In concert, the US and the UK in the 1960s seized the island of Diego Garcia, expelled its inhabitants and converted it into a massive airbase for the bombing of Middle Eastern and African targets. Both countries continue to defy a ruling by the International Court of Justice to transfer the island back to Mauritius. Compare that to Chinese action on uninhabited and adjacent islands.
The US calls for all of us to obey the rules of international order. They are good rules. If they had been around a few years earlier we would not have had the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and a host of mini-wars ranging from Grenada, Guatemala, Panama, Syria, Chile, Columbia, Libya, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Cambodia and Lao.
But the grand-daddy of them all is perhaps the least known – the move by the US in the 1960s in concert with the UK to seize the island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, expel its inhabitants and convert it into a massive airbase for the bombing of Middle Eastern and African targets.
In the process the US managed to break or ignore the rules laid down by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty. Add to this denial of legal claims by former island inhabitants seeking right of return plus the illegal use of the islands for torture renditions, and the list of infractions of the rules by the US becomes fairly impressive.
It certainly makes Beijing’s alleged transgressions in the East and South China sea seem almost irrelevant – particularly since most of them are in fact Taiwan’s, not Beijing’s.
The Diego Garcia story begins with the British seizing the French colonised islands of Mauritius (the Chagos Archipelago to the south-west of India included) following its victory in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). In 1965 the British then split off the Chagos archipelago to create a fictitious territorial unit called the British Indian Overseas Territory (BOIT). Soon after, from 1968 – 1973 it began the deportation of the local population to Mauritius and the Seychelles after which the US was allowed to convert the territory to the enormous air and naval bases we see today.
(If there is one thing I learned during my years in foreign affairs it is the knee jerk subservience of Perfidious Albion to the wishes of the US, no matter how evil.)
Mauritius has maintained its claim to the Chagos Archipelago ever since, claiming it was illegally separated to create the BOIT. In 2017, the United Nations General Assembly voted 94-15 to refer the dispute between Mauritius and the UK to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In 2019, the ICJ in The Hague ruled that the UK must transfer the islands back to Mauritius as they were not legally separated from the latter in 1965.
It demanded also that the United Kingdom withdraw its colonial administration from the islands and cooperate with Mauritius to facilitate the resettlement of Mauritian nationals (the original Chagos population) in the archipelago – to which the US and the UK responded by saying the current agreement between them would remain in force until 2036 and already there is talk of extending it for a further 50 years.
In its submission to the ICJ, Mauritius argued it was coerced into giving up the Chagos Islands and that the separation was in breach of UN resolution 1514, passed in 1960, which specifically banned the breakup of colonies before independence. It accused the UK of ‘trespass, intentional infliction of emotional distress, forced relocation, racial discrimination, torture and genocide’.
The remnants of the original 1,500 Chagossian population have been left to eke out a living in Mauritius and London.
Meanwhile, the Diego Garcia base continues its unflustered existence, happily bombing Middle Eastern, Somalian and other targets at will.
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and emeritus president of Tama University, Tokyo, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
Comments
10 responses to “Diego Garcia: Rules for the powerful; bombs for the weak”
How do we make such history known to the wider world? Repeatedly I see on TV, or hear on radio, references to China as “belligerent” or aggressive. When people such as Geraldine Doogue interview liberal historians or experts on international affairs it is taken as read that China and Russia are aggressors. But how does Russian and Chinese aggression/ expansion compare with that of the USA? Russia and China defend and maintain their borders. When the Soviet Union broke up, the Americans assured the Russians that NATO would not spread eastward. Then the Americans took it East. The Americans wage war and support coups across the world and yet it is the Chinese and Russians who are portrayed by our media as belligerent!
That is because our media is nothing more than a pusillanimous and pathetic echo of the propaganda coming out from Washington and London. (AP/AFP/Reuters… NYT, Washington Post, BBC… not forgetting Google & Facebook…). But full marks to these very good students of Joseph Goebbels. He would be proud of their ability to turn black into white, and white into black!
A case in point- they have been able to persuade a not insignificant swathe of Chinese people themselves living in Taiwan and Hong Kong that they are not Chinese! I give the CIA/NED/HRW/Amnesty International (the latter 2 having been infiltrated by the CIA), as well as their media A++ for their ability in mind bending!
Our great American intellectual Noam Chomsky talks about ‘manufacturing consent’; I would go further and say that these guys can actually manufacture truth! You mentioned Geraldine Doogue- I am certain that she believed 100% what she was talking about. The truth, according to the masters of the Universe!
