Diego Garcia And The Special Relationship’s Dirty Secret

By Daniel Simpson

[This article elaborates on an earlier posting, available here]

February 2006

CRAWLEY, England - Allen Vincatassin is an immigrant with a difference: he wants to go back to where he came from but the British government won’t let him. So he’s importing his compatriots instead.

Five hundred have joined this exodus since the chilly September dawn that greeted Vincatassin and the 18 friends and relatives he’d persuaded to trade tropical sunshine for a one-way ticket to Gatwick airport, where they hunkered under strip lighting by the toilets while he badgered officials to find them a hotel. The letter he’d received from London a few days earlier failed to deter him. “There is no question of our offering any temporary accommodation or other means of short term financial support,” a Foreign Office minister had insisted. No matter. After three days of belligerent phone calls and eating out of cans, they were given 30 pounds each for food and rooms in the airport Travelodge. Vincatassin’s audacity had paid off; their bills were covered for six months until they’d cobbled together enough cash between them to decamp to suburbia.

This was no asylum-seeking stunt, however, and it drew none of the usual tabloid newspaper hysteria about refugees exposing Britain as a “soft touch”. All 19 carried British passports, thanks to an Act of Parliament offering them the right to settle in a country they’d never seen, although its flag still flies over the coral atolls they called home until their families were expelled to make way for an American military base. For decades, these dispossessed exiles have demanded the right to return to their islands in the Indian Ocean, but to no avail. Most remain where the retreating British Empire dumped them: in the shantytowns of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Appeals for assistance have gone unheeded since 1982, when a meagre payout was authorised on the condition it would never be repeated.

“The passport came as a lifejacket,” Vincatassin reflects. A short man of 35, given to grandiloquence, he puffs out his chest and surveys the living room of a squat terraced house he shares with his wife and brother in Crawley, a drab commuter belt New Town, barely five miles from the London runway where they landed three years ago. “It was like enlightenment for me and I said, yes! At least if we are on their doorstep they’ll have to do something.”

Not all of his fellow islanders are impressed by Vincatassin’s quest to secure welfare payments for new arrivals to a community dispersed across the cul-de-sacs and crescents of Crawley’s post-war housing estates. To some, it’s a distraction from their ongoing struggle to resettle the depopulated Chagos archipelago and, as such, a symptom of identity crisis. The disputes over how best to seek redress from the British establishment reflect conflicting notions of what it means to be Chagossian; whether suffering is something to escape or to exhibit, whether a felicitous future lies in reviving a bygone way of life or in making the most of present opportunities.

Olivier Bancoult, chairman of the Mauritian-based Chagos Refugee Group and claimant in a legal challenge to Britain’s decree that the islands should remain uninhabited, is clear on how he sees it. “Here is not our country,” he said during a recess at his High Court hearing in London, which he’s flown in from Port Louis to attend. “If Allen Vincatassin cared about his fundamental right to return to his homeland, he should have taken up the case against the British government, not come here and settled.”