20 October, 2007 Diego Garcia
Earlier this month, Avenidas (Palo Alto Senior Center) hosted a documentary, ‘Stealing a Nation’, made by the renowned film maker, John Pilger. This is one of the most shocking tales of the British and the US government’s connivance to expel the most vulnerable islanders of Diego Garcia from their homeland.
Diego Garcia was an idyllic paradise situated in the Indian Ocean inhabited by 2000 people whose roots date back many generations. In the late 1960s, the government of British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, entered into a secret agreement with the United States to purge all the inhabitants and hand over the island to the United States – in complete violation of the United Nations Charter. What followed, according to Pilger (drawing from official documents), was a brutal effort to terrorize the population into submission.
First they were starved of essential food supplies, then threatened with being bombed and finally witnessed their beloved pets being gassed to death. Many committed suicide and the remaining population were herded at gunpoint onto boats like cattle and dumped in the slums of Mauritius where many died of utter depression. Currently, Diego Garcia is the largest US military base in the world and is suspected of being a rendition site for ‘enhanced interrogation’ of detainees. In 2000, the highest British Court issued a judgment declaring a grave injustice had been done to Chagossians but this was overturned by a decree of the British Crown.
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