Great post!

I have friends who helped with their legal fight for return. The case really exposed a very nasty, cruel and uncaring side of the British government.

Paradise Cleansed by John Pilger 10/11/04 - 'The Guardian'

"There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: "American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)." It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays ..." Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".

There is not a word of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about being caught, writing that it was "fairly unsatisfactory" that "we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else". The documents leave no doubt that the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet ministers.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the "sanitizing", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked," says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s," ... and when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried."

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks.

In the first months of their exile, as they fought to survive, suicides and child deaths were common. Lizette lost two children. "The doctor said he cannot treat sadness," she recalls. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters and a son; she told me that when her husband was told the family could never return home, he suffered a stroke and died. Unemployment, drugs and prostitution, all of which had been alien to their society, ravaged them. Only after more than a decade did they receive any compensation from the British government: less than £3,000 each, which did not cover their debts.

The behavior of the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In 2000, the islanders won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion illegal. Within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because of a "treaty" with Washington - in truth, a deal concealed from parliament and the US Congress. As for the other islands in the group, a "feasibility study" would determine whether these could be resettled. This has been described by Professor David Stoddart, a world authority on the Chagos, as "worthless" and "an elaborate charade". The "study" consulted not a single islander; it found that the islands were "sinking", which was news to the Americans who are building more and more base facilities; the US navy describes the living conditions as so outstanding that they are "unbelievable".

In 2003, in a now notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation, with government counsel allowed by the judge to attack and humiliate them in the witness box, and with Justice Ousley referring to "we" as if the court and the Foreign Office were on the same side. Last June, the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home. These were the same totalitarian powers used to expel them in secret 40 years ago; Blair used them to authorize his illegal attack on Iraq.

Led by a remarkable man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court describes the "deportation or forcible transfer of population ... by expulsion or other coercive acts" as a crime against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from their paradise, the Chagos islanders, says Bancoult, "will not let this great crime stand. The world is changing; we will win." "


Finally in 2006 Lord Justice Hooper and Mr Justice Cresswell ruled that orders made under the royal prerogative to prevent the return of the Chagos islanders to their homes were unlawful. They described as "repugnant" the action to exile the population of the islands. "The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant," the judges said.

But the government are appealing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/6333223.stm) and the right of return is still being denied!

(sorry for long post - but this one really gets to me!)

The best John Pilger documentary I've seen, detailing the legacy of imperial power held by the UK government (and Royalty, to some degree). It documents the horrifying use of England's empiric past to 'acquire' an island ideal to the US government in order to further it's international bombing range. From the Google Video post comment:

STEALING A NATION (2004) is an extraordinary film about the plight of people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean - secretly and brutally expelled from their homeland by British governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to make way for an American military base. The base, on the main island of Diego Garcia, was a launch pad for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Stealing a Nation has won both the Royal Television Society's top award as Britain's best documentary in 2004-5, and a 'Chris Award' at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

A brochure of the film is available at www.bullfrogfilms.com/guides/stealguide.pdf.

I highly recommend watching it, as it gives an insight on e very rarely seen side of UK/US relations (and a further shameful side to Huddersfield born Harold Wilson - at least it's an air base in Indonesia, rather than the UK as a US Airstrip [One!])

Hot off yesterday's presses:

Snowball fight ends in stabbing in SE Portland

05:32 PM PST on Tuesday, January 16, 2007

By ANTONIA GIEDWOYN, kgw.com Staff

An errant snowball led to a stabbing in southeast Portland Tuesday afternoon, police said.

About 1 p.m., officers arriving at the 4800 block of SEWoodstock Boulevard found 17-year-old Timothy Ray Garcia with a stab wound to his upper body.

Police arrested 36-year-old John Preston Grant for assault.

Witnesses told officers that the victim and a group of friends were throwing snowballs at each other when one of the snowballs struck a moving vehicle driven by the suspect.

The suspect got out of his vehicle and started a fight with the group, which escalated to a stabbing. He then drove off but returned a short time later and turned himself in to officers at the scene.

Garcia was transported to a local hospital with non life-threatening injuries.

from http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_011607_news_snowball_stabbing_.48413a0a.html

Thanks rembar, this is good stuff.

