Stealing a Nation (2004)
Written and Directed by John Pilger
Before the mysterious disappearance of the flight MH370, never had I heard of the existence of a military base in the Indian Ocean named Diego Garcia. With the power of the web, we now know so many things about this piece of coral island, out in the middle of nowhere, in the Chagos Archipelago with Diego Garcia as the main island and its neighbours are Mauritius and Seychelles.
Some time now, the story of the imposition of inhumane displacement of its indigenous inhabitants of the isle by imperial superpowers, namely Britain and America had hit the headlines in the UK and Mauritius.
Around 1965, the British foreign office clandestinely falsified a document stating that the Chagos Archipelago was an uninhabited piece of land only occupied by seagulls. They did this to justify the selling of this island, which they had held since the 19th century, to the US in exchange for modern military equipment. The US, in turn, desperately needed it as a surveillance post to perform their duty as the de facto policeman of the world. Diego Garcia had been the base from where attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan were carried out.
The population of the Chagos islands were systemically chased out of their ancestral lands, where they had lived for more than a century. The Chagossians were originally brought in as slaves and indentured labourer but became freemen after slavery was outlawed. To purge the island of its people, in the mid-1970s, they were almost forcefully dragged out of the quarters and transported like criminals in ships in appalling states to be kept as prisoners in Seychelles and later in Mauritius.
Their descendants, in the turn of the century, sued the British foreign office and won the right to return to the Chagos Islands in the year 2000. Unfortunately, the political bureaucracy had unnecessarily imposed hurdle after hurdle to their desire. It appears like nobody respects the court decision. Even the Queen of England had been hurled in by the British leaders to pass a decree to this end.
When reporters interviewed past politicians of the whole fiasco of brutal treatment of the poor natives by the imperial powers, leaders from both side of the Atlantic defend their actions, citing that the decisions were the best given the situation and need of the climate of political then.
