229. Britain’s Last Colony: The Second World War, Forced Deportations, and 9/11 (Ep 1)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durimple. Just a couple of little things before we start. You are going to hear a little bit of it's not because R2D2 is starring in this episode. We have some drilling in the background. So huge apologies right from the get go. But we are coming to you from the Jayapur Literary Festival in Jayapur, India, one of the most thrilling literature festivals the world has to offer. But they're making it bigger while we're here. Apparently it's not big enough, William. They're building it around us. We are very ambitious for the festival.

1:03Well, it would have been nice if you were ambitious after the recording, but you know, it's fine. It's okay. And the other thing I want to tell you, since we have been at Jerpo, we are doing a little bit of something, a little bit special for the bonuses. We've been in, I think, one of the most exciting green rooms I have ever been to. And I do this kind of quite a lot. Tripping over talent, tripping over gossip and interest. And we've been grabbing a few people to bring you some very, very special bonus episodes. I have no idea what Anita's been up to. I've been on stage running the festival.

1:35I mean, you've been slightly the director of the festival while the cat's away. And I've had such a nice time. Anyway, so yes, do please become a member of the club. If you want to hear all this bonus stuff, empirepoduk.com. Empirepoduk.com is where you have to go. And let me tell you something. Some of it is going to blow your little socks off, I promise. Now, it isn't often that we collide with a news story that is so rooted in our food groups of empire, but it happens and it's happening right now. We're meeting, we're sitting actually here at the Jaipur Literary Festival at a time where just about a day ago, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Keir Starmer, met with his Mauritian counterpart to discuss the future of a place called the Chagos Islands.

2:21Now, you've probably heard this in the news. It's come up again and again, particularly after the inauguration of President Trump, all because of one particular military base in this archipelago of islands, the Chagos Islands, called Diego Garcia. What is this all about? You're probably scratching your head because there are a great deal of complexities involving words like treaty, history, and imperialism that are all wound up in this. And we have got the best man with us to unravel it. And when I say the best man, William. We really mean it because he's been in the eye of this storm. He absolutely has.

2:56We have with us Philippe Sands, international human rights lawyer, barrister and writer. And also up to his nostrils in Chagos Islands. And he's very happy to be with you on your fabulous podcast, which he's a really regular listener to. Oh, and you're such a nice man. So yes, Philippe Sands, who's been up to your nose in Chagos Islands. It is certainly the case that empire and colony in the Indian Ocean have been part of my life since April 2010 when I was on holiday skiing with my brother on a chairlift when my phone went and I normally don't look at my phone on a chairlift but the number was plus 230.

3:35I didn't know what that was. I answered it fearful of dropping it in the snow 100 feet below me. Right. And the person at the end of the phone said this is the prime minister's office in Mauritius, would you be willing to speak to the Prime Minister now? That was how it began. Did you take the call up in the chairlift? How can you not take the section call? My proudest moment is that while on the phone with the Prime Minister, I managed to remove myself from the chairlift, slide off the chairlift without falling over. Holding a pair of skis? Holding my ski sticks in one hand, the phone in the other, my brother lifting the barrier, and him starting to talk about a place called Chagos, which I'm going to be very honest with you, I had never heard of.

4:18Well, of course, why would you have? It's a teeny archipelago. So people who don't know anything about it, let's start. And I'm going to come back to your story. Let's start with some geography. I'm going to start with your story about why you were involved. Yes, but just before we get to that. And then he said, you probably haven't heard of Traygos, but you'll know about Diego Garcia. Right. And the penny dropped. You see, I do that sometimes. I leap in too soon and I did that just now. I'm so sorry, Philippe. Honestly, if you had a gavel of shut your face, you would in a second. He's just very polite.

4:48So look, you are utterly forgiven for not knowing about the Chagos Islands. Diego Garcia features in movies about wars and America and everything else. Can you wrap this all up for us? Where is it in the world? Geography first. How big is it? What is it like? And what is Diego Garcia? 58 islands forming an archipelago in the Indian Ocean to the east of Mauritius, about a thousand miles, to the north of Madagascar, northeast of Madagascar, and south of the Maldives, which is the closest other land territory. And like the Maldives, are they atolls of coral? They are atolls of coral, volcanically created also, and they are presently uninhabited.

