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.
Diego Garcia has been used to launder controversial military equipment shipments to embargoed countries? I am aware of no such allegations having been made public. May I ask your source for this allegation?
Thanks for noticing that. ;) I guess I should have just put the citations in but I was short on time and decided to come back to it later. Here are some examples with sources:
Cluster munitions violate the 2008 ban that the UK signed but the US is accused of a secret deal to store them on Diego Garcia (“British soil”)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11897980
“…one of the cables released by Wikileaks shows the Foreign Office suggested a loophole to allow the US to keep cluster bombs on British soil should be kept from Parliament.”
Off-shore storage has not been banned, but that begs the question of legal/technical definitions of off-shore for the territory of Diego Garcia, which is mostly water.
Bunker-buster bombs are another example. They were stock-piled on Diego Garcia, apparently as a way to “deliver” them to Israel during an arms embargo.
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2010/me_israel0217_03_18.asp
“Officials said the U.S. military was ordered to divert a shipment of smart bunker-buster bombs from Israel to a military base in Diego Garcia. They said the shipment of 387 smart munitions had been slated to join pre-positioned U.S. military equipment in Israel Air Force bases…. This is really an embargo, but nobody talks about it publicly.”
You could argue it’s just political gesturing, perhaps, but it’s the kind of allegation you can find easily — the islands are used to navigate the laws on military equipment/arms just like we saw with the Iraqi mobile SCUD launch vehicles as explained in 1992.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFD71539F935A15752C0A964958260
There are many countries and other islands doing much of the same thing, so this isn’t just about Diego Garcia, but one of the key differences is that the other places still have indigenous inhabitants who tend to add risk — leak information, ask for compensation, etc.
Thanks for the detail. The cluster bombs are a normal part of the cargo on some or all prepositioning ships anchored at or near Diego Garcia. Unless you consider dropping them on the heads of people in Asia or the Middle East to be a transfer to another country, they are there for possible use by the US military, not as items of commerce. No such allegations have been made public by anyone I consider informed. I am not defending American policy or the use of such weapons or the deception revealed in the WikiLeaks cable. That’s another discussion. Accurate information and reporting are prerequisites to such discussion, don’t you agree?
Now as to the bunker buster bombs. I’m sorry this is so long.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/ottolenghi/259656
Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? Check the Source First
Emanuele Ottolenghi – 03.17.2010 – 12:14 PM
Mistrust the press — that is one important lesson from Max Boot’s post about Mark Perry’s sensationalist (and sensationally inaccurate) attribution of the U.S.-Israel fallout to General Petraeus.
Elsewhere in the news, be prepared for more instances of the mass media’s inability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Take the report that the U.S. is seemingly getting ready to bomb Iran. The Herald, the Scottish daily, notes that a shipment has left California with military supplies for Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. This shipment includes huge quantities of bunker busters. Now all this may be true — but their news story is that these supplies are in preparation of a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The source of this analysis?
Professor Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
According to the Herald, Plesch said:
They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran … US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours … The preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision. He may decide that it would be better for the US to act instead of Israel … The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely …
How many times has Professor Plesch claimed this before?
OpenDemocracy, March, 21, 2005, “Iran, the coming war“:
So when might the attack on Iran occur? The Bush administration has, from its perspective, allowed the Europeans and the non-proliferation diplomats enough time to fail. They will certainly use the UN conference on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament from 2-27 May 2005 as an opportunity to grandstand.
For US domestic political purposes a “crisis” in spring 2006 when the EU and the UN can once more be confronted with their alleged failures, and challenged to support US leadership, would be timely for mid-term elections in which the ultra-conservative coalition will wish to consolidate its gains and eliminate any nascent moderate or realistic Republican candidate in good time for the 2008 presidential election.
