REVIEWS
“THE BASES OF EMPIRE:
The Global Struggle Against US
Military Posts”
edited by Catherine
Lutz, Pluto Press, London,
2009.
“ISLAND OF SHAME”
by David Vine, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 2009.
Peace Researcher 38 – July 2009
- Jeremy Agar
In August 1971, on a quiet coral
island in the Indian Ocean, a man was sent by the US government to kill the local
inhabitants’ dogs. There were about a thousand of them, roaming free. He tried
to shoot them, but some were merely wounded and howled. So he went off to get a
poison and strewed strychnine. But still dogs survived. So the remaining ones
were rounded up, put in a compound and gassed, while the island’s children
cried.
The next day all the children and
their families were herded onto a boat and shipped away from their home. The
island was thereby emptied of people and pets, and two hundred years of human
culture was abolished. The people have still not been allowed to
return. The expulsion is one of the moral watersheds of the last 50 years.
These books explain why it happened, why it’s so little known, and why it
matters.
During the 1950s’ Eisenhower era,
when the Cold War between the US
and the USSR had become the
defining feature of global politics, America was exuberantly powerful. The
Russians might have a bomb, but the Stars and Stripes flew over the oceans. It
was a period when America
could “project” its influence with few impediments, so officials pressed for it
to take its chances while the going was good. Some farsighted staffers
within the Government recognised that the colonies of Africa and Asia might soon attain independence and the locals might
get stroppy.
It occurred to a certain Stu Barber,
from the Long Range Objectives Group of the US Navy, that the oceans of the world
contained scores of small islands that were going to waste. “Our military
criteria were location, airfield potential, anchorage potential. Our political
criteria were minimal population, isolation, present status, historical and
ethnic factors”. As a US Navy historian has explained, the idea was that the US
“should acquire base rights in certain strategically located islands, mostly in
the Southern Hemisphere, and stockpile them for future use”. The
race to check out the world’s islands was on, especially those that were
“sparsely populated”. These would be “the easiest to acquire and would entail
the least [sic] political headaches”.
Depopulating Diego Garcia
The Indian Ocean, handy to Africa,
South Asia and the Middle East, was ideal. In
no time, 60 likely sites had been found there. Best of all was Diego Garcia,
part of the Chagos Archipelago about 1,000 miles
south of India.
Too small to show up on normal maps, the island was still long enough for
runways, and its almost enclosed lagoon could shelter as many aircraft carriers
as might one day be needed. There was one problem: people lived there.
Diego Garcia had once been
uninhabited, a perfect example of the sort of palm-treed,
coral-reefed atoll that features in magazine cartoons. That lasted until
1783, when the island’s French “owner” brought in 22 African slaves to grow
coconuts. In 1814, with Napoleon defeated, Diego Garcia became a British
colony. Because slavery was abolished in 1835, Indians were imported to replace
the slaves as cheap labour. That’s how Diego Garcia remained for the next
century or so, a pinprick on the map of empire, and less than a pinprick on the
conscience of the Colonial Office.
The post-war American surge
coincided with a tired Britain
trying to cut costs. The UK
felt it could no longer hang on to all its pink empire, deciding to give up on
all its conquests between Suez and Singapore.
This didn’t mean they didn’t worry about “the vacuum in the Indian
Ocean” that might have resulted - had it not been for kind Uncle
Sam. Successive British governments had become attuned to abasing themselves
before the Americans and were quick to agree that the US deserved to have “exclusive
control” over Diego Garcia. Parenthetically, spelling out the obvious
rider, the UK
added, “(without local inhabitants)”.
Whatever Yankee wanted, Yankee got.
So as not to inconvenience Washington,
it was accepted that Her Majesty’s Government “should be responsible for
acquiring land, resettlement of population at HMG’s
expense”. The people of Diego Garcia would be shuttled off to Mauritius, the nearest available
island, a thousand miles away to the south-west. The Chagossians
wouldn’t get off the boat in Mauritius,
despite the promise of $1 each as a resettlement bonus and a slum shack.
