Absolutely Must Go: The US Military vs. the Exiles of Diego Garcia

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26701-absolutely-must-go-the-us-military-vs-the-exiles-of-diego-garcia



Indigenous Chagossian population helping US personnel bring equipment ashore to the Indian Ocean island, Diego Garcia, in 1971

Absolutely Must Go: The US Military vs. the Exiles of Diego Garcia
Friday, 10 October 2014 10:22 By Clare Bayard, Truthout | News Analysis

While eyes worldwide focused on Scotland's historic independence referendum last month, the clock is running out on one of the last remaining British colonies in Africa. It's a different question for this colonized and evicted population. Will they finally be able to come home, or will the United States continue to control their land?

The fulcrum of President Obama's "Pacific Pivot" is Diego Garcia, a remote Indian Ocean island housing a city's worth of US military materials on a nuclear-ready base. The location is perfect for projecting power in a number of key regions, and to keep its operations out of sight - and away from contestation, because the native population was removed from the island in order to construct this base. In the middle of last century, as peoples' anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa were winning their freedom, the United States and United Kingdom cut a shady deal to sever part of pre-independent Mauritius. The plan was to preserve the British colonial status of the Chagos Islands, exile all the residents, then lease this prize land to the Pentagon for 50 years.

This lease expires in 2016, but the next two months are crucial. The United States and United Kingdom must agree by December 2014 whether to affirm the 20-year optional extension. There are no Chagossians, the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands of the Chagos archipelago, involved in these negotiations. And as Mauritian activist Alain Ah-Vee says, "The present Mauritian regime is not putting before the British and US governments any concrete road map for ending this colonization and military occupation of its territory." However, decolonization activists in Mauritius and the diaspora are calling upon Americans to quickly build pressure on Obama to close this key base.

Diego Garcia is key to an economically weak United States struggling to maintain fear-based global dominance. John Pike, an analyst of the US military, says Diego Garcia "is the single most important military facility we've got." His assessment of the military's goal: "We'll be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us from bases on their territory." The US military's tactical shift to increasing dependency on aerial missions, backed up with naval power, combines with the strategic location of this Indian Ocean base, leased by the British to the Pentagon. The base has also played a critical role in the CIA's infamous secret renditions program, which transfers US captives to locations where they are then tortured.