Wikileaks has now resurfaced a debate over the fate of the indigenous Chagos population. It suggests the UK intended to use a marine park as a measure to prevent the resettlement of these islanders. Mauritius has now sued the UK:

A US cable from May 2009 quotes a discussion about the park with Foreign Office official Colin Roberts. “He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents,” the cable said. The Mauritian Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam said his government had filed a case before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg.

It is no surprise that the UK is politically opposed to resettlement claims. This is long-standing and bitter fight that has had some high-profile court cases already. Mauritius has even started to make a more aggressive sovereignty claim over Chagos, ironically. What is notable about the Wikileaks documents is how they frame the marine park and discuss ending resettlement claims a year after those claims already were struck down.

In 2008 I quoted a news article that said the UK courts ruled against allowing Chagos Islanders the right to resettle their home land. The reason given then was international security (e.g. an air base for strikes against Iraq, Iran; laundering controversial military equipment shipments to embargoed countries).

By a ruling of 3-2, the lords backed a government appeal that argued that allowing the islanders to return could have a detrimental effect on defence and international security.

The Chagos islanders were forced to leave in the first place because they lived on an island known as Diego Garcia, which I explained in 2007 had been appropriated by the US and UK when the West lost its political influence in Ethiopia.

A surveillance base and listening-post located in the highlands of the Horn of Africa, to “monitor” Soviet influence in the Middle East, was transitioned in a hurry to the small island in the Indian Ocean. The island was cleared so it could be a military installation and supply port. The risk of interference from indigenous residents was resolved by forcibly removing them and any claims to their property.

Diego Garcia was not just a lone desolate spot in the sea that the US developed to protect the free world from the Red threat, as most reports used to say. It really was a place thousands of people called home before American soldiers landed and stripped them of their property, identity and livelihood.

A year earlier, in 2007, I referenced a film called Stealing a Nation and an article in The Guardian called Paradise cleansed. Both give a detailed look at the UK foreign policy attitude towards the Chagos population and their claims.

To get rid of the [Diego Garcia] population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be “returned” to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, “is to convert all the existing residents…into short-term, temporary residents.”

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: “We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls.” At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: “Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays…” Under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction”, another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as “a floating population and to “make up the rules as we go along”.

They certainly have a way with words.

Thus the recent news, spurred by Wikileaks, is a new tactic for this same old fight. A marine park is clearly an easier pitch to the international community than claims of UK defense and international security. But I do not see why the park must be mutually exclusive to resettlement of the indigenous population. The whole idea of a park should use concepts of security to allow coexistence. Risks are reduced through study in order to prevent long-term negative impact. An area is set aside to ensure that the native species are not harmed or lost while new and old visitors are allowed to live there too.

“We are interested in the preservation of our homeland and we are backing the British Government on this,” said Allen Vincatassin, chairman of the Crawley-based Diego Garcian Society, the main islanders’ group in the UK. “We support the MPA and we believe the issue is separate from resettlement.”

The question then becomes whether the UK can accept a marine park operated for interests other than just their foreign office and military.