Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  Once the terror resumed following the vote, Robin Cook urged that the deployment of the UN peace mission be delayed, on the absurd grounds that the army needed time to secure control over the militias (the same that it had created and armed).19

  Britain announced the suspension of existing arms export licences to Indonesia only on 11 September; a full seven days after the post-vote terror had begun on 4 September, following the announcement of the result of the vote. In this period of gross atrocities, Britain failed to freeze arms sales immediately and impose economic sanctions, thus failing to use a significant lever at its disposal to help halt the atrocities. (‘The international community’s response to the crisis in East Timor was swift’, the Department for International Development managed to say with a straight face in December.)20

  The EU agreed to impose an arms ban for only four months from September, a sign of its lack of seriousness in pressing Jakarta. The ban was duly lifted in January 2000, leaving each member state to decide whether to resume arms sales. Naturally, Britain did so, resuming the delivery of supplies to the military that had just undertaken a ‘planned, systematic campaign’ of murder and violence. At the same time, the press reported a secret assessment by Australian defence intelligence stating that extending the arms embargo would help to prevent further repression by the Indonesian army.21

  But the reality is even worse: in fact, Britain had never imposed an embargo at all – it got around it by extending the existing licences for arms exports by four months. This ensured that Indonesia was not deprived of any arms at all. This was the first time that an extension had been made to the validity of export licences in relation to an EU arms embargo.22

  The government had also invited Indonesia, along with sixty other countries, to an arms exhibition in September. Baroness Symons, then Defence Procurement Minister, claimed that Indonesia had a right to look at the equipment on offer for reasons of ‘self-defence’ – an assertion not worth commenting on. Despite apparent Foreign Office pressure on the Ministry of Defence, the latter did not withdraw the invitation and it was left to the Indonesians to decline. An MoD spokesman said on 8 September: ‘Certain things are obviously on their mind domestically and they are obviously busy with things in East Timor.’23

  Human Rights Watch noted that the post-vote violence was ‘predictable and preventable’. It had been warning for months of escalating Indonesian-organised human rights atrocities in East Timor – notably the massacre of dozens of people in a church compound in Liquica in April – and called on aid donors to make aid conditional on human rights improvements.24

  These calls also went in vain, as Indonesia’s leading partners continued to support the regime and failed to use a variety of levers available to them. This was at the same time as Blair, Clinton and others were supposedly anguishing over the highest moral principles in responding to human rights abuses by the Yugoslav regime in Kosovo. In fact, the 3,000–5,000 deaths in East Timor in the months before the referendum was twice as many as in Kosovo before NATO bombing began.

  It was only when the Clinton administration eventually publicly condemned Indonesian-backed violence and announced in early September that it was suspending arms supplies and training programmes with the Indonesian military, that the latter conducted a volte face and withdrew from East Timor. This showed the latent power available to Washington to stop atrocities, but which is rarely used, and which was only belatedly used by Britain.25

  However, violence by militias created by one of Britain’s favoured militaries continued in East Timor. In August 2000 Human Rights Watch noted that the militias ‘have escalated operations in East Timor over the past month’, killing two UN peacekeepers and ‘terrorising the civilian population’. These raids, Human Rights Watch added, ‘are taking place under the nose of elite Indonesian troops’. It called on the international community, and specifically Britain, to reimpose an arms ban – once again in vain.26

  The effects of the violence of 1999 were still felt by tens of thousands of people in late 2002. These were the forgotten East Timorese who remained displaced in West Timor and other parts of Indonesia, who were still prevented by security and other concerns from making a free decision as to whether to return to East Timor or remain in Indonesia. They were still being terrorised by the same militias who had devastated East Timor since 1999.27

  According to Human Rights Watch, the UN and its member states ‘have a particular obligation to see that justice is done for the crimes committed in East Timor’, not least because UN personnel were among the targets of the violence and UN personnel were witnesses to crimes.28

  But neither Britain nor the US support a war crimes tribunal for the 1999 events in East Timor, despite it being proposed by the UN mission. Neither does London support the call made by East Timorese NGOs for an international tribunal to prosecute crimes against humanity following the 1975 invasion. There is also naturally no support from the British government for a war crimes tribunal for Suharto (and thus no media campaign for the same, unlike for Milosevic who is fair game). Perhaps it is feared that an investigation into Suharto would lead to various British connections.

  The Blair government has, in all seriousness, repeatedly tried to take credit for East Timor’s transition to independence. Only a willing media has allowed the grotesqueness of this propaganda to reach the public and failed to offer a truer picture.

  The current plight of East Timorese, together with ongoing Indonesian atrocities in Aceh and West Papua provinces, show that there are still plenty of reasons for the British government to stop supplying arms, military training and other means of support to Indonesia. A Foreign Office minister referred retrospectively to the 1999 violence in East Timor as ‘state-sponsored terrorism’.29 That is, by a government Britain continues to regard as favoured ally, as we supposedly engage in a ‘war against terrorism’.