The Guardian, “Are we going to war with Iran?” October, 21, 2005:
A new war may not be as politically disastrous in Washington as many believe … For an embattled President Bush, combating the mullahs of Tehran may be a useful means of diverting attention from Iraq and reestablishing control of the Republican party prior to next year’s congressional elections. From this perspective, even an escalating conflict would rally the nation behind a war president. As for the succession to President Bush, Bob Woodward has named Mr Cheney as a likely candidate, a step that would be easier in a wartime atmosphere. Mr Cheney would doubtless point out that US military spending, while huge compared to
other nations, is at a far lower percentage of gross domestic product than during the Reagan years. With regard to Mr Blair’s position, it would be helpful to know whether he has committed Britain to preventing an Iranian bomb “come what may” as he did with Iraq.
New Statesman, February, 19, 2007, “Iran — ready to attack”:
American military operations for a major conventional war with Iran could be implemented any day. They extend far beyond targeting suspect WMD facilities and will enable President Bush to destroy Iran’s military, political and economic infrastructure overnight using conventional weapons.
Four predictions in five years — and no war so far.
Professor Plesch does not seem to have his fact-checking machine and his sources up to date, tuned in, and reliably informed. It may not matter to some media outlets, which will probably continue to publish on ideological rather than factual grounds.
Still, journalists should remember that a good news story cannot rely just on the sensation of the message but must also ensure the credibility of the messenger. With Professor Plesch, it seems, this is just not the case.
—– ends —–
And more, from the same source:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/j-e-dyer/262221
Slow-Roll to Diego Garcia?
J. E. Dyer – 03.20.2010 – 8:30 AM
It’s going to be impossible to keep up with these reports and rumors, but one new item merits discussion. Emanuele Ottolenghi has pretty thoroughly discredited the originators of the rumor that bombs shipped to Diego Garcia are for an imminent attack on Iran. Now, however, there’s a report from a less-dismissible source that the original intention may have been to ship the bombs to Israel. Much of the blogosphere is running with the story that Obama “diverted” the shipment, with the timing of these revelations apparently related to Washington’s ongoing tiff with Jerusalem.
My assessment up front: the blogosphere’s got that story wrong. The U.S. may well have decided to change the destination of bombs being prepositioned overseas, but the decision was clearly made at least two months ago, before the January 2010 contract to ship the munitions to Diego Garcia was posted. Nevertheless, if the World Tribune report is valid, that change in our prepositioning plan could be part of a disquieting trend in the Obama administration’s arms policy toward Israel.
A key fact in this tangled tale is that Israel has been one of the U.S. military’s principal foreign prepositioning sites for the last 20 years. (Others are South Korea and Thailand.) Munitions we store with these hosts, while intended for our own forces’ use in contingencies, can be used by the host nations in the case of national emergency. We only store such stockpiles in nations with which we have defense agreements. A previous ammunition shipment to the storage sites in Israel became quite famous a year ago when the cargo ship bearing it was originally scheduled to arrive during the IDF operations in Gaza. In light of a December 2009 agreement on doubling the size of our munitions stockpile in Israel, it’s quite probable that we intended to ship additional bombs to the storage sites there this year.
The World Tribune piece appears to be discussing a U.S. policy-related shipment of this kind, rather than the diversion of arms that were actually sold to Israel. I don’t believe that a weapons sale is being reneged on. But a decision to suspend further prepositioning of U.S. munitions at the Israeli sites would be in character with the Obama administration’s emerging policy of delaying and blocking military sales to Israel. The most notable instance involves the Apache Longbow helicopter: a pending sale of Apaches to Israel was blocked by the administration in June 2009, due to the concern that they would be used to threaten Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The U.S. has delayed arms sales to Israel before, but as the JINSA article above notes, Obama’s policy of slow-rolling Israel while concluding major arms deals with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan is a new one. His administration’s bumpy history with Israel lends weight to the possibility that our military prepositioning strategy is being modified to prevent further growth in the munitions stockpile Israel might be able to drawn on. Implementing policy by this arcane method has the advantage of being a quiet and attritional approach.
We should note that Israel already has the types of bombs listed in the manifest for the Diego Garcia shipment. We sold the IDF several thousand of them in the last decade. There is no need to hyperventilate over the erroneous implication that a type of weapon Israel desperately needs is being withheld. But the possibility that the Obama administration hopes to control the limits on Israel’s options is not so easily dismissed.