In the meantime, the worst worries
of both imperial governments had been justified. The Third World, as the
self-styled First World was pleased to name the colonies, was indeed becoming
independent - in formal if not real terms - and the UK Prime Minister, Harold
Wilson, warned US officials that he might have to “pay a price” at the UN for
having ejected a whole culture from its birthright. A British official pleaded
with the Americans. He needed a “bribe”. It’s an ambiguous plea. Did the Right
Honourable gentleman mean the islanders needed a sweetener or did he have his
hand out? Ostensibly the former, but the Brits have always favoured the nod and
the wink.
In those more upfront days US
officials might have felt neither Wilson’s nor the Chagossians’
pain. Wilson
was to offer the new Prime Minister of Mauritius three million pounds to cover
the costs of transferring an entire culture to his island, to which the Chagos Archipelago was formally attached. This arrangement
gives a further clue as to the hapless bargaining position of the islanders. In
so many colonial territories, the post-independence boundaries were haphazard,
reflecting imperial convenience rather than the needs of the colonised. In this
case, the locals didn’t count at all because the day after the dogs of Diego
Garcia were exterminated, the human locals too no longer existed.
Dumped Into The Slums Of Mauritius
In 1964 Chagos
had been politically separated from Mauritius, allowing the co-opted
local elite to wash their hands of the whole squalid affair. Fearing dominance
by Indians, the conservative Opposition, which was largely Kreol
(ethnically African) and Coloured, had come out against independence. Never
mind that the people of Diego Garcia were themselves mostly African. With
almost no resettlement money and the demise of the copra industry, the people
who had been forced into a monoculture of coconuts had no place in the economy
and no means to gain a toehold in a future economy. A vague plan to invent a
culture for them as pig farmers was aborted and they were dumped into the slums
of Port Louis, Mauritius, where they were derided
as the bottom of the heap by those one tiny notch above on the ladder.
Deprivation does that to people. Like pigs in crates, they turn on themselves
and on each other.
Vine paints Diego Garcia as very
much a tropical paradise, and the few other impartial observers who have been
able to visit concur. The Americans based there seem to have delighted in the
place - as individuals. As cogs in a machine they have dredged its pristine
coral to make concrete. Throughout, the islanders have been
refused even service jobs at the base on their own land. That’s because any
sort of occupation could one day allow a legal challenge to stay. The imperial
masters reckon it’s safer to deny any hope, however faint.
Eventually, shamed at last into a
gesture of guilt, the UK
gave some Chagossians citizenship. A small group
bound by a common and intensely narrow experience, with no cultural ties to
other sub-cultures from deprived backgrounds, the emigrants will find the going
tough. At present they live mostly near one of London’s airports (neither of the books
discusses this present tense, the epilogue to their stories).
Vine, an anthropologist, is very
good at putting their plight into context. Most accounts of this nature are
written from an exclusively political or economic bias. Vine’s understanding of
culture, of the effects of dislocation, and of generational impoverishment,
allows him to engage imaginatively with his topic. The injustice under scrutiny
is so blatant that his book could easily have become a spluttering polemic.
It’s much more than that, at once sympathetic, scholarly and witheringly angry.
Amid stark contrast, irony abounds. Mauritius
is one of the richer places in the region, its wealth deriving from tourism.
Tourist venues in the “Third World”, typically
on islands, are like that, with the whims of rich First Worlders
being met by some of the world’s poorest workers. The central Indian Ocean thus
has two big new airports, one for bombers and one for tourists, and many of the
people expelled from their home to make room for the military now find work
catering to the tourists who might, in a less neurotic world, otherwise have
been enjoying an unspoiled Diego Garcia.
