I’ve just watched the latest of John Pilger’s Special Reports about an island people who were first wronged forty years ago, and continue to be wronged until the present day.
Stealing A Nation was his report on how the British Government deported an entire island race, so that they could hand the people’s land over to America for them to build a naval and air force base in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Their story is shocking. I’d vaguely known that Diego Garcia was a British protectorate and that the Americans had a large base there. What I didn’t know was that they’d deported an entire population, shooting dogs, forcing them to travel in squalid conditions with only the belongings they carried, and then left them to rot in the slums of Mauritius.
And this isn’t a story from history. It continues to this day with a recent “Order in Council” overturning a High Court decision in favour of the islanders. This is not something I’d previously known about and bears more investigation.
I know that the reality is that we’ll bend over backwards (or forwards) for America, and want to stay best buddies. They want a big naval base in an area where they have complete secrecy and great strength. But should this sort of thing happen without regard to an entire nation? Absolutley not. We’re talking about a people who cannot even visit the graves of their families. How barbaric are we? And it’s not as though it would be any different under a Tory government either. Stuff like this really makes you despair.
Interesting that this history of Diego Garcia on a US Navy website fails to mention anything about the lcoal population. Still, if you’re in the US Navy and soon to be heading out there, or maybe are going to be one of the handful of Brits on the island, it sure looks nice!
In the meantime, congratulations must go to John Pilger for continuing to make films about this stuff and ITV for showing it (well one film a year’s not going to kill them is it?). A shame that it didn’t go out earlier than 11pm, but hey, there are crap soaps about police and firefighters to be shown at that time.