Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  The most charitable explanation is that Mr Mason simply did not know what was in the Pentagon’s mind. Two years later another Labour politician, Roy Hattersley, signed the most crucial of all the many agreements that record the saga: the ‘limited’ communications facility was now to be allowed to evolve into ‘a support facility of the United States Navy…the facility shall consist of an anchorage, airfield, support and supply elements and ancillary services, personnel accommodation and transmitting and receiving services. Immovable structures, installations and buildings for the facility may…be constructed.’

  The United States was, in other words, establishing a base on Diego Garcia. Sailors who were posted there, and who loathed its isolation, came to call it ‘the Rock’ the naval authorities put up a water tower near the harbour entrance and emblazoned it with the words ‘Welcome to the Footprint of Freedom’—the island, a long and narrow curve of coralline limestone, has the appearance of a child’s foot, heel pointing south, toes to the north.

  The final purely administrative note in the story took place in June 1976, four months after the Hattersley Agreement was announced. The Seychelles won their independence, and were allowed to take with them three of the four island groups that had been made part of BIOT in 1965. They won back Farquhar and Desroches because the British Government decided it had no use for them; and they were given back Aldabra because, although the US Navy thought it a suitable spot for a base, a number of the world’s wildlife organisations had complained that the giant Aldabran tortoises would be disturbed by aircraft noise and construction work, and the Pentagon wisely decided not to pick a fight with the tortoise lobby. BIOT, from 1976 on, was limited to the Chagos Islands only, and was administered from London by the diplomat who was also head of the East Africa Department. He seldom visited his charge, though one Commissioner did have a governor’s hat made, just in case. The day-to-day running of the island was left to a resident Administrator, arguably one of British diplomacy’s least enviable postings.

  All of the foregoing would be unremarkable, if regrettable, had the Chagos Islands been but a group of uninhabited tropical atolls upon which the armed forces of the Western Alliance had decided to build a fortress. Perhaps some conservationists would have grumbled at the despoliation of some thousands of square miles of virgin wilderness; and perhaps pacifist groups would have condemned the extension of war-making powers into an ocean hitherto untroubled by the superpowers. But there would have been no exceptional reason for controversy, and the word ‘scandal’ would probably not have been applied to the case.

  But it has been, and with good reason. It turned out that the Chagos Islands were not, and in recent history never had been, uninhabited. There was a flourishing, contented and permanent population on Diego Garcia and on half a dozen other islands in the group besides. There were towns, churches, shops, schools, prisons, farms, factories, docks, playgrounds, warehouses and a light railway. People had been living on the islands for the previous two centuries; there were graveyards, with stones inscribed in Creole and English and telling of a tradition of community and comradeship.

  On the day that British Indian Ocean Territory was formally established as a colony the Chagos Islands were peopled by some 2,000 islanders—more than there were in the Falkland Islands at the same time, as many as there were on Tristan da Cunha, Ascension and Pitcairn put together, half as many as on the island of Anguilla. They worked for a French-run copra and coconut oil company known as Chagos Agalega, and their little oil factories were fairly prosperous. ‘There were touches of old-fashioned ostentation’ a visitor reported in the late 1950s. ‘There was a château…whitewashed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages clustered around the green…lamp standards and parked motor launches…’

  And the inhabitants were all of them British subjects, citizens of a Crown colony, entitled to the protection and assistance of the Crown and, in the early days of their new status, governed on behalf of the Queen by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, the colony’s first Commissioner.

  But they were to be given no protection, and no assistance, by the Earl, the Crown, or anybody else. Instead the British Government, obeying with craven servility the wishes of the Pentagon—by now the formal lessees of the island group—physically removed every man, woman and child from the islands, and placed them, bewildered and frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. The British officials did not consult the islanders. They did not tell them what was happening to them. They did not tell anyone else what they planned to do. They just went right ahead and uprooted an entire community, ordered people from their jobs and their homes, crammed them on to ships, and sailed them away to a new life in a new and foreign country. They trampled on two centuries of community and two centuries of history, and dumped the detritus into prison cells and on to quaysides in Victoria and Port Louis, and proceeded, with all the arrogant attitudes that seemed peculiar to this Imperial rump, promptly to forget all about them.

  Or would have done, had not David Ottaway, an enterprising reporter from the Washington Post, travelled to Mauritius in September 1975 and discovered, in a slum close to the Port Louis docks, an abject and indigent group of more than a thousand islanders from the Chagos Archipelago. They called themselves the Ilois, and they told a horrifying story: they had been kidnapped, en masse, and turned out of their homes, to make way for the American forces who, they understood, now had control of their islands.

  Only a few months before the United States Senate, which had been inquiring into the need for establishing so costly a base (or ‘facility’ as the British insisted on calling it: even today the Foreign Office refuses to acknowledge that there is a base), was assured by a senior official of the State Department that ‘there are no inhabitants on Diego Garcia’. He was right. Such inhabitants as there had been had all been shipped out, were now a good 1,200 miles away, and had been strictly forbidden from ever trying to return home.

