SO WHY IS IT THEN...:

All your bases belong to US: a review of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia by David Vine (Justin Vogt , The National)

Diego Garcia is the largest of the 64 coral islands that comprise the isolated Chagos Archipelago, located 1600 kilometres south of India, the closest continental land mass. The majority of Americans have surely never heard of it, but the island is a crucial outpost in the vast “empire of bases” that both ensures and defines America’s global hegemony. The rapid transformation of Diego Garcia from postcolonial backwater to strategic asset – which forced every single one of its indigenous inhabitants into exile – is the subject of David Vine’s Island of Shame, a devastating account of the human costs of empire-building.

The story begins in 1960, when Stuart Barber, a civilian working at the Pentagon in the Navy’s long-range planning office, devised what he called the “Strategic Island Concept”. Barber was a “defence intellectual”, one of a cadre of academics and experts who, in the early years of the Cold War, helped expand the notion of national security into a far-reaching vision of American power and influence. Like others in Washington, he feared that as former European colonies achieved independence, they would become inhospitable sites for military outposts, limiting America’s ability to project power into regions – like the Middle East – critical to the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The United States, Barber argued, needed to build bases in remote locations, close to hot spots but at a safe remove from local troublemakers– the only places, Barber wrote in a memo to his superiors in the John F Kennedy administration, that “could be safely held under full control of the West”. Islands were the natural solution, but it would be necessary to select those whose indigenous populations would not cause what Barber delicately referred to as “political complications”.

Diego Garcia fit the bill. By 1963, when American planners resolved to build a base in the Chagos Archipelago, the islands were home to roughly 1000 people, British subjects employed on the island’s coconut plantations. The Chagossians – also known as the Ilois – comprised a genuine indigenous community, descended from the African slaves and Indian indentured servants brought to the islands by 18th- and 19th-century French and British colonists.

As Vine relates, the United States had dealt swiftly and mercilessly with other inconveniently-placed native populations: in the 1940s and 1950s, indigenous communities in Puerto Rico, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands and elsewhere had been “relocated” in order to make way for American military installations or nuclear test sites, often with disastrous results. This time around, the Americans found a willing partner in Britain, a declining power eager to free itself of the burdens of empire without renouncing its presence in the Indian Ocean. The Americans told the British that they wanted “exclusive control” of the islands – delivered “without local inhabitants”. In exchange, the United States forgave a $14 million bill for assistance it had provided to the British nuclear missile programme.

To meet their obligations to the United States, the British needed to remove the natives without appearing to violate the rights of colonised people enshrined in international law. The solution was a breathtakingly cynical act of bad faith. As a UK Foreign Office legal adviser described in an internal memo, all the British had to do was “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population”. Thus, the Chagossians – a community whose roots on Diego Garcia stretched back for generations – were transformed into mere “transient workers”. Vine reveals that this bit of semantic dispossession was an explicit part of the secret agreements between the two allies regarding the fate of the islanders. The US embassy in London was instructed in a memo from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to use the term “migrant labourers” when discussing the Chagossians with the British, since “withdrawal of ‘inhabitants’ obviously would be more difficult to justify”.

Once the justification was in place, the depopulation could begin.

...that the Left never defines whites as the indigenous people no matter how many generations we stay somewhere?

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 22, 2009 9:04 AM