{"id":129587,"date":"2019-03-25T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=129587"},"modified":"2019-04-01T12:02:31","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T11:02:31","slug":"the-rightful-owners-of-a-key-island-us-military-base-would-like-it-back-and-the-un-agrees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/the-rightful-owners-of-a-key-island-us-military-base-would-like-it-back-and-the-un-agrees\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rightful Owners of a Key Island US Military Base Would Like It Back, and the UN Agrees"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chagos Archipelago belongs to the country of Mauritius; it\u2019s not a bargaining chip for the American empire.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago and site of a major United States military base, located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, was leased from Britain in 1966.<\/p><\/div>\n

15 Mar 2019<\/em> – Give Chagos back to the Chagossians<\/em>! That\u2019s a slogan I first heard in 2000. It was a demonstration in London, outside a courthouse, a small group of people with handmade signs appealing to the British legal system to return their islands to them. Few people paid them any attention. The courts sided with the islanders (whose case is unimpeachable) and then did nothing to enforce their verdict.<\/p>\n

The Chagos Archipelago is a group of 60 islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands are claimed by Mauritius, a country that won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1968. Three years before the independence of Mauritius, the British separated the Chagos Archipelago and converted it into the British Indian Ocean Territory. To cement its control over the islands, the British expelled over 2,000 Chagossians. Some of these Chagossians stood in London, fighting for their lost islands.<\/p>\n

At the end of February, the UN\u2019s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the U.K. must give the islands back to Mauritius. In 2017, the UN General Assembly had heard the case of the islanders and referred<\/a> it to the ICJ. Now, the ICJ \u2013 with a 13 to 1 ruling (the U.S. voting against) \u2013 has sided<\/a> with the Chagossians. But this is not a binding ruling, and the British government has said it would ignore the International Court of Justice.<\/p>\n

Diego Garcia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why would the United Kingdom need these islands? By the 1960s, the United States had begun to take over many of the British imperial bases for its own massive military base system. There are now over 800 U.S. military bases in more than 70 countries (for comparison, the Russians have about eight overseas military bases, most of them in the territory of the former USSR \u2013 such as in Moldova and in Belarus \u2013 with only the bases in Syria and Vietnam outside that zone). No country can match the U.S. military footprint.<\/p>\n

The biggest island on the Chagos Archipelago is Diego Garcia. The United States leases this island from the United Kingdom. The U.K. gave the United States the lease in exchange for a discount on the sale of the Polaris nuclear submarine system. That lease ends in 2036. Diego Garcia has been one of the most important U.S. overseas bases \u2013 used in the U.S. war on Vietnam, the U.S. war on Afghanistan and the U.S. war on Iraq. It was used by the CIA as a black site in the War on Terror (150 Sri Lankan fishermen were held there in its prisons).<\/p>\n

Zone of Peace<\/strong><\/p>\n

The United States has faced legal threats to its base for the past five decades. The bereft Chagossians have taken their case to British courts, hoping to exert pressure to return the islands to them. When the British broke off the islands from Mauritius in 1965, the U.K. violated UN Resolution 1514 (XV) on Decolonization<\/a> that argued against the breakup of colonies. Britain strong-armed the Mauritius independence movement, telling them that they could have their freedom without Chagos or have no freedom at all.<\/p>\n

More difficult for the U.S. military operations was the attempt by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the United Nations to constitute the Indian Ocean as a \u201czone of peace.\u201d As early as 1964, at the Cairo, Egypt, Non-Aligned summit, the member states recommended that the oceans of the world be \u201cdenuclearized zones\u201d (the NAM was inspired by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and the 1963 Treaty of Tlatelolco \u2013 to keep Latin America free of nuclear weapons). In 1970, the Non-Aligned summit in Lusaka, Zambia, declared<\/a> that the Indian Ocean must be a \u201czone of peace from which Great Power rivalries and competition, as well as bases,\u201d must be excluded.<\/p>\n

The United States attacked this idea. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt told<\/a> the U.S. Congress in 1974 that the USSR stood atop the \u201ccentral part of the West\u2019s energy jugular down to the Persian Gulf.\u201d For that reason, the Indian Ocean \u2013 and Diego Garcia \u2013 has \u201cbecome a focal point of U.S. foreign and economic policies and has a growing impact on our security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marine Reserve<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every attempt was made to deny the people of Chagos their homeland. In April 2010, the British Foreign Office said<\/a> that 640,000 square kilometers of the archipelago would now be a \u201cmarine reserve,\u201d which should remain uninhabited. The British government told the U.S. government \u2013 in a secret cable<\/a> \u2013 that the \u201cformer inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos were a marine reserve.\u201d This was environmental conservation for military purposes. No statement was made to remove the U.S. base from Diego Garcia, which would be at the heart of the marine reserve.<\/p>\n

In 2015, Mauritius went to the court of arbitration at the Hague, where they won a ruling that the British declaration of the marine reserve was illegal. The UK had not consulted either Mauritius or the Chagossians. Britain eventually said that the Chagossians would not be able to exercise their right to return because of the objections of the U.S. military. So be it.<\/p>\n

After this ruling, a spokeswoman for the British foreign office said that the ICJ\u2019s ruling \u201cwas an advisory opinion, not a judgment.\u201d It is unlikely that the U.K. \u2013 or the United States \u2013 will honor the opinion. The United States voted against it. The U.K. now says that the military base \u201chelps to protect people here in Britain and around the world from terrorist threats, organized crime and piracy.\u201d The door closes once more on the hopes of the Chagossians.<\/p>\n

Those hopes, eternal and persistent, are captured in the poet Saradha Soobrayen\u2019s<\/a> prize-winning work:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the main island of Diego Garcia, the U.S.<\/em>
\nbase, Camp Justice<\/em>
\nsquats. The Chagossians are still chanting, \u2018Rann<\/em>
\nnu Diego\u2019<\/em>
\nthirty, forty years later, fighting for the right to<\/em>
\nreturn. Their loss<\/em>
\nis unimaginable, these guardians of the Chagos<\/em>
\narchipelago<\/em>
\nTheir homecoming is not yet out of reach, not<\/em>
\nyet out of sight.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books<\/a> and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. <\/em>He is the author of 18 books, including <\/em>Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), <\/em>The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), Red Star Over the Third World <\/a>(LeftWord, 2017) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution <\/a>(University of California Press, 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – go.ind.media<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chagos Archipelago belongs to the country of Mauritius; it\u2019s not a bargaining chip for the American empire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":129336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,56,51,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","category-asia-pacific","category-europe","category-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}