Chagossians

The depopulation of Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago was the forced expulsion of the inhabitants of the island of Diego Garcia and the other islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) by the United Kingdom, at the request of the United States, beginning in 1968 and concluding on 27 April 1973 with the evacuation of Peros Banhos atoll.[1][2] The people, known at the time as the Ilois,[3] are today known as Chagos Islanders or Chagossians.[4]

Some Chagossians and human rights advocates have said that the Chagossian right of occupation was violated by the British Foreign Office as a result of the 1966 agreement[5] between the British and American governments to provide an unpopulated island for a U.S. military base, and that additional compensation[6] and a right of return[7] be provided.

Legal action to claim compensation and the right of abode in the Chagos began in April 1973 when 280 islanders, represented by a Mauritian attorney, petitioned the government of Mauritius to distribute the £650,000 compensation provided in 1972 by the British government to the Mauritian government for distribution. It was not distributed until 1977.[8] Various petitions and lawsuits have been ongoing since that time. The British government has consistently denied any illegalities in the expulsion.

Forced depopulation

In early March 1967, the British Commissioner declared BIOT Ordinance Number Two. This unilateral proclamation, the Acquisition of Land for Public Purposes (Private Treaty) Ordinance, enabled the Commissioner to acquire any land he liked (for the UK government). On 3 April of that year, under the provisions of the order, the British government bought all the plantations of the Chagos archipelago for £660,000 from the Chagos Agalega Company. The plan was to deprive the Chagossians of an income and encourage them to leave the island voluntarily. In a memo from this period, Colonial Office head Denis Greenhill (later Lord Greenhill of Harrow) wrote to the British Delegation at the UN:

The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a committee. Unfortunately along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc.

Another internal Colonial Office memo read:

The Colonial Office is at present considering the line to be taken in dealing with the existing inhabitants of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). They wish to avoid using the phrase permanent inhabitants in relation to any of the islands in the territory because to recognise that there are any permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights will have to be safeguarded and which will therefore be deemed by the UN to come within its purlieu. The solution proposed is to issue them with documents making it clear that they are belongers of Mauritius and the Seychelles and only temporary residents of BIOT. This devise, although rather transparent, would at least give us a defensible position to take up at the UN.

Advocates of the Chagossians charge that the number of Chagossian residents on Diego Garcia was deliberately under-counted in order to play down the scale of the proposed ethnic cleansing. Three years before the depopulation plan was created, the British Governor of Mauritius, Sir Robert Scott, estimated the permanent population of Diego Garcia at 1,700. However, in a BIOT report made in June 1968, the British government estimated that only 354 Chagossians were third-generation belongers on the islands. This number subsequently fell in further reports. Later in 1968, the British government asked for help from the legal department of their own Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in creating a legal basis for depopulating the islands.

The first paragraph of the FCO’s reply read:

The purpose of the Immigration Ordinance is to maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of the Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population. The Ordinance would be published in the BIOT gazette which has only very limited circulation. Publicity will therefore be minimal.

The government is therefore often[quantify] accused of deciding to clear all the islanders by denying they ever belonged on Diego Garcia in the first place and then removing them. This was to be done by issuing an ordinance that the island be cleared of all non-inhabitants. The legal obligation to announce the decision was fulfilled by publishing the notice in a small-circulation gazette not generally read outside of FCO staff.

Starting in March 1969, Chagossians visiting Mauritius found that they were no longer allowed to board the steamer home. They were told their contracts to work on Diego Garcia had expired. This left them homeless, jobless and without means of support. It also prevented word from reaching the rest of the Diego Garcia population. Relatives who travelled to Mauritius to seek their missing family members also found themselves unable to return.

Another action taken during the forced depopulation was to massacre the residents’ pets. As recorded by John Pilger:

Sir Bruce Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1000 pets were gassed with exhaust fumes. They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked, Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, and when their dogs were taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried. Sir Bruce had been given responsibility for what the US called cleansing and sanitising the islands; and the killing of the pets was taken by the islanders as a warning.[45]

Removal of the last inhabitants

In March 1971, a BIOT civil servant traveled from Mauritius to tell the Chagossians that they were to leave. A memorandum states:

I told the inhabitants that we intended to close the island in July. A few of them asked whether they could receive some compensation for leaving ’their own country.’ I kicked this into touch by saying that our intention was to cause as little disruption to their lives as possible.

By 15 October 1971, the Chagossians on Diego Garcia had all been removed to the Peros Banhos and Salomon plantations on ships chartered from Mauritius and the Seychelles. In November 1972 the plantation on Salomon atoll was evacuated, with the population allowed to choose to be taken either to the Seychelles or Mauritius. On 26 May 1973 the plantation on Peros Banhos atoll was closed and the last of the islanders sent to Seychelles or Mauritius, according to their choice.[46]

Those sent to the Seychelles received a severance pay equal to their remaining contract term. Those sent to Mauritius were to receive a cash settlement from the British Government distributed through the Mauritian Government. However, the Mauritian Government did not distribute this settlement until four years later, and the Chagossians on Mauritius were not compensated until 1977.[46]

On 23 June 2017, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted in favour of referring the territorial dispute between Mauritius and the UK to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in order to clarify the legal status of the Chagos Islands archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The motion was approved by a majority vote with 94 voting for and 15 against.

In September 2018, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, heard arguments in a case regarding whether Britain violated Mauritian sovereignty when it took possession of the islands for its own purposes.

On February 25, 2019 the ICJ ruled that the United Kingdom infringed on the right of self-determination of the Chagos Islanders and was obliged to cede its control of the islands.

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