  22

  DIEGO GARCIA: REMOVING PEOPLE FROM HISTORY

  The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours.

  Foreign Office, 1966

  A LANDMARK DAY in the history of Britain’s foreign policy was 3 November 2000. On that day a group of Chagossians defeated the Foreign Office at the high court in London and secured the right to return to some of their homeland islands.

  The chances are, however, that many readers of this book will not have heard of the Chagossians, and the date will not appear significant. They could be forgiven for this, but the mainstream political culture cannot in my view be forgiven for the silence that has surrounded the story.

  Beginning in 1968 the British government removed the entire population of 1,500 Illois people from the Chagos island group in the Indian Ocean. This strategy – plainly illegal under international law – was pursued as covertly as possible to ensure minimal international attention. It was then the subject of systematic lying by seven British governments over nearly four decades. The removal was undertaken to make way for a US military base on the largest island in the Chagos group – Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia is now regularly used as a US nuclear base and as a launch pad for military intervention in the Middle East. At the same time, the Chagossians have suffered a nightmare at the hands of successive British governments.

  In November 2000, the high court ruled that ‘the wholesale removal’ of the islanders by the British government was an ‘abject legal failure’. It ruled that the Chagossians should be allowed to return to the outlying islands in the group, a major success after decades of struggle for redress against the British. But the ruling did not allow the islanders to return to Diego Garcia itself. The Chagossians are therefore continuing their struggle for justice. And the nightmare goes on because Whitehall is continuing to oppose the Chagossians in court and even in effect refusing to implement the high court’s ruling by hindering their return.1

  That the Chagossians and Diego Garcia are not household names in Britain is, to me, testimony to the servility to power of mainstream British political culture
. One would expect this court case to be regarded as significant. Indeed, one might expect the tragedy of the islanders’ treatment by successive governments to be rather well known; their plight has been desperate for nearly four decades. But not so: the small flurry of press articles around the court case has been followed by the same silence that largely prevailed for the previous decades. Watchers of television will have remained almost completely in the dark. And the current scandal blocking their return has gone largely unreported.

  The now 4,000 islanders who want to return home have become Unpeople in British political culture, deserving of virtually no attention. Through all the US interventions in the Middle East that used Diego Garcia as a base for bombers, the media buried the story. Through all the parliamentary debates on Britain’s ‘overseas territories’ (the Chagos islands are officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory), the tragedy has only ever been raised by a couple of MPs like Tam Dalyell and Jeremy Corbyn. All the memoirs of policy-makers excised the story from history – Defence Secretary at the time, Denis Healey, for example, makes no mention at all of the depopulation of the Chagos islands in his 600-page autobiography.2 Equally, in hardly a single academic book on British foreign policy in the past decades are the Chagos islands even mentioned: merely one example of the extent to which British academics work within a framework established by elite priorities.

  Olivier Bancoult, the chair of the Chagos Refugees Group and leader of the Chagossians in exile, says that:

  We believe that if the British public had known of these unlawful deportations at the time, we would probably still be living on the islands now. There is a lesson for our community, that we must learn to stand on our own feet and insist that we are consulted during the process leading to our return. We must never again rely on governments to tell us what we should have or not have.3

  The Chagossians’ plight was almost completely buried until late into the 1990s when a British solicitor, Richard Gifford, was on holiday in Mauritius and happened to meet some of the Chagossian community in exile and learnt first hand of their ordeal. His findings in Mauritius so alarmed him that he came back to Britain determined to seek redress through the British legal system.

  Removing birds and people

  During the decolonisation process in the 1960s Britain created a new colony – the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). This included the Chagos island group which was detached from Mauritius, and other islands detached from the Seychelles. Mauritius had been granted independence by Britain in 1965 on the barely concealed condition that London be allowed to buy the Chagos island group from it – Britain gave Mauritius £3 million.

  ‘The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours’, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, its chief civil servant, said in a secret file of 1966. The Colonial Office similarly noted that the ‘prime object of BIOT exercise was that the islands … hived off into the new territory should be under the greatest possible degree of UK control [sic]’.4

  In December 1966 the Wilson government signed a military agreement with the US leasing the BIOT to it for military purposes for fifty years with the option of a further twenty years. Britain thus ignored UN Resolution 2066XX passed by the General Assembly in December 1965 which called on the UK ‘to take no action which would dismember the territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity’.

