Read Shenaz Patel's Searing Afterword for "Silence of the Chagos"

In Mauritian author Shenaz Patel’s English-language debut, Silence of the Chagos, she uncovers a sweeping story of global geopolitics and its invisible collateral. Forcibly removed from their island home in the 1960s by the British to make way for an American military base—a base that the U.S. has used to wage war in the Middle East and beyond ever since—the people of the Chagos are unrelenting in their fight for justice and the right to return. Patel brings their story to life with a keen journalist’s eye and fiery prose, gracefully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Here, we’re honored to share with you her forceful afterword, which provides all of the history you need to understand the Chagossians’ struggle and their “past that is not yet past.”

Chagos: Fifty Years of Fighting

IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE to draw on words even when they seem insufficient for describing just how interminable, how slow, how unresolved a wound, a fight, a war has been.

For the Chagos, the year 2019 marks half a century since an entire population was uprooted and deported from an archipelago which, by dint of its position in the middle of the Indian Ocean, caught the attention of the United States. Taking advantage of the instability of the decolonizing process, the United States hardly had to convince the British to sever this archipelago from the territory of Mauritius just as its independence was being negotiated. The main island of the archipelago, Diego Garcia, was transformed into what would become one of the most important American military bases, its location allowing the Americans to maintain control over the Middle East and the global oil trade. A base that was established during the Cold War, born out of the global rivalries of the 1960s, and in the Americans’ words, is still essential “to keep the free world safe.”

What the “free world” fails to realize, however, is that its freedom has come at a price: that of the Chagossian population’s deportation and forced exile to the Seychelles and to Mauritius between 1967 and 1973. Ever since, there has been an unending, twofold battle, which ultimately came to a head this year, 2019.

THE TWISTS AND TURNS OF DECOLONIZATION

The Chagos are a group of fifty-six islands clustered in seven atolls across the Indian Ocean, just below the Indian subcontinent. Some sources date the discovery of the archipelago back to Pedro de Mascarenhas’s voyage in 1512, but the Portuguese did not establish a settlement there. In fact, it was in 1744 that France, which had occupied Mauritius from 1721, claimed ownership of these inhabited islands some 1,350 miles northeast of Mauritius.

At the start of the 1780s, Pierre-Marie Le Normand, a Mauritian plantation owner whose business included sugar and coconut production, asked Governor Souillac to give him a plot of land to produce coconut oil on Diego Garcia, one of the main islands of the Chagos. Having been granted this land, he arrived on November 17, 1783 with an estimated twenty-two to seventy-nine free men of color and slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar. He opened the way for other plantation owners and their slaves brought in to expand the island’s oil production, followed by a French settler interested in fishing opportunities. In 1826, records show the population of the Chagos at three hundred and seventy-five slaves, nine whites, twenty-two free men of color, and forty-two lepers who were sent there in hopes that the meat of the turtles endemic to the archipelago might heal them.

In 1810, the British took Mauritius from France, and under the 1814 Treaty of Paris they were granted control of Mauritius’ dependencies, including the Chagos. Following the abolition of slavery in 1835, the former slaves were hired to work in the coconut groves, and they were joined by a number of indentured laborers from India. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Chagos had a population of approximately two thousand.

In the 1960s, Mauritius began to negotiate with Great Britain for its independence. During the discussions that took place in 1965 at Lancaster House in London, the British were open to this proposition. However, they had one non- negotiable condition: in order for Mauritius to gain independence, Great Britain would have to retain control over the Chagos.

After some minor resistance, the Mauritian delegation resolved to accept those terms. On November 8, 1965, the Chagos Archipelago was officially separated from Mauritius and registered as a British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

One may wonder why Great Britain was so determined to keep Chagos as a colonial territory even as it was in the process of decolonizing surrounding territories—the succinct answer is that this was due to the United States’ interest in the archipelago. In 1962, during the Sino-Indian War, the Americans realized that they had no military bases between the Mediterranean and East Asia, which led to their interest in the Chagos.