Deciding what we do with our own weapons is, of course, America’s sovereign right. The discretion and logistic convenience we retain by storing bombs at Diego Garcia are things any administration might seek. But while this bomb shipment may be a politically unremarkable logistic decision, reports that it may have implications about our relations with Israel are credible after months of one-sided policy from the Obama administration.
….. ends …..
Finally, about the World Tribune…
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/08/030908ta_talk_mcgrath
The New Yorker
This Just In Dept.
Fit To Print?
by Ben McGrath September 8, 2003
Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, “U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have finally been located.” The apparent scoop—of stop-the-presses significance—was unsigned, and billed as a “special to World Tribune.com.” The Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, meanwhile, not only got beat but failed even to acknowledge the news in the days that followed. What gives?
Not everyone ignored it: Rush Limbaugh, for instance. “There’s a piece in the World Tribune today—one of the papers in the United Kingdom—exactly as theorized on this program early on,” he said on his radio show. “It’s unconfirmed, but it’s a story that many of the weapons of mass destruction are at present buried in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.” Fox News, catering to a similar demographic, enlisted a military analyst that evening to discuss potential ramifications—military intervention in Lebanon?—on “The O’Reilly Factor.” According to the story, the weapons were probably delivered to the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, in a caravan of tractor-trailers that was spotted leaving Iraq in January, two months before the war began, as part of a multimillion- dollar storage deal between Saddam Hussein and the Syrian government.
In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that “there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird.” (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.) Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former “corporate editor” for News World Communications, the Times’ owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Morton and his wife, Choon Boon, are themselves followers of the Reverend Moon.) Among the World Tribune’s other recent half-ignored scoops are that Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for last month’s blackout and that a North Korean defector stressed, during a meeting in July with White House officials, the need for a preëmptive military strike against Kim Jong Il.
Morton said last week via e-mail that he founded the site as an experiment, back in 1998, while serving as a media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. “I didn’t expect World Tribune.com to last for more than a few months,” Morton wrote, but now, despite having no dedicated staff (“Everyone involved with World Tribune.com has a day job”), the site receives more than a million page views per month. And, unlike the Washington Times, which has lost at least a billion dollars in its twenty-one-year existence, World Tribune.com, in concert with the subscription-driven weekly intelligence briefing Geostrategy-Direct.com (a partner site), has paid for itself.
The secret of its success seems to involve well-placed informants (“Over the years I have developed an informal, international network of sources and writers I can trust,” Morton said) and an emphasis on immediacy. Although Morton said, “We emphasize newspaper standards to counter the half-baked, unfiltered content on some online sites,” World Tribune.com more fairly qualifies as something between a newspaper and a rumor-mongering blog. Call it “blews.” In this sense, it is part of a loose network of mostly conservative sites—WorldNetDaily, Dr. Koontz’s National Security Message Board, debka File (produced by a pair of Jerusalem-based journalists thought to have moles in Israeli intelligence)—whose dispatches sometimes serve as the journalistic equivalent of trial balloons: a story may not be based on knowable facts, but it nevertheless may occasionally turn out to be right. (Much of the time, of course, it more closely resembles a Bat Boy update in the Weekly World News.)
Take the Lebanon story. National- security buffs may have recalled hearing similar reports as far back as late December (beginning with an accusation from Ariel Sharon), and cropping up again in the spring (via debka). The story never quite stuck, however, and as of the end of last week no major newspaper had seen fit to tell it. Bill Gertz, the Washington Times’ best-known reporter, is a columnist and contributing editor for Geostrategy-Direct.com and a member of the World Tribune advisory board. A few days after the Tribune’s Lebanon lead, Gertz allowed that he, too, had been hearing the reports for months but hadn’t written anything about it for the paper. “I’ve never been able to nail it down myself,” he said. He would presumably have encountered similar difficulties with the story, available at Cosmic Tribune, of the increase in observed U.F.O. activity as Mars neared.