Outposts (5 page)
And, behind a low wall, ringed by flower beds that had long since resumed their feral patterns, a mansion. This was clearly where the man who ran the island—or woman, it being a woman who had the idea of turning Boddam into a free port—made his home. It was once a rather splendid place: three floors, verandahs, balconies, shuttered windows, a pergola by the lawn. Now the whole place sagged at an alarming angle; when I climbed up the main staircase
the house shook, and when I climbed down the stairs collapsed with a roar and in a cloud of grey wood-dust, and I had to jump the last six feet.
Not long ago a family had lived here. It had been a simple life, undemanding, pleasant. There had been no grand balls or diplomatic receptions at this corner of the Empire; but no doubt they had raised a glass on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday. Once in a while there was a radio message from London; and a ship would come every couple of months to collect the oil and the copra; and perhaps every three years His Excellency the Governor would come in his launch, and the children would be lavish with their flags and sing the one English song they knew to him.
But there was little evidence of that today. Tacked to the wall of one cottage I found a photograph of a debutante that had been cut from a copy of
Country Life
—a rather stern-looking girl from Wiltshire. And in another bungalow, four volumes of
The Times History of the War
, mildewed and yellow with age, but readable still, and with portraits of Kitchener, and stirring accounts of the Somme.
Boddam was always a small cog in the Imperial machine—one of the least islands of a lesser dependency of a colony whose best-known inhabitant—the dodo—had become a symbol of the extinct. And yet the island, though apparently dead and inhabited by ghosts, still remains today in London’s charge, still vexes the occasional civil servant. One might suppose it does not vex him much, since it has no permanent inhabitants, and thus neither products nor needs; but it is, incontrovertibly, a piece of British territory for which the Crown is responsible and which ultimately, one might suppose further, a government in London would still wish to protect and defend with a degree of passion, verve and style.
In fact, in the specific case of Boddam Island and her neighbours—and in particular one neighbour a few hours’ sailing time away to the south—London wishes rather more than that. The colony of British Indian Ocean Territory, which spreads in a wild profusion of atolls and lagoons and reefs over twenty-one thousand square miles of ocean, is at the same time one of the least-known, and in
many ways the most important of those that are left. It is a place of great beauty, and until recently it enjoyed the perfect peace of a tropic backwater, unremembered, but unencumbered. However today it is all very different. It is a place of considerable and unnecessary sadness—a territory wrapped in official mystery and internationally directed secrecy, its people and its history victims of a wretched and all-too-little-known scandal. Although its official title is the British Indian Ocean Territory its repute stems from the name of one very large island at the southern tip of the colony, a hundred miles from Boddam, and first discovered four centuries ago by a Portuguese sailor who gave it his name: Diego Garcia.
It is the only colonial possession which it is not legally possible for ordinary civilians to visit—unless they have government permission, which is seldom given. To get there I had to sail for some three weeks in a tiny and comfortless schooner. When I arrived I was brusquely shown the door, and only managed to stay for a few hours. It is not a place whose charms and problems Britain wishes to have advertised around the world. And small wonder, for the history of Britain and her Indian Ocean Territory is an unattractive story at best, and to many critics is a saga of terrible cruelty, best forgotten and wisest ignored.
The background is more complicated than it ought to be and involves, initially, the two large Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius (famous for the dodo) and the Seychelles (best known for a remarkable type of coconut which is formed in the shape of the female buttocks). Both islands were made British colonies in 1814 under the terms of the Treaty of Paris; at first the Seychelles was a dependency of Mauritius, and then, in 1903, it became a fully-fledged colony in its own right.
The two colonies also looked after a number of distant barely populated tropical islands as dependencies. The Seychelles Governor had under his wing such obscure Imperial particles as Desroches Island, a sandy spit planted with 800 acres of coconut palms; Aldabra, known for its giant tortoises, frigate birds, and sacred ibises; and the Farquhar Group, just to the north of Madagascar. Mauritius cared for the minute rock of Rodriguez, 200 miles to the
east; and the Chagos Archipelago, known by the more Imperial title of the Oil Islands, and which the Colonial Office List described as being ‘four days’ steaming’ from Mauritius.