Despite its small surface area (the three main islands barely covered twenty square miles), the archipelago offers remarkable geostrategic advantages. It is more or less equidistant from the eastern coast of Africa, the Middle East where the Arab–Israeli conflict is playing out, the portions of South Asia where India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir in the 1960s and 1990s, the far-flung Indonesian archipelagos, and the continent of Australia. Almost halfway between the Mozambique Channel off the eastern African coast and the Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, the Chagos are ideally situated on the sea routes used for shipping oil and strategic raw materials. Moreover, the horseshoe shape of Diego Garcia, its main island, provides a deep, well-protected interior lagoon that is ideal for holding nuclear submarines.

The British weren’t opposed to the idea of sharing the burden of the Western camp’s defenses in this part of the world, especially since the Americans were offering them a fourteen-million-dollar discount on the Polaris missiles that they were planning to buy for their atomic submarines.

Discussions began between Great Britain and the United States, who made it clear that they wanted uninhabited islands—which Great Britain would go to great lengths to give them. With extraordinary cynicism, a British official stated in a report that on these islands there were only “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays . . . who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc.”; these islanders would come to be called “seasonal workers,” implying that they did not constitute an actual, permanent population.

And so, in 1967, a campaign began to get rid of the Chagossian population.

The procedure was incremental. At first the inhabitants were “encouraged” to go to Mauritius to seek medical treatment or to visit friends and family. When they were ready to leave, they were told that there were no more boats returning to the islands and that they would have to stay on Mauritius.

The Americans grew impatient with this gradual relocation. In 1973, the British sent one of their supply ships, the Nordvaer, to carry off the last inhabitants in a single hour. Some of them were offloaded in the Seychelles, but most of them were sent to Mauritius, without any warning and without a cent to their name.

The United States then rushed to build one of their most essential military bases on Diego Garcia. It started operating on October 1, 1977, and its shores harbored the B-52 long- range bombers that were deployed against Iraq in 1991 and Afghanistan in 2001.

WHAT USE ARE INTERNATIONAL AUTHORITIES?

The Chagossians sent to Mauritius, shell-shocked by the enormity and brutality of what had been done to them, reacted by holding protests and going on hunger strikes. They received very little support at first from a Mauritius that evidently did not want to acknowledge its guilt or involvement.

But the Chagossians would not relent. In 1998, a new generation led by Olivier Bancoult—whose parents had been expelled from the Chagos when he was a child—filed a series of lawsuits against the British government that demanded official acknowledgment of the harm done to them, monetary compensation, and the right to return and to live on their archipelago.

Over the last twenty years, the eight thousand or so Chagossians have continued to pursue legal recourse in front of the English High Court and other international authorities. However, it is inevitable that there would be numerous setbacks in this battle of a small island population confronting two major world powers.

In November of 2000, the High Court in London ruled that the Chagossians’ “displacement” was illegal. But after two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, Diego Garcia became the beachhead for the United States’ counterattack against Afghanistan from 2001 to 2002 and for the American military invasion of Iraq in 2003 to hunt down Saddam Hussein. In fact, the Queen of England personally issued an order that rendered the High Courts’ judgment in favor of the Chagossians null and void.

In May of 2002, the Chagossians were given British passports, which was seen as a clear attempt to weaken their position. Despite their unsuccessful appeals in inter- national courts, the Chagossians kept fighting. It was bewildering when, in 2012, the European Court of Human Rights declared that their suit against the British state was inadmissible, underscoring that, in the 1970s, the Chagossians had accepted compensation of several hundred pounds sterling from the British government.

In the interim, Great Britain undertook several other schemes. In April 2010, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, announced the British government’s plan to create an enormous marine reserve around the Chagos. All fishing activity would be forbidden. Mauritius officially challenged this decision. In March 2015, the United Nations constituted an Arbitral Tribunal, which judged this creation of a marine park illegal. This judgment, however, did not hamper the British from moving forward with the plan.