5:32But until 1968, they were the home to about 2 ,000 human beings, although that number is contested by some, almost all descendants of enslaved people from Madagascar or Mozambique who worked on coconut plantations for various British and other companies. I have never brought it up with you guys, but I've long thought that there'd be a very good empire episode in the whole story of Mauritius and the Maldives, because this is an area which, since deepest antiquity, has been on the sea routes, and which surpasses hand like a sort of, like a present at a child's birthday party at musical chairs, that sort of stuff, between successive forces that have controlled the Indian Ocean.

6:18So in the case of the Maldives, You have Buddhist missionaries coming first from Ashoka in India, and there's stupas and all sorts of wonderful early Buddhist remains, if you go to the Mauritius, followed by early Arab traders, followed by the Portuguese. And it's, I think, the Portuguese that give Philip, isn't that not right? It's the first Europeans to have written about a place we now know as the Chagos Archipelago were the Portuguese. And it's named after the Portuguese for the wounds of Christ, is that right? Diego Garcia is named after a Portuguese gentleman. And they held onto it for a very little time.

6:55There's some suggestion that when they first saw it, they saw three black men in a canoe, but that is contested by others. So maybe there were people there before. Then it became Dutch. Then it became French. And in 1814, at the Treaty of Paris, the French ceded it to the United Kingdom. So I want to unravel this. It's very densely filled with information. So let's just pull it apart a little bit. I want to restore my Portuguese wounds. No, you're right. Because Chagos is from Chagas, isn't it? Versus the Chagas. Versus the Chagas, which is the wounds of Christ. So you're absolutely right. You are right.

7:32Thank you for that. On this issue of people who did live there, I'm ashamed to say, if I'd have taken your call on ski lift, I would have a little bit known about the Chagos online, only because there has been a legal case rumbling for ages to try and get compensation for these people who were evicted. I remember talking when I was first a student journalist to a woman called Zabanu Gifford, who wrote sort of books at the time. And she would always tell me, why aren't you covering my husband? Richard, Richard Gifford. So just tell us what he was doing, because she said, you know, it is absolutely criminal that nobody is concentrating on what Richard Gifford is doing for these people who have been left with nothing.

8:07To be honest, I feel almost a sense of shame that I didn't know about Chagos, because of course, I immediately read myself in after the call with the PM. It's a busy skig. I was too busy doing cases about genocide in the Congo and Croatia. I'm going to defend. Philippe, you get him. Get him, Philippe. I'm going to defend myself, William. Get him, Philippe. I had certain things on my plate at that point. Vukovar, Srebrenica, Rwanda. But it is true. And I fess up. I felt almost a sense of shame that I'd never heard of Chega. So, of course, why did I feel a sense of shame? Because having read myself in, I realized very quickly there had been litigation in the English courts brought not by the government of Mauritius, but by a group of Chagossians led by an extraordinary man called Olivier Banco, who was born on Peros Banyos, one of the islands of the Chagos archipelago, about 150 miles from Diego Garcia, and who led litigation in the English courts quite successfully up to a point that by 2000, he had won.

9:08And but for the events of September the 11th, the attacks in New York and elsewhere, the British government at the time, a Labour government, would have allowed the Chagossians to return to the outer islands of the Chagossian population. Because that's what they were asking for. They were just saying, let us go home. At that point, the issue was limited in the English courts, run by a remarkable man called Richard Gifford, to the question of the right of return of the Chagossian population who had been forcibly removed between 1968 and 1973. I have to say, I hold my hands up because I didn't understand it.

9:41It's like a handful of people wanting to go back to a place I'd never heard of. And I was very little. It was my first kind of gig in journalism. I never did it, but I never saw anyone else do it either. So all of us were kind of in this stew and suddenly, Checosis Island, Trump, Britain, Mauritius, China, all of these sort of big players get suddenly involved and we're like, oh, I know an echo of this, but I don't know anything. Now tell me how did you read up and where did you get to very quickly? So, you know, I read up, there's the internet, there's a few books provided, and I went back in historical terms to what had happened after 1814.

