For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm very happy to welcome to the show David Vine.
He is the author of the book, Island of Shame, the Secret History of the U.S. Military Base, on Diego Garcia.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you?
Thank you very much.
It's great to be here.
I'm really happy to have you here.
Excellent book here.
Congratulations.
I highly recommend everyone go out and get this.
It's very well done, very well written, very readable, and a very important story.
But let's just start with what the heck is Diego Garcia?
Never heard of such a thing.
Yeah, few folks in the U.S. have heard about it.
It's a very small, isolated island in the middle of the Indian Ocean where it just so happens that the United States government has a very large and significant military base, again, that very few people have heard about.
Even fewer have heard that and know that to create the base, the U.S. and British governments conspired to forcibly remove the entire local people of Diego Garcia and the surrounding Chagos Archipelago and simply deported them about 1,200 miles away to the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles.
All right.
Well, now, so I guess just help me out.
Indian Ocean is a big place.
So let's say if we're trying to get people to picture that part of the world, east of Africa, somewhere between Africa and Indonesia and pretty much due south of what?
Of India, about 1,000 miles due south of India, it's a very isolated, smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Okay.
And then I thought that this is interesting and kind of might catch people's attention.
You describe this thing.
I think you say the Americans call it Fantasy Island, that this is one of these most beautiful, like Lagoon, Gilligan's Island sort of, last Shangri-La on Earth kind of places, way out there in the middle of nowhere, huh?
That's right.
I've got a few nicknames for it, all of which sort of are sort of a painful memorial to the people who used to enjoy those beautiful islands who are known as Chagossians.
But Fantasy Island, yeah, is one of the nicknames that's been given to these beautiful tropical atolls.
All right.
So I guess we've got to go back in time here.
I'm not sure whether we should go back in time to the foundations of the American Empire, as you do such an interesting and great job, comprehensive job writing about in the book, or maybe we need to go back and talk about the British Empire in the Indian Ocean, which goes back to, you know, what, 1300-something A.D. or what?
Yeah, although the sort of competition in the Indian Ocean that's most relevant is that between the British and French Empires basically in the 18th century when they started claiming islands, first Mauritius and then looking for other islands that would be strategically located in their competition for the riches of India and the strategic ice resources that were so much in demand in those days.
That's exactly what led to both the British and French to first look at Diego Garcia because it was so strategically located relative to the shipping route to India, and actually it was first the French that settled Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands of the Chagos Archipelago, building coconut plantations there, although the people who really did the building were enslaved Africans and later indentured Indian laborers who were brought to Diego Garcia and these other islands.
And then over a period of about 200 years, the workers, the laborers on these coconut plantations came to found and create a unique and distinct society and became a new people who were initially known as the Ilwa, but more recently have become called the Chagossians.
So, and I guess, well, I don't know, I never did like the phrase, aid people, but I guess the way you're using it, you're saying these people who were formerly slaves for hundreds of years on this island, basically won their freedom on the island and they had created their own little civilization there.
They had created their own distinct little, if not ethnicity, nationality that they had made over quite a period of time.
How long were they independent of their slave owners there on that island?
I mean, not that the time before that shouldn't count or whatever, but...
Right, right.
Well, settlement on the island, the beginnings of the society there began in the late 18th century, around the time of the American Revolution, actually.
And the laborers there won their independence in 1835 with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which had come to take over Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago from the French.
And then the people lived there until the mid and late 1960s, and over time, again, developing their society further, their own language called Chagos Creole developed, and putting down roots in the island for five generations or more.
And I think the reason that it's worth kind of bringing up my sort of libertarian hobby horse about the collective identity is I think it depends on the frame of reference of the people doing the violating of the rights to, or what have you, or the bystanders, of whether it's worse to wipe out a people, or what's worse is the fact that here are individuals, thousands of them, who own property and have their rights as individuals have been violated.
And that's really what's wrong with the mass kidnapping and stealing of this island from these people is that they're people, and they owned it, and stealing is stealing.
It's as simple as that.
I think, from my perspective anyway, people can seem to deny rights once they deny the individual identity of the victim.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think you put it very well that this was an act of theft.
