Placed in the middle of the Indian Ocean are the tiny country of Chagos… a small gathering of 60 tropical islands, which as many other remote places, belongs to the UK, and which has never gained independence, as many other similar areas, like the nearby Maldives and Mauritius that both gained their independence in 1965, and also the nearby Seychelles that gained independence in 1976.
However nobody is left in the country of Chagos to claim independence for it, as the British Authorities, secretly during the 1960-ies forcefully deported the entire population to mainly the Maldives, where they and their ancestors today live in total misery and poverty.
The UK and the USA then got together and build a huge military base on one of the Chagos island, the Diego Garcia, where the USA still today run one of their largest overseas military bases, strategically placed near Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.
Also Diego Garcia is home to their third “Camp Justice” that together with the more infamous one at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and the Kadhimiya in Iraq, that is mostly known to be the place where Saddam Hussein was executed, all form secret prisons with little insight as to what is being done or who is being kept there.
All this does not sound like the democracies we are used to think of. This does sound much more like something happening in a remote dictatorship or something in the old communistic Soviet Union. But this is happening in our democracies.
In 2000 a British court ruled that the replacement of the population of Chagos was invalid. This was totally ignored by the British Government. Many other court cases have arisen, and the latest recent ruling from the High Court states that the population of Chagos will never be allowed to return home.
How can we let this happen… of course during the sixties and seventies in the midst of the cold war, things could easily be hidden, as we simply were not allowed to know things that was going on – also shameful in a democracy – but today we do know much of it, but then we apparently still choose to be silent about is and thus simply let the people of Chagos suffer still. On the other hand many of them has died and they are just poor rural people and they are far away, why should we care about them?
But this is our democracy. If we start to ignore atrocities are we then not letting go of our moral values? How can we let our governments forcefully deport whole populations to make way for military installations? This is similar to the deportations done by Stalin in the early Soviet era. Are we no better?
Let us not forget to clean our own back yards as we go after everybody else’s wrongdoings.
Let us try to set things right. Chagos is merely one of our own dark deeds that need to be corrected. We cannot allow our democracies to make people suffer. We should be better.
Let us bring all the Diego Garcias out in the open, and try to correct the wrongdoings of our leaders.
Let us begin by simply closing down the military base of Diego Garcia and letting the population of Chagos go home, and also pay for them so that they can start a living there.
We are already paying through our nose for other prestigious projects, like the independence of Kosovo. Chagos will be much much cheaper, and we will have undone a serious wrongdoing of our democracies.
The Chagos People’s Homeland Campaign
On Google Earth you can see Diego Garcia, by pasting the following in the search field:
7° 18′ 48″ S, 72° 24′ 40″ E