10:14So the British were the colonial power from 1814 up until Mauritius obtained independence in 1968. But it's the three or four years prior to independence that are crucial for this story. So just to clarify where we are with the Chagos Islands. So Britain invades Mauritius, takes the Chagos as part of its territory. Doesn't invade Mauritius. It's seeded. It's seeded by treaty. at the end of the Neapolitan. Got it. Okay, so it's kind of the swap shop. And they take it over and Ile-de-France becomes Mauritius. Gotcha. The capital remains Port Louis. And for the next 154 years, it is a British colony in the Indian Ocean.

10:58So Philippe, what you said is absolutely right. And you're very right to correct me. It's a peaceful transition. And then there was the abolition of slavery, but there are lots of investigations about how long did it last. certainly notionally by 1830 they were saying you know what we don't do slavery anymore and there was this whole system of giving compensation to the slave owners not to any of the enslaved people so that also is going to bring bells with people. And just to say I've been over those documents on the UCL archive and I've found examples of slave owners in the territory the colony of Mauritius being paid compensation for the ending of slavery there.

11:33One thing that's also very important to explain because it becomes important later. The Chagos Archipelago is 1 ,000 miles from Mauritius. So what is its relationship? It is treated by the British as a dependency of Mauritius. And so, for example, the way that it works is a magistrate will sail once every three months from Mauritius to the dependency of the Chagos Archipelago and deal with any cases that need to be dealt with. This becomes absolutely crucial 150 years later when the International Court of Justice needs to look at the question of, was the Chagos Archipelago really a part of Mauritius?

12:10Who was in charge? Who has the right to call this? The crucial question was, was it really run from Mauritius or was this a fiction? Very interesting. And your conclusion was? Well, the conclusion of historians is it was genuinely run as a dependency. And in the British legal texts of the 19th century and the early 20th century, including Second World War and beyond, the Chagos Archipelago is described as a dependency of Mauritius. By the 1900s, and we're talking sort of after, okay, so people have been given compensation, there's supposedly no slavery, indentured labor, we'll return to that maybe at another time in another legal case, who knows, you might be involved in that.

12:47But by 1900, we're talking about 426 families who live on this archipelago known as Chagor. So about 60 % of this African Malagasy origin. Malagasy, just explain what Malagasy means to people that I have in. Malagasy for me means of origin from the island of Madagascar. And that I have to say is not a part of the world that I know well. Although as you may know, Madagascar also has now certain claims in relation to islands that it says were separated unlawfully by France, but that That will be for another conversation. And just to add to the complexity, the ethnic origin of the people of Madagascar is actually from Southeast Asia.

13:26There is an extraordinary migration in about 500 BC when the whole bunch of seafarers move all the way from islands like Java and Borneo right across the ocean and end up in Madagascar. So these are a mixture of them and the slaves. Remember in our pirate series? Oh, the piracy, yes. We had all those escaped slaves in the pirate kingdom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One thing we haven't addressed because William reminds me, in this crucial 19th century period, a large population from modern India arrives in the island of Mauritius to work as indentured workers for the British and former French colonial individuals.

14:10And I think they're North Indians, aren't they? They're from the Gangetic Plain, from Bihar. Yes. And this becomes crucial in terms of geopolitics for today on your point, because the question in the eyes of many Western governments is, what is their natural support directed towards? Is it going to be India or is it going to be China? The answer is very clear. Leave that in your head for a second because that's going to come up a bit in the second half. But just on before we go to the break, we haven't touched on the strategic importance of why anyone should be bothered by this little archipelago, very pretty little islands made of coral, palm trees, blue sea.

14:49Why should anyone care? Location, location, location. It is equidistance from Africa and Asia. It provides an opening to what today is called the Indo-Pacific region. It allows a springboard into the South China Seas and those areas. It is seen as vital both for protecting trade routes and military routes. And that is going to be very important in part two when we talk about a little event called World War II. Join us then.