However you want to conceptualize the victims, but this was a group of people and a group of individuals who had their homeland stolen from them, as well as their individual property, their individual land and homes, houses, and other possessions that they had there and that they had received from earlier generations, their ancestors who had lived there.
Now, you take one look at the picture from the satellite or the map, and you can see why Diego Garcia is the prize.
It's this V-shaped island with this massive harbor in the center and everything.
And again, as you say, it's a fantasy island, white sands and beautiful everything and that kind of thing.
But how many islands are there total in this Chagossian chain?
I think, I'm not sure if I ever resolved this, but at one point I remember wondering in the book whether the British and the Americans after World War II had just taken the entire chain and depopulated, so-called, mass kidnapped, as the Washington Post once put it, the entire population of all of these islands, or why was it that the people who were taken from Diego Garcia weren't at least allowed to go to some of the other nearby islands instead of having to go to Mauritius and all these places way over off of the coast of Africa?
That's a good question.
Diego Garcia is the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago, which is about 64 islands, and many of them were occupied by the Chagossians prior to the expulsion.
But the agreement that the two governments signed in 1966 was actually specifically for Diego Garcia, but both governments envisioned that if the U.S. indicated it needed any of the islands that the British government agreed, it would depopulate those islands as well.
In fact, as far as we know, the U.S. has only put military installations on Diego Garcia, although access to the islands is highly restricted.
I was prevented from going, and basically no journalists outside of observers have been able to go for over 20 years.
But as far as we know, there are only military facilities on Diego Garcia, but between 1968 and 1973, the two governments acting together, and with the British really doing most of the dirty work in exchange for a $14 million payment that the U.S. made, the British simply deported the Chagossians from all of the islands, not just Diego Garcia.
It actually was a two-stage process.
Many were hooded up onto cargo ships and deported from Diego Garcia to some of the smaller islands in the archipelago, and then from there were deported onward to Mauritius and the Seychelles and the Western Indian Ocean.
Well, and your description of the process by which these people were kidnapped, and again, that is the words I believe you quote from the Washington Post editorial, that we, meaning the United States government somehow, is guilty of a mass kidnapping of these people, and the way you describe it is an absolute horror show in here.
Yeah, it was not a pretty scene.
I actually just got back from Mauritius and the Seychelles, visiting with the Chagossians where they're living in exile and sharing a book with them, and people asked me about the title, Island of Shame, and the title actually comes from our friend Simon Winchester, the journalist who is one of the few journalists who have been able to get on Diego Garcia, but his suggestion of the title really echoed my feelings of shame that this is something that my government, my nation has done, has kidnapped this entire population and stolen their homeland from them.
The way it went down is that beginning in 1968, Chagossians who were off Diego Garcia and the other islands in Chagos for regular vacations or medical treatment were simply barred from returning to their homes, to their islands, and told, sorry, your islands have been sold, you can't go back, and separated from their land and property and the rest of their communities, and then British officials began cutting off supplies to the islands as the 1960s came to a close and conditions on the islands rapidly deteriorated.
Food and medical supplies began running low, and more Chagossians left hoping that conditions would improve and they'd be able to return, but in fact what happened, beginning in 1971, the U.S. Navy began construction of the base on Diego Garcia and ordered their British counterpart to complete the removal, and the British agent with U.S. military personnel looking on began rounding up the Chagossians on Diego Garcia and putting them onto cargo ships, and then simply sailed them away, some to these other islands in Chagos, others directly to Mauritius and the Seychelles, and in the process as the Chagossians were awaiting their deportation, British and U.S. officials rounded up the Chagossians' pet dogs and put them into sealed cargo sheds where they first gassed them and then burned them in front of their owners, which, you know, as one of the Chagossians' lawyers has pointed out, was a strong message to the Chagossians about what might happen if they were to resist their expulsion.
So it was not a pretty picture and has inflicted tremendous harm on the Chagossians, as happens to people around the world when you take their homeland from them, when you take their land from them and simply displace them, and that is what happened.
They were deported and literally left on the docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles with no resettlement plan in place.
Literally just left there on the docks and left to fend for themselves, to find their own jobs, to find housing, to make an entirely new way of life in a foreign land.
Well, 5,000 of them, right?
I mean, this is, I was going to say a Trail of Tears writ small, but I'm not sure how much smaller that is than the actual Trail of Tears.
Only this one took place in 1971.
That's right, that's right.
Your reference to the Trail of Tears I think is appropriate, and that is the larger context in which I try to tell the story to show that this is not, sadly, a unique episode in U.S. history, and we have to understand it in the context of understanding the history of the United States as an empire and the systematic dispossession of Native American peoples in this continent, mostly in the 19th century.
But then in the 20th century I've been able to document at least 16 other cases in which the U.S. military has displaced local people to create military facilities outside the United States.
So there is this pattern, and we have to see the ways in which the United States has acted like it has been an empire from its first days of independence.
And that, I think, is the context in which we can understand how it could be that our nation, our government, expelled this entire people.
Well, now, here's the thing, David.
I think, you know, in supermajority levels, you know, the so-called zeitgeist or whatever it is, collective conscience of America, people feel bad about what happened to the Indians.
That was a long time ago, and we can't undo it, but we don't glorify it in our Westerns anymore.
The documentary on the Discovery Channel is called How the West Was Lost, not How it Was Won, and we all know better than that now.
That was a terrible thing, and, jeez, even, you know, Hitler copied us.
Wow, how do you live that down?
That's pretty bad, but we're better now.
And yet, somehow, no, the exact same thing continues to happen.
It's just now there's water between here and there, and that's what makes the difference, I guess.
I think that does explain some of it, that this happened far away, although, you know, egregious things happen in our cities and close to home that we ignore.
But I think part of why so few people know about this and why it happened in the first place is that it did happen far away, and I think, unfortunately, our media tends to pay very little attention to anything that takes place outside the shores of the U.S.
But I think U.S. officials, mostly in the Pentagon and in the State Department, calculated that this was a small group of people living very far away, far removed from the lives of people in the United States, and that if they kept it quiet enough, which was their plan, and kept it hidden from Congress, which they did, that no one would know about it, let alone object.
And largely to this point, that's what's happened.
Well, what about the law?
They felt they had to hide it from Congress.
Did these men, was this a covert operation, or how secret was this that they had done this?
Because I guess that's really the other thing about realizing that what happened to the American Indians was wrong, and I think the law nowadays would forbid such a thing, right?
No?
Yes?
You would like to think.
The Chagossians have been suing both the British and the U.S. governments over the past decade.
In the U.S., the law has not been very friendly to them, largely because it's very difficult for non-U.S. citizens to sue the U.S. governments at all, but especially for any actions taking place outside the United States.
So it's been very convenient, actually, for U.S. officials to have this base on Diego Garcia be on British territory.
It is technically a joint U.K. base, but they're just a handful of British functionaries.
It's really a U.S. base.
But because it's British territory, it actually keeps the purview of U.S. law out of their hair.
So largely, the Chagossians have been able to seek recourse in U.S. law or had their suit quickly dismissed by U.S. courts.
Isn't that interesting?
People can be tried in American courts for crimes that they commit in other countries, like Manuel Noriega or the Ethiopian pirates.
They can be tried in Miami or in New York.
But if actual Americans do things under the color of law of the U.S. government in other places, then they are provided 100% immunity for anything that they might do.
That's pretty much what's gone down, both under the law of sovereign immunity, which gives the United States wide-ranging immunity for actions it commits outside the U.S., and then the immunity that's given to U.S. officials.
As long as someone, in this case it was the Attorney General, says that officials were acting in their official capacity as government officials, then anything they do can't abate the sanction of the law.
Well, now, at the end of the Cold War, one of the officers who came up with the idea of taking this island from these people and using it as a military base spoke out and said it's time to give it back.
But instead, what's happened, as you talk about in your book, I think it's John Pike at GlobalSecurity.org, says the Pentagon's plan is to be able to run the world, I guess that is threaten complete destruction to anyone in the world, from Diego Garcia and Guam by 2015.
So Diego Garcia, not only are we not giving it back, as that officer suggested at the end of the Cold War, it's become the very center point of America's enforcement arm in the era of our new unopposed world empire.
Yeah, it's become increasingly important through the years.
There was interest in the base because of its location and relative proximity to a wide range of territory from southern Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia and Southeast Asia, but increasingly the base has become critical to controlling the Middle East and Persian Gulf and its oil supplies and to Central Asia as well.