The Chagossian suit against the marine reserve was then rejected by the British court of appeals. But, in December 2010, WikiLeaks made many diplomatic cables public, including one sent by the American ambassador in London to several departments of the American federal government in Washington, D.C., to the United States military command, and to the American ambassador in Mauritius. This diplomatic cable, dated May 15, 2009, summarized conversations between members of the British Foreign Office and American officials confirming that this project was merely a delaying tactic intended to undermine the Chagossians’ claims to a right to return by framing their resettlement as a threat to the marine reserve. An irony all the greater considering that this perimeter currently contains nuclear submarines . . .

ENTER WIKILEAKS

In November, 2016, Great Britain offered forty million pounds toward social assistance programs that would help the Chagossians, insisting once more that resettlement on the archipelago was not negotiable. The British government tried another tactic on March 27, 2017: they invited Chagossians again to apply to visit their archipelago. This would be a repeat of 2006, when London had organized a one-week visit to the islands for 105 Chagossians. This time, the Chagossians refused the offer, which they viewed as a poisoned chalice and a trap. “We’re inhabitants of the Chagos, not visitors,” they said.

On February 8, 2018, the Chagos Refugees Group (CRG) suffered another setback, which however opened other doors. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom rejected their challenge pertaining to the marine park, but where the appeals court had declared the inadmissibility of the diplomatic cable that Julian Assange had received from the whistle-blower Chelsea Manning and uploaded onto the WikiLeaks platform, the Supreme Court rejected that opin- ion and deemed the cable admissible. Even if, in its opinion, the contents of the cable didn’t affect the Court’s finding that the decision to create the marine park had been for illicit reasons, this decision was huge for the Chagossian case.

Julian Assange had immediately celebrated this decision on Twitter: “Big win at UK Supreme Court today in a judgment that will affect many court proceedings around the world: leaked diplomatic cables are admissible as evidence.”

The Chagossians were plastered across the pages of gossip magazines when Amal Clooney was seen among the lawyers representing them in May 2018 during the London High Court’s consideration of the CRG’s appeal of the British government’s May 2016 refusal of their right to return. In the meantime, the CRG had also benefited from the political support of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party’s leader.

THREATS AND REALPOLITIK 

Meanwhile, another battle was being waged by Mauritius, which was arguing that its rights had been disregarded in this matter. Great Britain had flouted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which had been adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 14, 1960. Resolution 1514 prohibited any attempt to alter a country’s territorial integrity at the moment of decolonization and independence. Indeed, the separation of the Chagos Islands had been censured by the United Nations, which passed General Assembly Resolution 2066, “Question of Mauritius,” on December 16, 1965. It requested Great Britain to comply with Resolution 1514 as it worked with Mauritius. This request was reiterated in Resolution 2232 on December 20, 1966 and Resolution 2357 on December 19, 1967. But the United States and Great Britain paid no heed to those entreaties.

Over the last few years, Mauritius has repeatedly attempted to assert its sovereignty over the Chagos. But pragmatism and the necessities of realpolitik have consistently held sway as the two global powers have reminded the small island of Mauritius of the numerous advantageous economic and trade treaties that could very easily be annulled with a stroke of the pen. But the struggle has intensified. And, in a speech to the 70th United Nations General Assembly in October 2016, the Mauritian prime minister, Anerood Jugnauth (who had participated in the Lancaster House negotiations in 1965), caused an uproar when he called again for recognition of Mauritius’s sovereignty over the archipelago and then formally requested a resolution be made on the matter.

With the United States’ backing, Great Britain firmly opposed this proposition, arguing that it would create a “terrible precedent,” since this concerned a bilateral dispute that ought to be negotiated between the two countries. It made no difference that a preceding opinion by the United Nations, which had given the British until June 2017 to finish talks with Mauritius, had not resulted in any concrete action. The British reaffirmed that the base at Diego Garcia contributed “in an essential manner” to regional and inter- national stability and security, that it played a “critical” role in the fight against the most complex and urgent challenges of the twenty-first century, such as terrorism, international crime, piracy, and any other form of instability.