Such was the situation in early 1965, when Mauritius was beginning to make noises about becoming independent. A Labour Government was in office in London (nearly all the protagonists in this story are members of the Labour Party, the significance of which will become clear later), and its then Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood, flew to the Mauritian capital with some startling news. The islanders, he said, could indeed have their independence from Britain, but only on condition that they gave up their claim to the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, 1,200 miles away, and in perpetuity: Mr Greenwood gave no reason, but offered three million pounds in compensation, which the local politicians eventually decided to accept.
This accomplished, the Colonial Secretary then flew north to the Seychelles, and informed the Colonial Government there—which was not yet thinking of independence—that its three principal dependencies of Farquhar, Desroches and Aldabra were also being removed from the bailiwick, and the sovereignty of these scraps of sand and coral and giant tortoises was being passed back to London herself. No one knew why, until November, when a brief announcement was made in the House of Commons. The four island groups were to be made into a brand-new colony, to be named British Indian Ocean Territory; they would be administered by a Commissioner, who would be based at Victoria, in the Seychelles; they would use the currencies of the Seychelles and Mauritius and the stamps of Mauritius; and they would be run according to British colonial law ‘unless modified by the Order in Council of 8th November 1965’, the document that formally established this new, self-standing possession.
It was more than a year before anyone realised why London had gone to the time and trouble to set up a new dependent territory that was so scattered and so seemingly useless. On 30th December 1966, all was answered: Britain and the United States signed an Exchange of Notes ‘concerning the availability for Defence Purposes’
of the islands. The Notes were voluminous—eleven main sections, and two annexes with more than fifty sub-paragraphs (which covered all known contingencies, including a specific ban on the United States executing anyone on the islands)—but essentially said one thing. America was given permission to lease the islands for fifty years (with an option on a further twenty) without payment, and to build a defence installation there, to suit such needs ‘as might arise’.
Lord Chalfont, another Labour minister, signed the Government’s acceptance of the Notes (on behalf of his Foreign Secretary, George Brown) and the matter became law—without even the most perfunctory debate in Parliament, and with virtually no publicity. It was in any case generally accepted that to have some Western defence outpost in the region was prudent: the only other bases in the Indian Ocean at the time were the RAF base at Gan, an atoll in the southern part of the Maldive Islands chain, and Aden. Even the least prescient Imperialist would realise that these would eventually be abandoned (as indeed they were: the British were forced out of Aden in November 1967, and voluntarily left Gan in March 1976). Given the general instability of the region, and the absolute necessity of guaranteeing the free flow of Gulf oil, Washington and London seized on the notion of keeping the islands of BIOT for their very own, in case the need arose.
Inexorably and, perhaps, inevitably, the forces moved in. First there was an agreement signed in 1972 (under a Tory government—the only publicly admitted deal that involved a Conservative administration) to allow the US Navy to erect ‘a limited communications facility’ on the island of Diego Garcia, at the southern end of the Chagos island group. Then, two years later another deal was signed, for expansion of the facility—but it was still only to be what the then Labour Defence Secretary, Roy Mason, called ‘very austere’. Indeed, so confident was Mason of the unimportance of the island that he publicly assured the Mauritians, who were by this time becoming rather exercised at the idea of a large superpower fortress being built in their neighbourhood, that ‘Diego Garcia will not be used as a military base’.
The most charitable explanation is that Mr Mason simply did not
know what was in the Pentagon’s mind. Two years later another Labour politician, Roy Hattersley, signed the most crucial of all the many agreements that record the saga: the ‘limited’ communications facility was now to be allowed to evolve into ‘a support facility of the United States Navy…the facility shall consist of an anchorage, airfield, support and supply elements and ancillary services, personnel accommodation and transmitting and receiving services. Immovable structures, installations and buildings for the facility may…be constructed.’