15:26Welcome back. So yes, a little tease for you just before we went into the break, which is why is the strategic importance of this everything and everything to the debate that we're having right now and all of these sort of international wranglings that are going on with, you know, Britain saying, we'll wait for Donald Trump to read a treaty before we decide to do what we thought we were going to do, which is give the Checos Islands back to the Mauritians. And it's all very much alive in the news at the moment. But let's go to World War II first, because what the Chagos Islands did at that time is that they were so important strategically, as Philippe said last time, but for fueling warships.

16:02Coaling. The Chagos Archipelago was a coaling station. And given the vast distances, I mean, a thousand miles from Mauritius and even more from the African continent, it's the same distance into the Indian Ocean and the Asian battlegrounds. And so warships are stopping there and they are refueling and stocking up with coal so that they can sail eastwards. And when they're coming back from the east, they don't have to sail all the way to the African continent and they can refuel halfway there. But at this point, it is just like a little wait station. It's time. Refuel and wait. It's just time. So there's no such notion of like Diego Garcia.

16:37That's not even a thing. That comes a bit later, doesn't it? Well, Diego Garcia exists as an island, but it's not a military base. It's a coaling station for refueling essentially military vessels. And a British coaling station. Yes, it's a British coaling station. So we've got its pivotal importance. Everybody sees it's really very useful before the big blue starts to have somewhere that you can refuel. This is an excellent place. It's kind of out of the way. And it's handy for us. At what point then do the Americans say, you know what, I'd quite like a bit of that. Thanks very much. And you're our friends, Britain.

17:10Let's do a deal on this. So the first key date is the summer of 1945, when the United Nations is created in San Francisco. And it has a commitment to something that's come to be known as decolonization. The colonial powers agree to end their colonial rule. It takes 20 years for the Mauritians to really get up to speed. By now, there are 20 or 30 independent African countries. Mauritius is not at the forefront. But by the early 1960s, they are agitating for independence. And there are a series of meetings between the Mauritian leadership and the British government with demands for independence.

17:49There is then a crucial meeting in November 1965 in London at Lancaster House between the Mauritian leadership group led by a Mr. Ram Goulam, the father of today's prime minister and Harold Wilson to determine the conditions under which Mauritius will become an independent African state. Mr. Wilson's been given a briefing paper, which I and others have called the sort of Frighten Them With Hope paper, because his instruction from his permanent secretary is, you must frighten them with hope, prime minister. He says it in that quote unquote. Yeah, that's just nuts. Incredible series of words. The hope that they will get independence and the fear that they will not if they do not cede to us the Chagos archipelago and allow us to dismember the colony.

18:40Now, this is a problem in international law. Do you want to know what the problem is? I absolutely do. The rule on decolonization is that you can only dismember a part of a colony if the affected population has given its consent. The British say that the Mauritian leadership gave its consent at Lancaster House. The Mauritians will later say, we sort of gave our consent, but it was under duress. So hang on a minute. Is that in effect saying we said it, but our fingers were crossed under the table? I mean, is that the leak? No, he forced us. He told us that if we didn't accept this, we wouldn't get independence.

19:21So fright beats hope. Okay. Yes. Gotcha. So they consent. the British immediately, a few days later, pass an ordering council creating a new and the last British colony to be created, the British Indian Ocean Territory, formerly known as the Chagos Archipelago, formerly dependency of Mauritius. And this is 1965. 1965. The year I was born. The year I was born, the last colony was great. You look good. You look good. Yes, you are coincident with the last British colony ever created. Do people call it biot for sure? Yes, they do call it biot. Three years later, they gained independence in March 1968 without the Chagos Archipelago.

20:05And the reason the British have held on to the Chagos Archipelago is not that they have a particular desire to hold on to it or any part of it. But the Americans have a new project starting in 1964-65 to create a series of military bases or listening stations in far-flung strategic but tiny islands. And they identify Diego Garcia, one of the 58 islands of the Checos Archipelago, as their preferred destination. and they say to the British, we want it and we want it cleared of any population. Oh, so this is the Richard Gifford case where it starts. So his case has always been is that there were people there who were forced.