So you've seen it, the base on Diego Garcia, play key roles in the recent invasions and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the previous Gulf War in the 1990s, and many in the military see it and Guam as these key strategic hubs to locate huge amounts of weaponry, mostly naval and air force weaponry in the case of Diego Garcia, that can then be projected into any part of the world where someone in the U.S. government sees a strategic interest.
That's how military officials are seeing the base right now.
Well, it's a very important thing.
You review not just the history but also in contemporary terms just how expansive the American military is, the empire itself, just how big a footprint they call it, it really has around the world.
And it's the kind of thing where on one hand it's sort of like talking to 6th graders, on the other hand we are talking to the American people and we still don't hear the term American empire used nearly enough.
People can still not wrap their head around the idea.
The worst they can say is, well, we're the policemen of the world.
They just still don't get it.
But you do, David.
You explain in your book very well about National Security Council Directive No.
68 and how ever since then the American Pentagon and American foreign policy has been centered around the idea of hegemony over the planet Earth.
Can you just elaborate on that however you like from there?
Sure.
Yeah, it is difficult and it's even difficult for me.
I'd say growing up people in the United States think of the United States as a source of good and freedom in the world.
And of course the nation and many citizens in it are many of those things.
But I think we need to stare very directly at the face of the other side of what the United States is, which very much is an empire and has been since its founding.
And part of what I do in the book is show the way in which in the 20th century in particular and after World War II the United States has become something of an empire of military bases.
It's had many forms of power that it's deployed, economic and political, and other forms of military power.
Military bases in particular have come to distinguish the empire that the United States has become.
We actually have a collection of about 1,000 U.S. military bases outside the United States.
That's 1,000 military bases on other people's territory, which is really hard to comprehend especially for people here in the United States.
It's unprecedented in human history to have so many foreign military bases.
It's become a really key tool through which the United States has exerted its power and control around the world and its dominance.
Unfortunately you don't see much movement in the Obama administration to reign this empire of bases in.
In fact they've been looking for new bases.
It's very much been a bipartisan operation to build and maintain this infrastructure of military bases around the world.
As you show in this book, Island of Shame, the secret history of the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, this is true for the Chagossians and it's true for Eskimos and Koreans and Japanese and people all over the world that though these military bases, these empire bases might be invisible to the American population, these are very real things with very real consequences in the real world to real individuals who are the victims of, at the very least, the massive theft of their property.
As you document in great detail, the destruction of their lives.
On that note, I'd like to wrap up the interview, if I could, by giving you a chance to tell people about Rita Bancolt, if I'm saying that right, and who she is and what her story is.
If you can just verify to me that this Rita woman is a real human being and that, I don't know, at least in your eyes it matters that these things have happened to her and that she is owed justice right now.
Yeah, part of what I try to do in the book is intertwine the big picture story of the American empire and the creation of this base on Diego Garcia and its strategic importance and that analysis.
I intertwine that with telling the story of this one Chagossian family, the family of Rita Bancolt and her experience to bring readers into touch with what it means to have an empire and just a few examples of the lives of people who are touched and affected by the operation of the United States as an empire.
I describe Rita Bancolt's life before her expulsion and then her life in exile and the way that the expulsion totally disrupted and transformed her life.
She lost ultimately her husband and four children in exile, and I describe that experience and the impact on her.
Maybe I'll just read a couple of words from her that gives you a sense or a feel for the book.
Just a quick excerpt of the way she described to me what happened the day she was told she couldn't go back to her island, to her homeland.
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, but my voice couldn't open my mouth to say what had happened.
For an hour she remained silent, her heart swollen with emotion.
Finally she blurted out, you'll never again return to our home.
Our home has been closed.
As Rita told me almost 40 years later, the man at the steamship company had said to her, your island has been sold.
You will never go there again.
Let's try to really bring the reader into touch with what it means to have your island taken from you, your homeland taken from you, and hopefully readers will gain a better feeling and sense of what this act meant for people who live very far away but whose lives are actually intimately interconnected with our lives as Americans.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to thank you for your time on the show today and, again, congratulate you on this book.
It's a great piece of work.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
All right, everybody, that's David Vine.
Run out and get Island of Shame, the secret history of the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia.
