Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (2 page)

The people, the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured south Indians brought to Chagos beginning in the eighteenth century, received no resettlement assistance and quickly became impoverished. Today the group numbers around 5,000. Most remain deeply impoverished. Meanwhile the base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most secretive and powerful U.S. military facilities in the world, helping to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), threatening Iran, China, Russia, and nations from southern Africa to southeast Asia, host to a secret CIA detention center for high-profile terrorist suspects, and home to thousands of U.S. military personnel and billions of dollars in deadly weaponry.

“You were born—”

“Peros Banhos,” replied Rita Bancoult
*
before I could finish my question.

“In what year?”

“1928. . . . The thirtieth of June.”

Rita grew up in Peros Banhos’s capital and administrative center,
L’île du Coin
—Corner Island.
“Lamem monn ne, lamem monn reste,”
she added in the songlike, up-and-down cadence of Chagossians’ Kreol: La-MEM moan NAY, la-MEM moan rest-AY. “The island where I was born is the island where I stayed.”
¹

Corner Island and 31 neighboring islands in the Peros Banhos atoll form part of the Chagos Archipelago. Portuguese explorers named the largest and best-known island in the archipelago Diego Garcia, about 150 miles to the south. The archipelago’s name appears to come from the Portuguese
chagas
—the wounds of Christ.
²

“And your parents?” I asked. “What island were your parents born on?”

“My parents were born there too,” Rita explained. “My grandmother—the mother of my father—was born in Six Islands—
Six Îles
. My father was also born in Six Islands. My grandfather was born there too. My grandmother on my mother’s side was born in Peros Banhos.”

Rita does not know where her other ancestors were born, one of the injuries still borne by people with enslaved forebears. However, she remembers her grandmother, Olivette Pauline, saying that Olivette’s grandmother—Rita’s great-great-grandmother—had been enslaved and had the name “Masambo” or “Mazambo.” Rita thinks she was a
Malgas
—a person from Madagascar.

Rita and her family are some of Chagos’s indigenous people.
³
Chagossians lived in Diego Garcia and the rest of the previously uninhabited archipelago since the time of the American Revolution when Franco-Mauritians created coconut plantations on the islands and began importing enslaved and, later, indentured laborers from Africa and India.

Over the next two centuries, the diverse workforce developed into a distinct, emancipated society and a people known initially as the
Ilois
—the Islanders. Nearly everyone worked on the coconut plantations. Most worked in the production of copra—dried coconut flesh—and coconut oil made by pressing copra. The people built the archipelago’s infrastructure and produced its wealth. As some maps still attest, the islands became known as the “Oil Islands”—meaning coconut oil, not the petroleum that would prove central to the archipelago’s recent history. A distinct Chagos Kreol language emerged. The people built their own houses, inhabited land passed down from generation to generation, and kept vegetable gardens and farm animals. By the time Rita was a mother, there were nurseries and schools for her children. In 1961, Mauritian colonial governor Robert Scott remarked that the main village on Diego Garcia had the “look of a French coastal village miraculously transferred whole to this shore.”
⁴

While far from luxurious and still a plantation society, the islands provided a secure life, generally free of want, and featuring universal employment and numerous social benefits, including regular if small salaries in cash and food, land, free housing, education, pensions, burial services, and basic health care on islands described by many as idyllic.

“You had your house—you didn’t have rent to pay,” said Rita, a short, stocky woman with carefully French-braided white hair. “With my ration, I got ten and a half pounds of rice each week, I got ten and a half pounds of flour, I got my oil, I got my salt, I got my dhal, I got my beans—it was only butter beans and red beans that we needed to buy.

“And then I got my fresh fish, Saturday. I got my salted fish too, of at least four pounds, five pounds to take. But we didn’t take it because we were able to catch fish ourselves. . . . We planted pumpkin, we planted greens. . . . Chickens, we had them. Pigs, the company fed them, and we got some. Chickens, ducks, we fed them ourselves.