The United States was, in other words, establishing a base on Diego Garcia. Sailors who were posted there, and who loathed its isolation, came to call it ‘the Rock’ the naval authorities put up a water tower near the harbour entrance and emblazoned it with the words ‘Welcome to the Footprint of Freedom’—the island, a long and narrow curve of coralline limestone, has the appearance of a child’s foot, heel pointing south, toes to the north.
The final purely administrative note in the story took place in June 1976, four months after the Hattersley Agreement was announced. The Seychelles won their independence, and were allowed to take with them three of the four island groups that had been made part of BIOT in 1965. They won back Farquhar and Desroches because the British Government decided it had no use for them; and they were given back Aldabra because, although the US Navy thought it a suitable spot for a base, a number of the world’s wildlife organisations had complained that the giant Aldabran tortoises would be disturbed by aircraft noise and construction work, and the Pentagon wisely decided not to pick a fight with the tortoise lobby. BIOT, from 1976 on, was limited to the Chagos Islands only, and was administered from London by the diplomat who was also head of the East Africa Department. He seldom visited his charge, though one Commissioner did have a governor’s hat made, just in case. The day-to-day running of the island was left to a resident Administrator, arguably one of British diplomacy’s least enviable postings.
All of the foregoing would be unremarkable, if regrettable, had the Chagos Islands been but a group of uninhabited tropical atolls upon which the armed forces of the Western Alliance had decided to build a fortress. Perhaps some conservationists would have grumbled at the despoliation of some thousands of square miles of virgin wilderness; and perhaps pacifist groups would have condemned the extension of war-making powers into an ocean hitherto untroubled by the superpowers. But there would have been no exceptional reason for controversy, and the word ‘scandal’ would probably not have been applied to the case.
But it has been, and with good reason. It turned out that the Chagos Islands were not, and in recent history never had been, uninhabited. There was a flourishing, contented and permanent population on Diego Garcia and on half a dozen other islands in the group besides. There were towns, churches, shops, schools, prisons, farms, factories, docks, playgrounds, warehouses and a light railway. People had been living on the islands for the previous two centuries; there were graveyards, with stones inscribed in Creole and English and telling of a tradition of community and comradeship.
On the day that British Indian Ocean Territory was formally established as a colony the Chagos Islands were peopled by some 2,000 islanders—more than there were in the Falkland Islands at the same time, as many as there were on Tristan da Cunha, Ascension and Pitcairn put together, half as many as on the island of Anguilla. They worked for a French-run copra and coconut oil company known as Chagos Agalega, and their little oil factories were fairly prosperous. ‘There were touches of old-fashioned ostentation’ a visitor reported in the late 1950s. ‘There was a
château
…whitewashed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages clustered around the green…lamp standards and parked motor launches…’
And the inhabitants were all of them British subjects, citizens of a Crown colony, entitled to the protection and assistance of the Crown and, in the early days of their new status, governed on behalf of the Queen by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, the colony’s first Commissioner.
But they were to be given no protection, and no assistance, by the Earl, the Crown, or anybody else. Instead the British Government, obeying with craven servility the wishes of the Pentagon—by now the formal lessees of the island group—physically removed every man, woman and child from the islands, and placed them, bewildered and frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. The British officials did not consult the islanders. They did not tell them what was happening to them. They did not tell anyone else what they planned to do. They just went right ahead and uprooted an entire community, ordered people from their jobs and their homes, crammed them on to ships, and sailed them away to a new life in a new and foreign country. They trampled on two centuries of community and two centuries of history, and dumped the detritus into prison cells and on to quaysides in Victoria and Port Louis, and proceeded, with all the arrogant attitudes that seemed peculiar to this Imperial rump, promptly to forget all about them.