Legal Victories; Political Defeats
Supported by international
solidarity, the Chagossians sued the British
government in the British courts. Everyone was surprised when they won, with
the UK Supreme Court declaring the expulsion to have been illegal. The problem
was that the verdict had no coercive power. The law be damned, the Government
lawyers fumed. The return can’t happen. So it was that in 2004, an Order in
Council, a decree from the Cabinet, banned it. Then, a further
surprise, the High Court judges overturned the ban, with some staunch comment:
“The suggestion that a Minister can, through the means of an Order in Council,
exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim he is
doing so ... for the ‘peace, order and good governance’ of the territory is, to
us, repugnant”.
The judges can’t be faulted, but
there’s an absurdist look to proceedings. The law, it seems, is unimpeachable -
until the State discerns a serious threat, when all bets are off. According to
John Pilger at the time, the British authorities
brazened a blank denial of the truth. “There is nothing in our files about a
population and an evacuation”, declared the UK Department of Defence
(antiwar.com: “Diego Garcia: Paradise Cleansed” 4/10/04).
In the US, in 1975, Ted Kennedy,
then as now a Senator representing Massachusetts, put in an unwelcome but
successful amendment to a Congressional bill, asking for a report on the
expulsion. In their reply, the two complicit bureaucracies, State and Defense, were less abrupt then the Brits but more
misleading. A simple lie can be challenged, but the US
denial was couched in the evasive terms of public relations spin: “In the
absence of more complete data”, Washington
prattled, “it is impossible to establish the status of these persons and to
what extent, if any, they formed a distinct community”. With the whole
government machine determined to hide it, the “data” would remain “incomplete”
for decades.
Washington
suggested that the removal of Chagossian people from
their homeland was doing all concerned a favour as it was a way “to avoid
social problems”. Vine translates. This was “a polite way of referring to
trumped up racist fears about prostitution” at the base. To the State and Defense Departments, there was no problem as the Chagossians (“these people”) “all went willingly”. Always
happy to look on the bright side of life, US military Websites can now enthuse
about the good living on the island, with its great golf and snorkelling. After
the “sweep” that had “sanitised” the base from messy human beings, Diego Garcia
could be branded as pristine and perfect. Official amnesia allowed an
impression that it had lain unspoiled and receptive for millennia, awaiting
only the sympathetic power of the US Navy for it to achieve its destiny as a
home away from home for the guardians of global peace.
In 2001, as domestic US opinion recovered a repressed memory, a class
action suit was launched in Washington.
The defendants included Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s whiz-kid
technocrat, and those more familiar and recent villains, Donald Rumsfeld and
the Halliburton corporation. The Chagossians
had difficulties beyond the obvious imbalance in power and influence, most
obviously in Mauritius.
Opinion in the Archipelago was divided between one island and the next, and
between Indian and African. While some opposed the base, others welcomed it as
a potential job provider. While some Chagossians
decried interference with their traditional lifestyle, others hoped for new
opportunities arising from the new link to the world.
Most languished in local slums; a
few got to England.
Are you keeping count? The menial workers clustered around Gatwick Airport
south of London
represent a third diaspora. Diaspora 1: from Africa
or India to Chagos; Diaspora 2: from Chagos
to Mauritius; Diaspora 3:
from Mauritius to England.
And only now has the possibility of a normal freedom, in the sense of their
being able to choose a way of life, arisen. It has for the younger generations
growing up in England,
triply displaced as they have been, with no cultural memory. You could say that
they’re on their own. It’s an ambivalent legacy.
Base Central To All America’s Wars
Since the base was built, Diego
Garcia has been involved in all America’s
regional wars. In Gulf War 1 B-52’s flew to Iraq. From there Afghanistan has been bombed. And
after 9/11, it hosted a new “Camp
Justice”, a secret
detention centre. Vine shows that the base serves as a model for any
future “Diego Garcia” that could be set up in Africa.