“I had a dog named
Katorz
—Katorz, when the sea was at low tide, he would go into the sea. He caught fish in his mouth and he brought them back to me,” recalled Rita 1,200 miles from her homeland.

“Life there paid little money, a very little,” she said, “but it was the sweet life.”

During the winter of 1922, eight-year-old Stuart Barber was sick and confined to bed at his family’s home in New Haven, Connecticut. A solitary child long troubled by health problems, Stu, as he was known, found solace that winter in a cherished geography book. He was particularly fascinated by the world’s remote islands and had a passion for collecting the stamps of far-flung island colonies. While the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina in the South Atlantic became his favorite, Stu noticed that the Indian Ocean was dotted with many islands claimed by Britain.
⁵

Thirty-six years later, after having experienced a taste of island life as a naval intelligence officer in Hawai‘i during World War II, Stu was drawing up lists of small, isolated colonial islands from every map, atlas, and nautical chart he could find. It was 1958. Thin and spectacled, Stu was a civilian back working for the Navy at the Pentagon.

The Navy ought to have a permanent facility, Stu suddenly realized, like the island bases acquired during the Pacific’s “island hopping” campaign against Japan. The facility should be on “a small atoll, minimally populated, with a good anchorage.” The Navy, he began to tell his superiors, should build a small airstrip, oil storage, and logistical facilities. The Navy would use it “to support minor peacetime deployments” and major wartime operations.
⁶

Working in the Navy’s long-range planning office, it occurred to Stu that over the next decades island naval bases would be essential tools for maintaining military dominance during the Cold War. In the era of decolonization, the non-Western world was growing increasingly unstable and would likely become the site of future combat. “Within the next 5 to 10 years,” Stu wrote to the Navy brass, “virtually all of Africa, and certain Middle Eastern and Far Eastern territories presently under Western control will gain either complete independence or a high degree of autonomy,” making them likely to “drift from Western influence.”
⁷

All the while, U.S. and other Western military bases were becoming dangerous targets of opposition both in the decolonizing world and from the Soviet Union and the United Nations. The inevitable result for the United States, Stu said, was “the withdrawal” of Western military forces and “the denial or restriction” of Western bases in these areas.
⁸

But Stu had the answer to these threats. The solution, he saw, was what he called the “Strategic Island Concept.” The plan would be to avoid traditional base sites located in populous mainland areas where they were vulnerable to local non-Western opposition. Instead, “only relatively small, lightly populated islands, separated from major population masses, could be safely held under full control of the West.” Island bases were the key.

But if the United States was going to protect its “future freedom of military action,” Stu realized, they would have to act quickly to “stockpile” island basing rights as soon as possible. Just as any sensible investor would “stockpile any material commodity which foreseeably will become unavailable in the future,” Stu believed, the United States would have to quickly buy up small colonial islands around the world or otherwise ensure its Western allies maintained sovereignty over them. Otherwise the islands would be lost to decolonization forever.
⁹

As the idea took shape in his head, Stu first thought of the Seychelles and its more than 100 islands before exploring other possibilities. Finally he found time to gather and “scan all the charts to see what useful islands there might be”: There was Phuket, Cocos, Masirah, Farquhar, Aldabra, Desroches, Salomon, and Peros Banhos in and around the Indian Ocean alone. After finding all to be “inferior sites,” Stu found “that beautiful atoll of Diego Garcia, right in the middle of the ocean.”
¹⁰

Stu saw that the small v-shaped island was blessed with a central location within striking distance of potential conflict zones, one of the world’s great natural harbors in its protected lagoon, and enough land to build a large airstrip. But the Navy still needed to ensure it would get a base absent any messy “political complications.” Any targeted island would have to be “free of impingement on any significant indigenous population or economic interest.” Stu was pleased to note that Diego Garcia’s population was “measured only in the hundreds.”
¹¹

When in late 1967 a mule-drawn cart ran over the foot of Rita’s three-year-old daughter Noellie, the nurse in Peros Banhos’s eight-bed hospital told Rita that the foot needed an operation. She would have to take Noellie to the nearest full-service hospital, 1,200 miles away in Mauritius.

