Indian Ocean Islanders Take On a Superpower

Former truck driver Norbert L'Emclume, 65, sits in a shabby hut in Cassis, a slum in Port Louis, the capital of the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. His wife hangs up laundry, while their grandchildren play on old mattresses laid across a narrow, open sewage ditch. In addition to serving as in impromptu playground, the mattresses are also where the 12 members of L'Emclume's family sleep.

Questions about L'Emclume's origins awaken sad memories and he often responds with an elegiac poem often recited in the slums. "I left my country, my little island; I lost my family and my heart."

This week, the fate of L'Emclume and other former Chagossians is the subject of a case being argued halfway around the world, before a court in London. Once again, lawyers and judges in faraway Great Britain are revisiting the story of a destroyed paradise in the Indian Ocean -- and a dirty chapter in the more recent history of the former colonial power.

At issue is a story from the days of slavery, except that this tale begins only four decades ago. It's the story of how Her Majesty's government depopulated and sold off the 60-square-kilometer (about 23 square miles) Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, along with their 2,000 inhabitants, including L'Emclume. Their imperial goals, after all, were more important.

The story begins in the 1960s, when the English -- then as now led by Queen Elizabeth II -- depopulated the islands. The Chagossians were starved out, pets were gassed before the eyes of the islands' children, and finally, the islanders were loaded onto freighters and shipped off to the Seychelles and Mauritius.

What to do with the inhabitants?

The emptied islands didn't remain empty for long, though. For $14 million -- paid indirectly in the form of a discount on Polaris rockets purchased by Great Britain from the United States -- America leased the largest island in the archipelago in 1966. Diego Garcia soon became one of the US's most important military bases the world over.

The choice of location was hardly accidental. From the beginning of the coldest phase of the Cold War -- beginning in the early 60s with the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis -- the US had been ramping up its search for strategically located military bases. A base in the Indian Ocean, they reasoned, would help keep the Soviet Union and China at bay. Films at Britain's national archive, the Public Records Office in London, offer extensive documentation of the exploratory trips taken by US military personnel. For the Americans, the Chagos Islands were the perfect location. The only problem? They were inhabited.

The Chagossians originally came from Mozambique, Madagascar, Senegal and southern India. The descendants of slaves, they worked on the coconut plantations and made a living trading in copra, a lamp oil derived from coconuts and a sought-after commodity on Mauritius and in the Seychelles. Indeed, the Chagos Islands were also known as the "Oil Islands."

The plantation owners on the three largest islands, Diego Garcia, Peros Banhos and Salomon, had created a well-functioning infrastructure. The islands boasted churches, schools and even a small railroad. Food, lodging and medical care were free for the plantation workers.

The islanders raised ponies and donkeys, pigs and chickens, and they spent much of their time fishing in the idyllic lagoons surrounding the atolls. As a sign of loyalty to the Queen, even the simplest corrugated metal huts proudly displayed the Union Jack or the Chagossian coat of arms, which depicts three portly tortoises.

A net of lies and fabrications

But the United States wanted Diego Garcia swept clean -- and they also wanted to avoid embarrassing questions by the United Nations over the fate of the local inhabitants. To satisfy the Americans' demands, the British Foreign Office began weaving a net of lies and fabrications. According to one proposal, the Chagossians would be classified as migrant workers from Mauritius and the Seychelles, which would conveniently legitimize their deportation. But the plan was quickly discarded when the results of an anthropological study showed that this was not the case. Ultimately, the British decided simply to keep quiet about the islanders' whereabouts.

"I would advise a policy of quiet disregard -- in other words, let's forget about this one till the United Nations challenges it," advised one civil servant in an internal memo. In 1966 another top diplomat, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, issued the following instructions to his colleague, Dennis Greenhill: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours.... There will be no indigenous population except seagulls."

When Great Britain granted its colony Mauritius, which also included Chagos, independence in 1968, the "Oil Islands" remained under London's guardianship. The depopulation program began in 1971 and ended in 1973, when the last Chagossians were forcibly deported and Diego Garcia was turned over to the United States.

Nowadays about 5,500 Chagossians and their offspring live in exile -- 4,500 in Port Louis, 650 in the Seychelles and 300 near London's Gatwick Airport. Although London paid each deported Chagossian about £3,000 in compensation, most of the islanders quickly slipped into poverty, succumbing to unemployment, drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, AIDS and high rates of suicide. The Creole word the Chagossians themselves use to describe their melancholy condition is "chagrin" -- longing.

But in 1998 they decided to fight back, and filed a lawsuit against the British government. The Chagossians' legal representatives, led by Nelson Mandela's attorney Sydney Kentridge, discovered a treasure trove in the Public Records Office: the many handwritten files that documented the fate of Diego Garcia. In 2000, the High Court declared the deportations illegal and ruled that the displaced Chagossians were within their rights in seeking to return to the islands.

"7.20 S, 72.25 E"

But the United States had absolutely no intention of giving up "7.20 S, 72.25 E," as the base is known in military circles. For the Americans, Diego Garcia is an indispensable launching pad for sorties over Afghanistan, Iraq and other destinations throughout half of Asia -- an ideal hub for a powerful fleet of B-52 and Stealth bombers.

The island has a harbor that can accommodate 30 warships. It also has shooting ranges and other training facilities, crude oil and gasoline storage tanks. From its vantage point on Diego Garcia, Washington monitors the region's tanker routes, as well as the activities of rising global players India and China. The island is home to about 4,000 troops, as well as civilian employees, mainly from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, but none from the Chagos Islands.

