LeaderHomeward bound
Chagos islanders Thursday May 24, 2007The Guardian
The 2,000 inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago, who were evicted from their homes by Britain 40 years ago to make way for a US airbase on the island of Diego Garcia, called their fight to return "la lutte" (the struggle). For good reason. They were tricked, bullied, in some cases terrorised from their homes. They were forced to leave their possessions behind. Their pets were gassed. They were crowded into the holds of ships and dumped on the quayside of the docks of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. They were homeless, jobless, unable to speak the local language. They moved to the slums in which they have been quietly dying ever since, though around 200 of them have resettled unhappily in Crawley, Sussex.

Yesterday, their struggle appeared triumphant, when the high court dismissed an appeal by the Foreign Office against their return. In its ruling, the high court suggested that the time for appeals was over, after the government lost three times in different courts before. But in theory yesterday's judgment could be taken to appeal at the House of Lords, delaying the return further. If the disaster that befell the Chagos archipelago between 1967 and 1973 reads like something out of the pages of Dickens or Zola, the recent history of Britain's attempts to prevent the return of the islanders is just as appalling.
The late Robin Cook, then foreign secretary, rightly accepted defeat after a court victory in 2000 by the islanders. He said the government would arrange for the surviving Chagossians to return to the outer islands. But then September 11 happened. Once again, the strategic value of an airstrip halfway between Africa and southeast Asia, from which Afghanistan and Iraq could be bombed, and through which suspects in the war on terror could disappear on their way to Guantanamo Bay, outweighed the moral case of the islanders. In June 2004, the government used the mechanism of an order in council, a royal prerogative power not subject to parliamentary debate, to stop the islanders returning. Lord Justice Stephen Sedley yesterday ruled this was an abuse of power.
Britain acted solely to serve American military interests. The Chagossians have surrendered their right to return to Diego Garcia, which will still serve exclusively as a US airbase. The argument has been about allowing return to islands between 100 and 300 miles from the base. Donald McKinnon, the Commonwealth's secretary general, called that a wide security perimeter. There are many innocent victims of the special relationship between Britain and America, but among them must surely now count that small band of people who lived in what they once thought of as paradise.