By Shubha Singh
Chagos islanders – exiles from a forgotten Indian Ocean archipelago now used as a US military base – have won an appeal in the British courts that allows them to return to their homeland.
The imperatives of the Cold War era and the strategic location of the islands had resulted in the Chagossians, as they call themselves, being banished from their homes after the British government leased their islands without their consent to the Americans to build a military base.
The islanders' tale is one of the more sordid ones from the Cold War era.
Chagos may be a forgotten name, but Diego Garcia, the biggest island in the group, has a familiar ring. Diego Garcia is the Indian Ocean airbase and naval refuelling station that the US used during the Vietnam War and more recently to fly its giant B-52 bombers on bombing missions to Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 1966 the British government secretly leased the islands to the US for 50 years, giving America a strategic naval base that commanded the expanse of the Indian Ocean from Africa to Indonesia. In the process, the nearly 2,000 inhabitants of the islands were forcibly evicted, brutally driven on to boats and then sent off to live in refugee camps in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
The American government had wanted uninhabited islands and they considered the presence of the islanders – on even the farthest of the 65 islands – to be a security risk.
The Chagos islands were administrated by the British as a dependency of Mauritius, but when Mauritius became independent in 1968, the islands were renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory.
The treaty leasing the islands to the US was strongly opposed by the countries in the region. India has supported Mauritius' claim to the Chagos islands, and the proximity of the American base had been a cause of concern in India.
The Chagossians are descendants of African slaves and Indian labourers brought to the islands in the 18th century to work on French coconut plantations. The distant tip of Chagos group of islands lies about 500 km from the Maldives. The Chagos islands lay within the reach of Maldivian sailors and traders in the old days.
The Chagos islanders have fought a brave legal battle to be allowed to return to the islands but have been thwarted by the successive British governments. In 2000, the British High Court ruled that the ordinance issued by the Commissioner of the British territory exiling the islanders was unlawful. The British government used what is called an "order-in-council" to ban the return of the islanders, but the High Court ruled it as unlawful.
The British government then went to the Court of Appeal against the ruling, but on May 23 the court dismissed the government case and also refused it leave to appeal to the House of Lords, the country's highest judicial authority. However, the government has said that it intends to appeal against the refusal of right to appeal.
The Chagossians are aware that they cannot return to Diego Garcia because of the US airbase, but they are ready to move to any of the other nearby islands, such as the Salomon islands atoll about 200 km north of Diego Garcia.
Ironically, while the picturesque Salomon islands are a favourite haunt of yachtsmen sailing across the Indian Ocean, who can buy a three-month permit to stay on the islands, Chagossians are banned from setting foot on them. American officials have said that allowing the islanders could lead to the infiltration of terrorists on the islands.
In 2006, the British government allowed 100 islanders to go back for a day to visit the graves of their ancestors. Despite winning a series of court cases, it is still uncertain when the rest of the islanders, most of them born in exile, will get a chance to go home – even if for a day.