendants of enslaved people and contract workers.

Over 50 years ago, when nearly all of Britain’s colonies in Africa were achieving independence, the UK and US governments conspired in secret for the UK to hold onto Chagos and to expel its entire population so the US could build a military base on the largest island, Diego Garcia.

As records show, the expulsion of the Chagossians was based on lies and racism, leaving them in extreme poverty. To this day, the UK government refuses to allow the Chagossians to return to their homeland. This forced displacement, racial persecution, and prevention of their return amount to crimes against humanity under international law. Human Rights Watch argued in February 2023 that individuals should be put on trial for the expulsion of Chagossians and that the UK should pay full and unconditional reparations to generations affected by its forcible displacement.

The new UK Government has inherited these ongoing colonial crimes, but could end them tomorrow. UK governments have repeatedly acknowledged for the last 20 years that the treatment of the Chagossians was “shameful and wrong”, but the same successive British Governments have continued to prevent their return.

Tony Blair’s government used the monarchy to issue an ‘Order-in-Council’, bypassing parliament to prevent the Chagossians from returning.

Scattered about halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia, about 7° south of the Equator, the British Indian Ocean Territory, comprised of the majority of the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, continues to cause ripples in international affairs, as the full extent of the wacky [underhanded, it is submitted] behavior of British and United States of American wheeler-dealers emerges.  Originally part of the British colony of Mauritius (which was itself a French colony before that, having originally been sighted by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in the early 1500s), the Chagos (and some of the islands of Seychelles) were cobbled together to form the British Indian Ocean Territory in 1965 to give the British a bargaining chip with the United States of Americans, who in turn wanted a military base in the Indian Ocean--an otherwise *uninhabited* military base in the Indian Ocean, it should be noted.  Ergo.  The forced depopulation of the roughly 2,000 Chagossians who called the islands home (descendants of the African/Indian/Malay slaves brought over to work the copra plantations) commenced in earnest and was realized fully by the early 1970s.  Through the decades, the Îlois have fought for the right of return, and just as progress was being made, some leaked documents in recent years have shown how the British and United States of Americans hatched a [nefarious, it is submitted] plan to create the Chagos Marine Protected Area and promptly designated the entirety of the BIOT thusly....and if you know anything about marine protected areas, you’ll know no one’s allowed to *live* there.....A strange little pocket of the earth.

Stamp details: Stamp on top: Issued on: October 23, 1968 From: Camp Justice, British Indian Ocean Territory MC #16

Middle stamps: Issued on: November 8, 1990 From: Camp Justice, British Indian Ocean Territory MC #108-109

Stamps on bottom: Issued on: May 2, 2018 From: Camp Justice, British Indian Ocean Territory Colnect #2018-01

Song for a stolen land: Silence of the Chagos by Shenaz Patel @RestlessBooks @J_Zuckerman

The Chagos. An archipelago with a name silken as a caress, fervid as regret, brutal as death . . .

The prologue that opens Shenaz Patel’s Silence of the Chagospresents a sharp juxtaposition: A boy in war-torn Afghanistan looks up as a B-52 bomber soars in, dropping a bomb that will tear his mother’s body apart before returning to its base far to the south on the island of Diego Garcia in the…

The Chagos Islands – where might remains right

I have written about this issue twice before (here and here), but it’s time for a sad update. (more…)