"Diego Garcia is experiencing steady growth, so as to meet professional and personal needs," raves the US Marines' Web site. But the archipelago is off-limits to visitors. With the exception of a British representative without any authority and the families of US military personnel, no one else is permitted to set foot on the islands.

In June 2004, the Americans made it clear that they intend to neither leave Diego Garcia nor tolerate any expatriate locals on the neighboring islands, claiming that they could "set up jamming transmitters and obstruct important military missions." The British Foreign Office, for its part, urged Queen Elizabeth II to issue a rare "Order in Council," an order made possible under the rules of the revised constitution that invalidates all previous court rulings while circumventing the British parliament. In doing so, the Queen appears to have banned the Chagossians from their native islands once and for all.

"Was Her Majority given a chance to read the order before she signed it?" asks Olivier Bancoult, president of the Chagos Refugees Group in Cassis, who plans to personally stage a protest in London against the royal edict. "Does she remember how London sent a fleet of ships to save the 2,000 Falkland Islanders in 1982, while 2,000 Chagossians, subjects of the crown just as they were, were simply abducted?"

Despite everything, the exiles envision their future as British subjects. All they want is to follow the lead of other island nations and transform their home into a profitable tourist destination. They do not expect the Americans to withdraw, at least for now. Given their current situation, the Chagossians would be content with well-paying jobs with the US military. "We are a small people without blonde hair and without education," says Bancoult. "But we ask the world to respect us and let us return home."
The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is located perfectly from a strategic point of view. But when the US military adopted it as a military base in the 1960s and 70s, it was inconveniently populated. The natives were driven out -- but now, they want their home back.

By Padma Rao

FRANCE-AFRICA: FROM SLAVERY TO SUMMITS

The leaders of France and 53 African countries open the latest biennial France-Africa summit in the west African state of Mali on Saturday.
Herewith a four-century chronology of France's role in Africa, which began with the slave trade in the 17th century and evolved through the rush for colonies in the 19th, followed by decolonisation in the second half of the 20th.

1642: King Louis XIII formally authorises French participation in the seizure of Africans for transportation into slavery in the Caribbean, a practice started by Portuguese traders two centuries earlier and widely practiced by all the main European powers.

1651-1715: Under King Louis XIV, France engages in heightened competition for international trade with the British, Dutch and Portuguese. The lucrative Caribbean sugar trade is underpinned by the transport of slaves from West Africa. French port cities such as Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Nantes become major slave trading centres;
- French traders settle along the West African coast, following on from the Dutch and the Portuguese. Saint-Louis in Senegal becomes a major French settlement;

1794: The Convention government born of the French Revolution abolishes slavery in the colonies, which at that time are all in the Americas. Eight years later First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte makes slavery legal again;

1830: In France's first military foray into Africa, troops invade Algeria, which is conquered and settled over several decades. Settlement increases enormously after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870;

1848: The slave trade is formally abolished by France, over four decades after its abolition by Britain;

Undated: At some point during the 19th century, the watchword for French colonisation in Africa becomes the "mission civilisatrice" (civilising mission), a slogan comparable to Britain's conceit of what Rudyard Kipling called "the white man's burden";

1869: The Suez Canal, built by France, opens up trade routes to east Africa. In the same year the discovery of diamonds in southern Africa sharpens the appetites that will herald the European "scramble for Africa" at the century's end;

1884: At the instigation of the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck the main European powers hold a conference in Berlin effectively to carve up Africa between them. From then on until World War II, the powers rush to grab territory in Africa, with the French mostly operating from their bases in the west, and also taking Madagascar in the Indian Ocean;

1895: France establishes two vast colonial administrations in West Africa (the AOF) and Equatorial Africa (AEF) north of the Congo River;

1898: A military clash between British and French forces at Fashoda in the Sudan ends France's ambition of linking up its colonies in west Africa to the Red Sea, where Djibouti is a strategic French outpost. The two great powers agree to delimit their zones on the continent;

1914-1918: All the major European belligerents in World War I draft in Africans from their colonies to fight. France notably uses its "tirailleurs senegalais" (infantry "sharpshooters"from Senegal) who will also play a role in World War II.
At the end of the war Germany loses its colonies, but France, like Britain and Belgium, conserves and consolidates its empire; each takes some former German-run lands;

1929-30: The Great Depression in the industrialised countries creates more favourable conditions for local economic progress in Africa, although independence movements remain embryonic;

1940-45: World War II leaves the European colonial powers severely weakened, increasing pressure for independence. Parts of the empire in Africa come out on the side of General Charles de Gaulle in his fight against the Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France. At the end of the war French troops commit massacres in both Algeria and Senegal, in the latter case against Senegalese colonial troops who are demanding their pay;

1958: Returning as president of France during the Algerian independence war, Charles de Gaulle organises a referendum on independence in sub-Saharan African colonies. Only Guinea votes in favour -- the other territories are given self-government;

1960: De Gaulle grants full independence to all other French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, which nevertheless retain close links to Paris. Several of them continue to host French military bases to this day;

1962: France grants independence to Algeria after a murderous eight-year war;

1973: France organises the first biennial summit with African countries, with the events initially only for French-speaking states, but later bringing in others. The summits take place on alternate years in France and in Africa;

Despite independence, French troops have continued to intervene in Africa, notably in 1977 and 78 in the Shaba region of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. France currently has 7,000 troops in five bases from Dakar in Senegal to Djibouti, but they increasingly seek to operate in the framework of multinational forces.