As one military planner notes: “It’s the single most important military
facility we’ve got. It’s the base from which we control half of Africa and the
southern side of Asia, the southern side of Eurasia [and]...the Persian Gulf region. If it didn’t exist, it would have to
be invented.... We’ll be able to run the planet from Guam
and Diego Garcia by 2015”.
The base’s motto is “Footprint of
Freedom”. The US State doesn’t do irony, so they won’t be concerned that people
who really do care about the environment enjoin us not to leave a “footprint”
on the earth. A greener consciousness than the US Navy might baulk at the
ethnic cleansing of a people so that their land could be paved for bombers. If
you look at a map you’ll see why Guam, which
became vital to the military during World War 2, is seen as a natural partner
for Diego Garcia as the future eyes and ears of Freedom. Its position east of Indonesia, the Philippines
and China is comparable to
Diego Garcia’s position vis-a-vis north-east Africa
and south Asia. In any strategic planning, the
western Pacific and the northern Indian oceans will likely dominate into the
foreseeable future.
While Vine treats his topic of Diego
Garcia with thoughtful respect and depth, he provides context with sketches of
other islands. “Bases Of Empire” has the opposite emphasis, with chapters on
each, including one on Diego Garcia by Vine. The latter book is mostly set
elsewhere. The Pacific, big and empty, has been bounty galore for military planners.
The first big American push followed its take over of the Philippines in 1898; the second followed the
defeat of Japan
in 1945. Since then the US
has enjoyed a free run. The tropical seas were either unpopulated or, like
Diego Garcia, peopled by a few dispensable locals. It’s been a half century
when no restraining rivals could check US impulses.
Prostrate Japan
offered Iwo Jima and Okinawa, whose people are
regarded by mainland Japanese as a lesser culture, and whose economy still lags
the rest of the country. Tensions with the occupying Americans persist. Perhaps
the closest parallel to Diego Garcia is the Bikini Atoll, whose population was
removed to free it up for testing atomic bombs. Apart from giving its name to
the skimpy two-piece bathing suits of the Fifties, a joke of sorts, Bikini has, like Diego Garcia, had no voice.
Polluting Puerto Rico
Some of the islands of empire are
within the US
itself. Puerto Rico, an island colony in the Caribbean
and constitutionally American, serves as a sort of landfill site for the 48
continental states. To show that they’re boss, the Navy routinely complains of
“civilian encroachment” caused by the existence of neighbourhood Puerto Ricans
looking for a place to live. The Pentagon has always opposed initiatives to
clean the island’s air, soil, water and hazardous waste, which has been fouled
by decades of unrestricted military swagger.* Even in the mainland US urban
sprawl near its many bases has compromised the health of civilians. *A
domestic NZ version of this is the propensity of State-Owned Enterprises like
ports and airports to try to exempt themselves from responsibility for their
local environments by claiming that the existence of nearby residents creates
“reverse sensitivity” issues which interfere with their efficient
operation.
Eventually Puerto Rican opposition
to gross pollution could not be resisted, and the Navy left. As in Diego Garcia
it trumpeted its environmental credentials, in this case by agreeing that the
land it had occupied be declared a national park. In practice this meant that
they didn’t bother to clean up the contaminants when they left. This
chapter comments on the battle for public opinion in terms which will resonate
with NZ readers. Co-opted journalists told Puerto Ricans opposing Iraq War 2
that the pro-Bush position was the expression of a “rational, inevitable and
realistic policy”. Democratic supporters of an independent and responsible
foreign policy (two can play at the language game) were patronised as
“idealists” and “romantics”. Well meaning they might be, but that’s the road to
ruin. If they won, the peaceniks would bring about “chaos, political and
economic crisis, coups and civil war”. All
debates over principles and values tend to echo with variations on this
demagogic panic mongering. What else can you do when you control the
government, the military and the press but your argument makes no sense? That’s
the problem posed by democracy and an educated population, the Diego Garcia
problem for which Stu Barber devised a final solution.