  The process had started almost before the ink on the BIOT Order in Council had dried. In late 1965—after BIOT had been created, but before Lord Chalfont had agreed to allow the Americans to use such islands as they wished for defence purposes—a small group of islanders arrived in Port Louis. They often went: a little cargo boat, the SS Nordvaer, and a smaller craft called the Isle of Farquhar used to make three-monthly voyages around all the atolls, and the Chagos islanders, whenever they could afford it, would make the four-day trip to the Mauritian capital to buy clothes and radio sets and fresh vegetables and toys for their children.

  But on this occasion the islanders were given a piece of unexpected and shattering news. They were told they could not go back home. No ship, it was said, was available to take them back to Chagos. They would have to remain in Port Louis, and fare for themselves as best they could. They had been turned into exiles, at the express direction of the faraway Earl of Oxford, who was acting on orders from London.

  Over the next eight years the islanders were systematically removed from the Chagos atolls. The Pentagon had been told that only ‘a small migratory population’ existed on the islands, and that to all intents and purposes the archipelago was deserted—which was just as well, since the US Navy had insisted that the area be made ‘sterile’, and that even the islands a hundred miles north of Diego Garcia had to be ‘swept clean’. The Foreign Office kept insisting there was no problem—only some ‘rotating contract personnel’ were ever present on the islands, and they would be ‘resettled’ on the termination of their various contracts. And to assist in speeding up the process the British Government bought out the Chagos Agalega Company for one million pounds, and summarily closed it down.

  The islanders now had no jobs; there was no longer any need for the food supply boats to call, since there was no working population, and no money to pay for food imports. So more islanders were persuaded to sail to Mauritius, with promises of work, and an altogether better life.

  Paul Moulinie, the Franco-Mauritian
whom the British Government entrusted with the winding-down of Chagos Agalega’s copra operations, was to say later that it was ‘never pleasant’ to have to tell the islanders to get out. ‘It was a paradise there. We told them we had orders from BIOT. We just said—sorry fellows, but on such-and-such a day we are closing up. They didn’t object. But they were very unhappy about it. And I can understand this: I’m talking about five generations of islanders who were born on Chagos, and lived there. It was their home.’

  Slowly, steadily the ‘small migratory population’ was cleared. ‘All went willingly,’ the Foreign Office said. ‘No coercion was used.’ (An American congressman snorted incredulously on hearing this remark. ‘No coercion was used—when you cut off their jobs? What other kind of coercion do you need? Are you talking about putting them on the rack?’)

  Then, in March 1971, the first American troops arrived. They were Seabees, marine construction workers, and they had come to rebuild the old RAF runway on Diego Garcia, which had been built during the Second World War, and at the end of which were still two wrecked Catalina sea-planes, damaged in a hurricane. There was an old ops room nearby, and the Americans found RAF emblems and pin-ups stuck to the walls, mouldy after twenty years of neglect.

  The last islanders were evicted over the next two years. The British had always said that troops were not used; and indeed the only time soldiers did become involved was when one of the evacuation ships broke down, and the troops gave the departing islanders some of their rations. Otherwise the pathetic became the routine. An islander said: ‘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 there. So were our fathers and forefathers who were buried in that land.’

  Some of the voyages must have been cruelly uncomfortable. One woman reported seeing the Nordvaer, which normally carried a dozen passengers, arrive in the Seychelles with 140 islanders aboard, sheltered by tarpaulins from the scorching sun. Some families were given a brief extension, with officials moving them off Diego Garcia and on to one of the island groups to the north, where it was still possible to fish and grow a little grain and fruit. But the Americans demanded that everyone be cleared off every atoll and every island, and so these last few were herded on to a final supply vessel, and carted off, like so many cattle.

  Once the dispossessed and ragged Britons had been discovered in Mauritius, the world’s attention became briefly focused upon them and their fate. The Senate held hearings; lawyers demanded compensation (and won, four million pounds); editorial writers expatiated (‘this act of kidnapping’, said the Washington Post; ‘this clear lack of human sensitivity’, said Senator Edward Kennedy; ‘La Grande Misère des deportes de Diego-Garcia’, fulminated Le Monde); civil rights organisations wrote reports (‘depressing reading for anyone who wants to believe in the essential decency and honesty of the British Government’, wrote The Times, reviewing one such); television films were made; the British Government was forced, briefly, to hang its head. A small party of American and British defence writers were flown to Diego Garcia, and were allowed to stay for five hours, and wrote about the island’s ‘incalculable strategic significance’, and compared it, as one American admiral wrote, to an earlier Imperial fortress. ‘This is the Malta of the Indian Ocean,’ he said.