20:56They weren't asked, they were made. It gets even more complicated. The Americans say, we don't care about the other islands, the population can stay there. But we want everyone off Diego Garcia. The British then have a problem. Under international law, they have understood, and we've got the legal advice from the archives in which this is made clear, you have to obtain the consent of the affected population. It was understood that the affected population of Diego Garcia would not give its consent. It was understood that the affected population of all the other islands, a total of maybe up to 1 ,800, 2 ,000 people, would not give their consent.

21:37So the British have an internal legal debate. And the argument that prevails is to determine that there is no population on any part of the Chagos Archipelago, which needs to give its consent. They determine in London that every person living on the Chagos Archipelago is a contract laborer, not a resident. So they take all of their rights away just like that? At a strike. Who comes up with this legal solution? I mean, is it some lawyer? A lawyer named Tony Ost, who I knew very well. He was opposed by another lawyer called Henry Darwin, who said, this is wrong. Henry Darwin did not prevail. Tony Ost prevailed.

22:21And the consequence was, at a stroke, a decision was taken that every person who lived on the Chagos Archipelago was no longer considered to be a resident, but became a contract laborer. One of the contract labourers was a four-year-old boy called Olivier Boncu. And Olivier Boncu never forgot what was done to him. And Olivier Boncu is a very important name because we kind of started talking about him with the legal case at the start because he was the test case, or at least the spearhead of the case that's saying, you know what, you can't do this to people. You can't suddenly make them stateless.

22:56And just to be completely clear here, there's 2 ,000 people scattered between these various different islands. They are a mixed population. Some are ex-slaves, some are sort of indigenous. None are ex-slaves. They are all descendant of predecessor slaves, their grandparents, their great-grandparents or whoever. The question of indigenous is very complex. They argue, some of them, that they are an indigenous community, but that is contested by others, including the Mauritian government today. You've spent time, I mean, obviously, you've spent time here and you've talked to people. What did it do to them, you know, to be told from a place, a court far away, people in sort of strange wigs and different languages, telling them that their history wasn't real, their stories weren't right, their grandparents didn't matter, and a four-year-old child could be a labourer who could be deported at any moment.

23:46I'll give you one story that for me has been the most touching. Olivier Banco's aunt, Lisby Elise, aged 20 in 1973.

24:05On the 29th of April that year, as she described to me, and she has a good memory, she was a witness later in the proceedings at the International Court of Justice, she said, I saw something I'd never seen before on my island, Peros Banyos, which is also where Olivier Banco is from. I saw a white man. And he came up to me and he said, your island is being closed. You will leave tomorrow with one suitcase and nothing else. So she then gathers her belongings. They are all removed, 400 or so people, the next day on a boat called the Nordwehr. They are sailed to Mauritius. When you say removed, at gunpoint, soldiers come and say, right, march up the camp, thank you all.

24:43Is there resistance? Do they throw stones? There's no resistance. They're a community that is particularly attached to their dogs. They want to take their dogs. The British won't allow them to take their dogs. They first try killing them with strychnine. They then try shooting them. Who the British do? The British. And they then end up gassing them. And they witness. The Chagossians witness all of this. I have had Chagossians describe to me how they watched their dogs swim after the boat as the boat was leaving. I don't know why that makes my heart break. Will you ask how they were? they're utterly traumatized i mean this was you know 50 plus years ago they still talk about it what kind of life are they living there are they small farmers or what's going on they are living a subsistence life looking after chickens and coconut plants and vegetables and fish they are fantastic fishermen and this i've seen for myself going back with them and they are able to catch things extraordinarily easily in ways that others cannot.

25:47And this is a place which, in a different shake of the dice, if America had not insisted on this, if Harold Wilson had not just been prepared to wipe away their rights, would in time presumably have become, like the Maldives, a fancy tourist destination. Absolutely. And someone would have been very rich, I don't quite know who. But in terms of the impact on them, remember that the Americans have basically said, we only want Diego Garcia cleared. It is the British legal logic, my own community, that causes everyone to be cleared out. So they are then dispersed to various parts of the world. Most of them go to Mauritius.