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Written by Chris Floyd
Britain and America cut a secret deal: land for nukes. London sliced off a sliver of its imperial dominions and gave it to Washington, in exchange for a price reduction on some sleek new nuclear missiles. Together, the two great democracies then drove the inhabitants of the sliver from their homes by force, dumping them into poverty-ridden exile hundreds of miles away. Washington built an imperial outpost on the stolen land, a military base which it used to "project dominance" over strategic regions in Central Asia and the Middle East. Later, the outpost became yet another link in Washington's chain of "black sites" -- secret prisons where captives snatched without charges or due process could be hidden from the world and tortured.
This is the story of the Chagos Archipelago, a chain of small islands in the Indian Ocean whose inhabitants were forced from their land forty years ago to make way for a military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The base, built and staffed largely by the Americans but operated jointly with the British, has been the launching pad for countless air strikes against Iraq (in two wars) and Afghanistan. It has also served as one of the sinister way stations in America's global gulag. In return for its use of the ethnically cleansed land, Washington graciously knocked off $14 million from the price tag of some Polaris nuclear missiles that Britain craved, in its never-ending struggle to retain some crumbs of its own, now-faded "projection of dominance" on the world stage.
For years, American and British officials conducted a careful, deliberate campaign of deceit to "justify" the theft of the land. But finally, a series of British courts ruled that the seizure had been illegal and that the Chagossian people had a right to return to their homes. In a desperate bid to avert justice, the government of Tony Blair invoked the "royal prerogative" to quash the rulings. When the courts found the government had improperly applied this nebulous but draconian power, it appealed to the Law Lords.
Late last month, the Lords delivered their decision: by the slim margin of 3-2, they upheld the government, and denied the Chagossian's right to return to their homes. The ruling contained these chilling words from Lord Hoffman: ""The right of abode is a creature of the law. The law gives it and the law may take it away." Even though the judges acknowledged that the initial theft had been wrong, the "law" -- in the form of arbitrary decisions by a government acting in the name of an unelected monarch -- had papered over that festering injustice, and the cover must be left undisturbed. Thus in quiet, measured, respectable tones, the Magna Carta is cast aside. But what of that? As we have seen in the United States in the past few years, that ancient, crumbling document now has all the force of a wad of tissue paper.
The court's ruling was lost in the great global media roar over the U.S. elections. But John Pilger was there with the Chagossians when the decision was handed down, and he gives this report (from Antiwar.com):
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