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

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

8/19/2009
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8/20/2009 Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia

Author David Vine's book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia is the first major book to reveal how the United States and the United Kingdom conspired to kidnap and expel the Chagossians, the indigenous people of the Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia. In 1971 the Chagossians were deported to the slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles. They live there to this day where they struggle to survive fight to return to their homeland. "The story of the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, and the cruel displacement of the island's people, has long been hidden from the American public," wrote Howard Zinn. "We owe a debt to David Vine for revealing it to the larger public." "A very good, original book on an important and intellectually challenging subject," wrote Chalmers Johnson, "the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of the American government in its forced expulsion of an indigenous people in order to build the supersecret military base at Diego Garcia."

Rita felt like she’d been sliced open and all the blood spilled from her body.

“What happened to you? What happened to you?” her children cried as they came running to her side.

“What happened?” her husband inquired.

“Did someone attack you?” they asked.

“I heard everything they said,” Rita recounted, “but my voice couldn’t open my mouth to say what happened.” For an hour she said nothing, her heart swollen with emotion.

Finally she blurted out: “We will never again return to our home! Our home has been closed!” As Rita told me almost forty years later, the man said to her: “Your island has been sold. You will never go there again.”

Marie Rita Elysée Bancoult is one of the people of the Chagos Archipelago, a group of about 64 small coral islands near the isolated center of the Indian Ocean, halfway between Africa and Indonesia, 1,000 miles south of the nearest continental landmass, India. Known as Chagossians, none live in Chagos today. Most live 1,200 miles away on the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Like others, 80-year-old Rita lives far from Mauritius’s renowned tourist beaches and luxury hotels. Rita, or Aunt Rita as she is known, lives in one of the island’s poorest neighborhoods, known for its industrial plants and brothels, in a small aging three-room house made of concrete block.

Rita and other Chagossians cannot return to their homeland because between 1968 and 1973, in a plot carefully hidden from the world, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500–2,000 islanders to create a major U.S. military base on the Chagossians’ island Diego Garcia. Initially, government agents told those like Rita who were away seeking medical treatment or vacationing in Mauritius that their islands had been closed and they could not go home. Next, British officials began restricting supplies to the islands and more Chagossians left as food and medicines dwindled. Finally, on the orders of the U.S. military, U.K. offi cials forced the remaining islanders to board overcrowded cargo ships and left them on the docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles. Just before the last deportations, British agents and U.S. troops on Diego Garcia herded the Chagossians’ pet dogs into sealed sheds and gassed and burned them in front of their traumatized owners awaiting deportation.

The people, the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured south Indians brought to Chagos beginning in the eighteenth century, received no resettlement assistance and quickly became impoverished. Today the group numbers around 5,000. Most remain deeply impoverished. Meanwhile the base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most secretive and powerful U.S. military facilities in the world, helping to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), threatening Iran, China, Russia, and nations from southern Africa to southeast Asia, host to a secret CIA detention center for high-profile terrorist suspects, and home to thousands of U.S. military personnel and billions of dollars in deadly weaponry. - a selection from Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia by David Vine.

Island of Shame
David Vine
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