The US are nothing but finger pointers. It’s always about do what we say, not what we do.
The hypocrisy is that they are not even members of UNCLOS yet try to enforce its rulings in the South China Sea.
That’s very convenient, pushing the rules for others but making sure they don’t have to abide by them themselves.
When you look at how they took Hawaii it was also just a land and strategic grab. They already annexed it as a territory in 1898, but surprisingly only in 1959 they made it a state of America. They literally just moved in, muscled the indigenous Hawaiians out of the way, and over time just waited until they could capture it 100% as their own. Like here with Indigenous Australians it is still a contentious issue.
In some ways Guam is even in a worse situation because it is a US territory added after the Spanish-American war. Those born there are given American citizenship, but because it is a territory they have no rights to vote in US elections. It’s the main airbase for the US to park its nuclear capable bombers should they need them to attack China. They had been brought back to the US under Trump earlier, but I have read recently that they are back there again now.
While the US like to castigate China over their claims over the South China Sea, they say nothing about the the ROC Constitution in Taiwan which still claims “Taiwan, China, Mongolia, and the entire South China Sea as its territory”.
I have found whatever the US accuses of anyone of doing anything whether it’s true or not, it is 100% certain that have done it themselves in the past. It takes one to know one.
They just adopted “Britain rules the waves and waives the rules”.
And it is not only the takeover of lands and countries, its leaving them often with a hell of a mess to clean up.
I read recently that in Laos with the rate that unexploded ordinance scattered throughout the country is being cleaned up, it will not be completed until the end of this current century.
It is fair to say the US is paying for some of the clean-up, but at the current rate how many legs, and arms will be lost + outright deaths will it take before the work is completed in 2100?
One of my English cousins was former British Army bomb disposal man in Iraq – since which in UN/NGO work in Cambodia, Lebanon/Palestine and in East Africa. He knows the cost to human life, “economies” and sovereignty of US/UK cluster bombs/mine-fields – and one of the few causes which helped reshape my opinion of Diana, Princess of Wales. And now Australia with the complicit encouragement of ex-LNP Minister Christopher Pyne places us alongside those other purveyors of death.
“LNP Minister Christopher Pyne places us alongside those other purveyors of death.”
And Defence Minister, quiet little unassuming Linda Reynolds seems to have been on a career path to represent the military industrial complex in Australia as Michael West’s site reveals.
‘The “spruiker-in-chief” of defence industry has been involved with promoting military industry interests since the late 1980s when she co-founded the WA Defence Industry Council. Reynolds combined a career in the army reserves with political staffing roles for the Liberals, and a stint with industry giant Raytheon, before becoming a senator for WA in 2014. From 2 March 2019, she served as Minister for Defence Industry before being promoted to Defence Minister on 29 May 2019.’ (1).
While recent exposure that in her office a young woman was allegedly raped are taking much focus, and importantly so, the MS media ought to be pointing out that the defence minister has been groomed for the job and is actually a lobbyist for weapons industry.
It reminds me of the fossil fuel industry grooming candidates to be elected on their behalf in the US political circus.
(1): https://www.michaelwest.com.au/king-of-lemons-australia-swindled-by-lockheed-martin-and-its-joint-strike-fighter/
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Not only the problem with unexploded ordnance; in Vietnam, babies are still being born with serious birth defects. Some say this could continue for quite a few more generations: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/3013636/vietnam-war-44-years-birth-defects-americas-agent-orange-are
Ditto Iraq, similar effects on babies born post-war, as a result of the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Not only did the US (and Australia) not respect “the rules of international order”, they have basically committed war crimes. Bush Junior and Tony Blair are criminals in this respect in the Iraq war. And I would include Peace Prize winner Obama as another criminal, for approving many thousands of extrajudicial killings done by military drones across the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Our current global hegemon is a criminal enterprise. What is disappointing is that most Australians either can’t see this or more likely don’t want to see it!
Well when the West chants “freedom and liberty”, what they meant was freedom and liberty for ME, death to everyone else.
Thanks to Greg Clark we are reminded of further hypocrisies and ugliness to the rightful owners/residents of Diego Garcia by the UK and its boss-in-Chief the US. And beautifully contrasted with the indignant cries about the Chinese and their occupation/build-up of disputed islands in the South China Sea (disputed because? – pushing the bullying and dangerous US navy further afield from China’s coast!