  Higher matters were at stake: Diego Garcia was well situated as a military base. Britain allowed the US to build up Diego Garcia as a nuclear base and as the launch pad for intervention in the Middle East. Using Diego Garcia, B52 bombers recently struck in Afghanistan and attacked Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. As I write this in mid-March 2003, B2 stealth bombers are taking off from Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq. Diego Garcia’s role ‘has become increasingly important over the last decade in supporting peace and stability in the region’, a Foreign Office spokesman managed to say with a straight face in 1997.5

  Olivier Bancoult told me, in an interview in London in October 2002, that ‘our birthplace is being used to kill innocent people. We can’t give any backing to what is happening on Diego Garcia, like B52s attacking Afghanistan’.6

  To militarise Diego Garcia, Britain removed the 1,500 indigenous inhabitants of the Chagos islands – ‘the compulsory and unlawful removal of a small and unique population, Citizens of the UK and Colonies, from islands that had formed their home, and also the home of the parents, grand-parents and very possibly earlier ancestors’, as the Chagossians’ defence lawyers put it. The islanders were to be ‘evacuated as and when defence interests require this’, against which there should be ‘no insurmountable obstacle’, the Foreign Office had noted.7

  The Chagossians were removed from Diego Garcia by 1971 and from the outlying islands of Salomen and Peros Banhos by 1973. The secret files show that the US wanted Diego Garcia to be cleared ‘to reduce to a minimum the possibilities of trouble between their forces and any “natives”. This removal of the population ‘was made virtually a condition of the agreement when we negotiated it in 1965’, in the words of one British official. Foreign Office officials recognised that they were open to ‘charges of dishonesty’ and needed to ‘minimise adverse reaction’ to US plans to establish the base. In secret, they referred to plans to ‘cook the books’ and ‘old fashioned’ concerns about ‘whopping fibs’.8

  The Chagossians were described by a Foreign Office official in a secret file: ‘unfortunately along with birds go some few Tarzans or man Fridays whose origins are obscure’. Another official wrote, referring to a UN body on women’s issues: ‘There will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a committee (the status of women committee does not cover the rights of birds)’. According to the Foreign Office, ‘these people have little aptitude for anything other than growing coconuts’. The Governor of the Seychelles noted that it was ‘important to remember what type of people’ the islanders are: ‘extremely unsophisticated, illiterate, untrainable and unsuitable for any work other than the simplest labour tasks of a copra plantation’.9

  Contrary to the racist indifference of British planners, the Chagossians had constructed a well-functioning society on the islands by the mid 1960s. They earned their living by fishing, and rearing their own vegetables and poultry. Copra industry had been developed. The society was matriarchal, with Illois women having the major say over the bringing up of the children. The main religion was Roman Catholic and by the First World War the Illois had developed a distinct culture and identity together with a specific variation of the Creole language. There was a small hospital and a school. Life on the Chagos islands was certainly hard, but also settled. By the 1960s the community was enjoying a period of prosperity with the copra industry thriving as never before. The islanders were also exporting guano, used for phosphate, and there was talk of developing the tourist industry.

  Then British foreign policy intervened. One of the victims recalled:

  We were assembled in front of the manager’s house and informed that we could no longer stay on the island because the Americans were coming for good. We didn’t want to go. We were born here. So were our fathers and forefathers who were buried in that land.10

  Britain expelled the islanders to Mauritius without any workable resettlement scheme, gave them a tiny amount of compensation and later offered more on condition that the islanders renounced their rights ever to return home. Most were given little time to pack their possessions and some were allowed to take with them only a minimum of personal belongings packed into a small crate.

  The Chagossians were also deceived into believing what awaited them. Olivier Bancoult said that the islanders ‘had been told they would have a house, a portion of land, animals and a sum of money, but when they arrived [in Mauritius] nothing had been done’. Britain also deliberately closed down the copra plantations to increase the pressure to leave. A Foreign Office note from 1972 states that ‘when BIOT formed, decided as a matter of policy
not to put any new investment into plantations’ [sic], but to let them run down. And the colonial authorities even cut off food imports to the Chagos islands; it appears that after 1968 food ships did not sail to the islands.11

  Not all the islanders were physically expelled. Some, after visiting Mauritius, were simply – and suddenly – told they were not allowed back, meaning they were stranded, turned into exiles overnight. Many of the islanders later testified to having been tricked into leaving Diego Garcia by being offered a free trip.

  Most of the islanders ended up living in the slums of the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, in gross poverty; many were housed in shacks, most of them lacked enough food, some died of starvation and disease, and many committed suicide. A report commissioned by the Mauritian government in the early 1980s found that only sixty-five of the ninety-four Illois householders were owners of land and houses; and 40 per cent of adults had no job. Today, most Chagossians continue to live in poverty, with unemployment especially high.12

  British officials were completely aware of the poverty and hardships likely to be faced by those they had removed from their homeland. When some of the last Chagossians were removed in 1973 and arrived in Mauritius, the High Commission noted that they at first refused to disembark, having ‘nowhere to go, no money, no employment’. Britain offered a minuscule £650,000 in compensation, which only arrived in 1978, too late to offset the hardship of the islanders. The Foreign Office stated in a secret file that ‘we must be satisfied that we could not discharge our obligation … more cheaply’. As the Chagossians’ defence lawyers argue, ‘the UK government knew at the time that the sum given [in compensation] would in no way be adequate for resettlement’.13