  There was some further editorial and parliamentary bluster when it was discovered (by me: I was working as a reporter for the Guardian in Washington at the time, and stumbled on the story by chance) that Britain had done a secretive financial deal over the islands: the American Government could lease them ‘without charge’, so long as Britain was given a fourteen million dollars’ discount on the price of Polaris missiles it was then buying for its submarine force. The discount was managed in such a way—research and development costs were cut, rather than the missiles themselves being offered at bargain-basement prices—that no one realised what was happening until eight years after the deal had been concluded. And when someone found out the ‘price’ included money for ‘detachment costs’, and that the Americans had probably known all along that there were islanders on Diego Garcia and that British officials would have to shift them off, there was even more anger. But, like all stories, this one waned over the months; the court cases were quietly abandoned; the passion was spent; the islanders were paid off and resumed a relatively untroubled life on Mauritius; Diego Garcia came to be regarded as truly essential for Western well-being, and the saga was tucked into the recesses of public conscience, and more or less forgotten.

  Except there were some people who cared. A middle-aged English teacher from Kent named George Champion was particularly outraged by what he had read of the islanders’ fate. He changed his name to George Chagos—an eccentric idea, but Mr Champion felt that by eccentricity he might attract custom for his cause—and began a monthly vigil outside the gates of the Foreign Office, trying to awaken customarily moribund Londoners to the scandal. People would come up to him and ask, ‘Who is Diego Garcia?’ the Methodist Church picked up the case and donated money to help the islanders’ community-in-exile.

  And there were others: John Madeley, editor of an obscure journal devoted to Third World agriculture, took up the cause, and in 1982 wrote a lengthy report for the Minority Rights Group—a report that won, if briefly, plaudits from almost every serious newspaper and journal in Britain. But soon there were other crises, other tragedies to consider—and Britons soon forgot the case of the faraway Indian Ocean islanders once again, and not long after even the few activists fell silent.

  One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1984 John Madeley telephoned me at home in Oxford. He knew I had long wanted to try to get to Diego Garcia, and he had an idea of how I might do it.

  He had just received a letter, he said; it had been written in South India, posted in Australia, and had a return address in Wollstonecraft, New South Wales. It was from a woman named Ruth Boydell who said she had a small yacht, was just then planning to go cruising in the Indian Ocean, and had heard of the case of the dispossessed islanders. She thought she might try to sail her yacht into at least one of the atolls in the Chagos group—could she have a copy of the Minority Rights Group report, and would the enclosed few dollars pay the costs? John wondered if I knew anything about sailing, and whether I felt bold enough to try to hitch a lift.

  I called Directory Inquiries, and found the Boydells’ number, and called: it was dawn in Australia, and a sleepy-sounding voice told me that yes, Ruth was at that moment in Cochin, in South India, and gave me the name of an hotel, and a telephone number.

  That was the moment I very nearly abandoned the chase. It was a Saturday morning, I was just home from one trip, was tired, hardly felt like going on another. I assumed, from all my experiences of the Indian telephone system, that it would be impossible to get through to a small town in southern Kerala; to heck with it, I said to myself—and anyway, I’d never been sailing.

  But then, one of those chance decisions that seems to change a life. I peered at the phone number I had been given. It had nine digits, and the first three looked like an area code. On a whim I punched in the India code, and then the possible Cochin code, then the number. There was a pause, a thick hissing noise, and then, quite distinct, the familiar double-purr of an old British Strowger exchange, ringing out the number. Ten seconds later Ruth, clear as a bell, was on the line, and I explained what I wanted. She said her yacht, a thirty-foot schooner with the extraordinarily unattractive name of Sketty Belle, was currently moored in the Maldive Islands; she planned to spend the next six weeks touring India with her parents but would then go back to the yacht, and would be delighted at least to talk about going to the Chagos Islands. Had I done much sailing before? I mumbled something about a Sunfish in Martha’s Vineyard, and left it at that. We agreed to speak again in two months’ time; and I promised I would contrive to get myself to the Maldives a few days later on.

  I embark
ed on a marathon trip: I managed to find things to do in Oregon, California, Hawaii, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, and eventually, and after eight weeks’ travelling, fetched up in the Joseph Conrad Suite in what had once been one of Empire’s most notorious watering-holes—but which was now a rather seedy tourist-trap—Raffles Hotel, in Singapore. I set out to make contact with Miss Boydell.

  It was not easy. Cruising sailors are rarely where they say they’ll be; plans change with the wind and the tide, a whim is a better guide than an engagement book. I made a trunk call to the Maldive Islands to the yacht basin where she had thought she might be—the little schooner was indeed there, and the man who answered the telephone said he could see it, ‘right pretty she is too’. But no skipper. I was passed from office to office, eventually finding myself talking to the local Cable and Wireless satellite station manager, with whom, it turned out, I had gone to school thirty years before. Old Hardyeans sticking thus resolutely together we managed, jointly, to track down the missing lady, and I arranged to fly to the Maldives the next day.

  I spotted the boat first—a sleek, bottle-green schooner, her cream upperworks streaked with rust, her two masts covered with chipped white paint, her three sails wrapped in orange covers. She rode at anchor in ten feet of pale blue water, looking as though she had needed the rest. She was, a sailor remarked, a good little sea-boat, sturdy and well-found. Yellow fish nibbled at the weed that had grown on her waterline. A slim black man lay asleep in the cockpit. Ruth, said a note, was shopping.