I think that science and religion are drawn to each other as much as repelled. I would be surprised if, as science draws closer to a unified theory, the elegance of nature would not inspire awe akin to religion. I certainly use the idea of god as a bridge to the amazing systems of nature. Of course my higher power isn't a big dude that looks like Jerry Garcia.

That's a really simplistic view, quantummushroom, that's akin to saying yeah well we screwed over a bunch of nations just to gain a foothold for ourselves, we're cool now so stop blaming us.

You don't realize that such activites by the goverment is actually holding you, the average citizen down. How exactly? Well think about the gap between the rich and the poor in America, it's so large now that there is a reduction in the number of people who are middle class.

Now let's think back about all the military incursions that America has been involved in and pick a few cases to look at. We'll look at Nicaragua, this starts back with Theodore Roosevelt who extends the existing Monroe Doctrine in 1904 allowing the US to interfe in a latin american state guilty of "chronic wrong doing" (I mean much more vague can this be). The Monroe doctrine comes to define america's policy in Latin America.

US Marines land in Nicaragua in 1909, after a similar pattern of interventions in Cuba (1898), Honduras (1905) and Panama (1908). Nicaragua becomes a US protectorate there after.

In 1926, Augusto Cesar Sandino lunaches a successful guerilla war against US marines and the Nicaraguan National Guard under Anastasio Somoza Garcia. The Sandinista rebels are a pro-liberal group that insists on a redistribution of land to the peasantry, which is violented opposed by Somoza. Sandino was murdered by the National Guard in 1934, Somoza who is a US ally then runs a brutual dictatorship until 1979 when the Somoza Dynasty is overthrown by Sandinista National Liberational Front. Jimmy Carter at the time tried desperately to prop up Somoza's regime until the bitter end. Nicaragua after years of oppressive rule lay in ruins with 40,000 to 50,0000 killed.

When the Sandinistas finally come into power, everything is done to demonize them with accusations of undemocratic policies, genocide, drug-trafficking. This is while US media remains silent on the documented facts of Sandinistas remarkable reforms. Oxfam, with it's experience of working in over 76 developing nations finds the Nicaraguan goverment to be exceptional in it's commitment to addressing inequities in land ownership, in extending health, educational and agricultural services to poor peasent families.

Until 1989, the US goverment pursues a policy of destabilization by suppyling an insurgent army of 'Contras' in Nicaragua.

The question is "Why would the US goverment feel threatened by socialism in a smaller, weaker country such as Nicaragua"?

This comes down to the Rotten Apple theory. If a tiny impoverished nation with miniuscle resources can begin to do something for it's own population others might ask "Why not us?". The weaker and less economically endowned the nation the greater the example that can be set. The rot could spread, threatening regions of real concern to the rulers of the world.

Same thing with Iran, which in the late 40s grew tired of it's resources being plucked by corporations. The CIA however interevened, a coup occured and the Shah of Iran came into power. This of course back fired a few years later with the extreme Islamic goverment emerging. The US goverment then makes links with Iraq, supporting Iraqi military operations into Iran, while selling arms to both sides. This of course back fires with the usage of Chemical and Biological weapons by Saddam. The US goverment distances itself.

1991, Iraq invades Kuwait. For a long time the international community does not do much other then decry the situation. However intelligence arrives saying that Saddam's forces are massing on the western border of Kuwait with Saudia Arabia. The american administration deems it too risky to allow Saddam to possbily enter Saudia Arabia. And the rest is history. But no wait. It's not all over yet. Suddenly only 100 KM away from Baghdad, coalition forces are pulled back, the regime in Iraq is unchanged, no pressure is placed on the regime to allow free elections to occur.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Yes, Nafarias, we're all Marxists here at VS. (actually I think we're closer to the opiate of the masses)

Although I like what he says, you do have a point that the Ben & Jerry guy might not be the best person to set domestic economic policy in the US - BUT it would be nice to get my monthly allotment of Cherry Garcia, and Chunky Monkey - (alloted according to my needs and abilities of course, comrade).

Also, on preview - I bet your grandma doesn't consider her Medicare prescription subsidy "social crap".

Step aside Garcia, Clapton, Anastasio, Haynes, Santana... here comes Jake!