The Philippines is at once a biggish
country and a collection of smallish islands and its entanglement with the
demands of empire has been as long and as complete as anywhere. So it is not
surprising that the fightback in the Philippines
has been strong. Filipino pressure freed the country from Clark Air Force Base,
one of the world’s largest and most intrusive. Long experience has created
alliances between activists. The various campaigns - against foreign military
bases, against social and environmental pollution - have been increasingly
linked. Huge injustices remain, but each victory increases the chance of future
successes.
But it is in Diego Garcia that the
ravages of empire are most obvious in that the injustices committed have been
without any mitigating excuse. The history of the island is the story of how a
perfect storm of exploitation was created, and we can attach whatever label we
wish to explain it, whether that be to do with imperialism or colonialism or
militarism or racism or patriarchy. However, one explanation offered by a
contributor, that the islanders were the victim of so-called “bureaucratic
neglect”, is harder to sustain. The neglect was not the result of careless
negligence.
Another writer reminds us that the
abuse was dealt out when Henry Kissinger ran US foreign policy. This man
believed in “realpolitik”, a fancy word for bullying.
Eurocentric Kissinger used to boast that “southern” concerns were of no interest
to him and that the African bureau of his department was a “bunch of
missionaries”. That’s because officials at the embassy in Mauritius were appalled by the
expulsion. Vine is particularly lucid in analysing the social dynamics of
small, homogenous situations. For whites on the island the culture of the base
was all they had as a reference for daily life. It’s not realistic to have
expected resistance from within the local power structure.
There is one misreading on Vine’s
moral compass. It’s OK that he openly sympathises with the Kreols,
but problematic when he ignores Indian experience and blames the Indian
leadership for selling out the Africans. As he has himself demonstrated, there
was a hierarchy of misery, and blaming one of the victims doesn’t help. Chagos’s ethnic history was a colonial construct, designed
by the imperial power precisely to be divisive. It’s a pattern along the lines
of Trinidad, Guyana
or Fiji.
In all these instances, there has been an unfortunate habit among liberal white
academics to chastise Indian politicians, when in all four colonies
progressive, non-sectarian resistance has been largely led by Indians.
In 2004 the US announced its Global Defense Posture Review, which was all about how to
“project” their power. That entails an indefinite “posture”, squatting all over
Diego Garcia. Just why did the Bushes attack Iraq
and Afghanistan?
All the likely critiques make the bases integral, whether the wars were just
about the oil or Kuwait, or whether they’ve been “demonstration” wars (“pour
encourager les autres”) or whether they’ve been
excuses to re-legitimise other Middle East bases. Whatever the emphasis or
immediate motivation, the need for island bases is assumed.
US Washes Its Hands Of Chagossians
When at the Congressional hearing
the Embassy in Mauritius
asked home base to think about the US’s “moral responsibility”, the
responding flunky suggested the Government bore no “legal responsibility. Moral
responsibility is a term, sir, that I find difficult to assess”. That
might be bureaucratic, but it’s not the voice of “neglect” or civil service
caution. It’s the voice of a bully who won’t answer to anyone. To a State
Department flunky would New
Zealand be an “island”? Probably it was -
until the nuclear row. That’s one good news item for us locals. Another comes
from an overview of US policy:
“Equally
courageous are the banished people of Diego Garcia who are struggling to return
home and to end their years of suffering and marginalisation as foreign
outcasts. With activist allies in New Zealand and the help of leading
journalists, human right organisations, and jurists in Britain, they have risen
from oblivion and won case after case in the British courts” (“US Foreign
Military Bases And Military Colonialism”, Joseph Gerson,
a US Quaker, “Bases of Empire”, p67). As he
was finishing his book, curious about the man who first proposed the expulsion,
Vine tracked down Barber’s son. Barber was dead, but, said his son, he had come
to bitterly regret his part in the tragedy. Yet all his efforts to influence
the system came to nothing. As an individual man with a conscience Stu Barber
didn’t count.