The Special Relationship’s Dirty Secret

By Daniel Simpson

Forget Iraq’s weapons of mass non-existence, the lies about torture and other facts fixed around policies cooked up in Washington: nothing demonstrates British subservience to the United States quite as blatantly as the theft of Diego Garcia.

Almost four decades after Britain evicted 2,000 Indian Ocean islanders to make way for American stealth bombers and B-52s, the dispossessed are appealing to London’s High Court to overturn a royal decree that bars them forever from returning to their homes.

They’ve been here before. Just five years ago, their lawyers humiliated the British establishment by winning a case that ruled there was no legal justification for the expulsion of these “Tarzans” and “Men Fridays”, as diplomats dubbed their distant subjects in official correspondence sanctioning the deportations.

With the briefest of nods to Robin Cook’s supposedly ethical foreign policy, the British government initially agreed to readmit them to the Chagos archipelago, a dependency hived off from Mauritius in the 1960s after Washington earmarked its largest atoll, Diego Garcia, as an ideal military base. The promise was empty, however, and promptly slapped down by the Queen, using an arcane prerogative that harks back to pre-Magna Carta days of absolute monarchy.

Such abuse of power is unparalleled, even in Britain’s long legacy of imperial crimes, argues the Chagossians’ barrister, Sir Sydney Kentridge, who in the past defended Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko in their struggles against apartheid.

“There is no precedent that we have been able to find in statute, case law, or indeed in history for what has been done,” he told the two judges presiding over the High Court. “The matter has never been placed before the UK parliament.”