Going to Mauritius meant waiting for the next and only boat service—a four-times-a-year connection with the larger island. Which meant waiting two months. When the boat finally arrived, Rita packed a small box with some clothes and a pot to cook in, locked up the family’s wood-framed, thatched-roof house, and left for Mauritius with Noellie, her husband, Julien Bancoult, and their five other children.

After four days on the open ocean, the family arrived in the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, and rushed Noellie to the nearest hospital. As Rita recalled, a doctor operated but saw immediately that the foot had gone untreated for “much too long.” Gangrene had set in. Noellie died a month later.

Mourning her death, the family had to wait two months until the departure of the next boat for Chagos. With the departure date approaching, Rita
walked to the office of the steamship company to arrange for the family’s return. There the steamship company representative told her, “Your island has been sold. You will never go there again,” leaving Rita to return to her family speechless and in tears.

When Julien finally heard his wife’s news he collapsed backwards, his arms splayed wide, unable to utter a word. Prevented from returning home, Rita, Julien, and their five surviving children found themselves in a foreign land, separated from their home, their land, their animals, their possessions, their jobs, their community, and the graves of their ancestors. The Bancoults had been, as Chagossians came to say,
derasine
—deracinated, uprooted, torn from their natal lands.

“His sickness started to take hold of him,” Rita explained. “He didn’t understand” a thing she said.

Soon Julien suffered a stroke, his body growing rigid and increasingly paralyzed. “His hands didn’t move, his feet didn’t move. Everything was frozen,” Rita said. Before the year was out, she would spend several weeks receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital.

Five years after suffering the stroke, Julien died. Rita said the cause of death was
sagren
—profound sorrow.

“There
wasn’t
sickness” like strokes or
sagren
in Peros Banhos, Rita explained. “There wasn’t that sickness. Nor diabetes, nor any such illness. What drugs?” she asked rhetorically. “This is what my husband remembered and pictured in his mind. Me too, I remember these things that I’ve said about us, David. My heart grows heavy when I say these things, understand?”

After Julien’s death, the Bancoults’ son Alex lost his job as a dockworker. He later died at 38 addicted to drugs and alcohol. Their son Eddy died at 36 of a heroin overdose. Another son, Rénault, died suddenly at age eleven, for reasons still mysterious to the family, after selling water and begging for money at a local cemetery near their home.

“My life has been buried,” Rita told me from the torn brown vinyl couch in her small sitting room. “What do I think about it?” she continued. “It’s as if I was pulled from my paradise to put me in hell. Everything here you need to buy. I don’t have the means to buy them. My children go without eating. How am I supposed to bear this life?”

“Welcome to the Footprint of Freedom,” says the sign on Diego Garcia. Today, at any given time, 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops and civilian support staff live on the island. “Picture a tropical paradise lost in an endless
expanse of cerulean ocean,” described
Time
magazine reporter Massimo Calabresi when he became one of the first journalists in over twenty-five years to visit the secretive atoll. Calabresi earned the privilege traveling with President George W. Bush and Air Force One during a ninety-minute refueling stop between Iraq and Australia. “Glossy palm fronds twist in the temperate wind along immaculate, powder white beaches. Leathery sea turtles bob lazily offshore, and the light cacophony of birdsong accents the ambient sound of wind and waves,” he reported. “Now add concrete. Lots and lots of concrete. . . . Think early-’70s industrial park.”
¹²

Confined to an auditorium during his stay (but presented with a souvenir t-shirt bearing “pictures of scantily clad women and mermaids” and the words “Fantasy Island, Diego Garcia”), Calabresi was prevented from touring the rest of the island. If he had, he would have found what, like most overseas U.S. bases, resembles a small American town, in this case magically transported to the middle of the Indian Ocean.