Those arguments were not accepted. On June 22, 2017, as a result of extensive lobbying, the General Assembly of the United Nations finally granted Mauritius’s request and adopted a resolution asking the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give an advisory opinion on the question of whether or not Great Britain had complied with interna- tional regulations on decolonization when it severed the Chagos Archipelago from the Mauritian territory. The Court was also asked to rule on the legal consequences, according to international law, of keeping the Chagos under British control—especially given Mauritius’s inability to carry out a plan to resettle its citizens there—including those of Chagossian extraction. Ninety-four members voted for the resolution, sixty-five abstained, and fifteen voted against. The African Union upheld Mauritius’s request, arguing the outcome of the ruling would also have significant bearing on the final processes of decolonization in Africa.

In February 2019, the ICJ adjudicated, unambiguously, that the United Kingdom’s separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius was “unlawful,” and that it had to end its administration of the Chagos “as rapidly as possible.”

The British, however, made it clear that they had no intention of honoring this advisory opinion. The original fifty-year agreement with the United States having been renewed in December 2016; they saw no reason to alter any part of this arrangement between the two world powers. In light of this unwillingness to debate, Mauritius decided to raise the stakes by bringing the issue before the United Nations General Assembly.

THE PORTABILITY OF AN ISLAND

On May 22, 2019, the United Nations General Assembly went against intense British and American intense lobbying by voting, with an overwhelming majority of 116 countries out of 193, on a resolution recognizing Mauritius’s sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago and calling on the United Kingdom to cede the Chagos Archipelago back to Mauritius within six months. Only six countries voted against. Fifty- six abstained.

“UK suffers crushing defeat in UN vote on Chagos Islands,” declared the headline of the Guardian that day. “The 116-6 vote left the UK diplomatically isolated and was also a measure of severely diminished US clout on the world stage . . . The scale of the defeat for the UK and US came as a surprise even to Mauritius, in view of the concerted campaign pursued by London and Washington.” The paper’s assessment was trenchant: “British diplomats said the non- binding resolution would have little practical impact. But it has taken a political toll, draining support for the UK in the general assembly and focusing dissatisfaction over its permanent seat on the UN security council.”

The ruling is not a completely straightforward victory for the Chagossians. Even as the Mauritian side underscored the need to carry out the last step of African decolonization, Mauritius’s prime minister had been clear: in regaining sovereignty over the Chagos, Mauritius would not insist that the base at Diego Garcia be dismantled. India had set this condition for supporting the Mauritian government, urging that the United States be allowed to maintain a presence on Diego Garcia in exchange for a recognition of Mauritius’s sovereignty. India seemed worried that any reduction in the United States’ presence in the Indian Ocean might result in a vacuum that China would quickly fill in an assertion of its increasing strength in the region. This position was a shift from India’s staunch opposition to the military presence of a non-coastal power in the Indian Ocean during the Cold War. Throughout the 1970s, the countries of the region had championed the idea of the Indian Ocean being a Zone of Peace so as to prevent any outsiders from intruding. A hope that seems to have all but vanished.

All this points to the intensification of discussions and negotiations over the “portability” of an island—relating, in economic terms, to the ability to function and to be profit- able under different operating environments. And it was clear that Mauritius was willing to directly negotiate the price of leasing Diego Garcia to the United States.

Amid geostrategic stakes, political negotiations, and legal imbroglios, the Chagos Archipelago is still grappling with a past that is not yet past. A past, a history that has unthinkingly wreaked havoc on the rights of thousands of men and women. Reports indicate that Diego Garcia has recently been used as a second Guantanamo, to remove presumed terrorists from the free world and hold them in secret detention. The Chagossians, in turn, are once again caught in a bitter limbo. And, having been unwillingly deported from their homes once already, they are in fear of having their interests overlooked yet again.

No, the battle that the Chagossians have been steadfastly fighting for fifty years against this iron fist that has stripped them of their islands, of their history, has not yet been won. Nor has their freedom . . .

Buy the Book

About the Author

View fullsize

© Thomas Langdon

Shenaz Patel (1966) is a journalist and writer from the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. She is the author of several novels, plays, short stories, and children’s books. She was an IWP (International Writing Program) Honorary Fellow in the U.S. in 2016, and was a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University in 2018.

About the Translator

View fullsize

© Rachel Caplan

Jeffrey Zuckerman is an award-winning translator from French of titles ranging from Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child to Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins.