Cases of US defying international law
By M.V.Kamath
The story of the withdrawal of a visa given to Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi by the United States is now old hat and it has been all but forgotten. Modi, probably could not care less. The US visa was withdrawn on the grounds that Modi had violated Human Rights and had endangered the lives of minorities. It was the silliest of excuses but one is reminded about America’s own despicable record of human rightsviolation as Vietnam celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the final liberation of territory from US forces.
On 30 April 1975 Saigon, then capital of South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese forces ending a long drawn out war, the bloodiest of our age. At the peak of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1969, there were half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam. By the war’s end 58,183 U.S. soldiers had died; the Vietnam losses were 1.3 million. And if one thinks of more than 4 million Vietnam civilians who had been either killed, wounded or maimed, one can imagine the terror that the U.S. had let loose an innocent country that had done America no wrong.
What isalso seldom realised is that during the long-drawn war, the United States had dropped over 300,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than all the bombs dropped the second world war. And what was it that had moved United States to this form of barbarism? Nothing, except that North Vietnam had decided to go the communist way. It offended the United States and it made Vietnam pay for it. The United Nations not move its little finger to stop US atrocities against innocent women and children. True, the war cost the United States over $ 165 billion.
In the end the US lost the war ingloriously but it is necessary to remind Washington its evil deeds perpetrated not so long ago. But that is only one of the many crimes against Human Rights that the U.S. has committed over the years. Not long ago, the British paper The Guardian (22 October 2004) had taken the trouble to remind what the U.S. had done in a little known group of islands called Diego Garcia lying about 1,600 kms directly south of Kanyakumari. The story of Diego Garcia, as John Pilger wrote in The Guardian “is shocking, almost incredible”. Diego Garcia is an island, one of unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago.
It was first settled in the late 18th century. Some 2,000 people lived there, most of them creoles, in several villages, with their, schools, a hospital, a church, a small railway, docks, a copra plantation and even a prison. They were a happy people with not a worry in the world andwas frequently referred to as paradise on earth. All that began to vanish when an American Rear Admiral stepped ashore and decided that Diego Garcia would make an admirable U.S. base from which to control nations of south Asia and countries on the periphery of the Indian Ocean.
Till then Diego Garcia was a British colony, though Mauritius which gained independence in 1968 had laid claims to it, very rightfully. And India had supported Mauritius’ claim. But the United States suddenly decided that Diego Garcia is strategically located and should be taken over.
Diego Garcia was ideally situated. If it could be developed into a strategic base it could be used not only to bomb countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, but to keep a watch India. Planes flying from Diego Garcia keep a close watch on Indian ship movements. Every square inch of Indian territory has been photographed and mapped out. It is the world’s biggest spying centre. And few have heard of it.
During the 1960’s the Labour Government of Harold Wilson decided in high secrecy to conspire with two American administrations to “sweep” and “sanitise” Diego Garcia. First all the 2000 odd Creoles living in Diego Garcia had to be bodily shifted to elsewhere. Says the Guardian report : “To get rid of the 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”. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966 “is to convert all the existing residents .... into short term, temporary residents”.
The Guardian adds: “What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality”. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, then 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”. And how was the task or emptying Diego Garcia of its population achieved? At first, says the Guardian, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving. Those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning.
As the Americans began to arrive and build a base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the Governor of Seycheles who had been put in charge of `sanitising’ ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. According to reports, almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. A creole citizen, Lizette Tallatte, is quoted as saying: “They put the dogs in the furnace and when the dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried”.
This was a warning to those islanders still living in Diego Garcia. They knew that their time had come to leave. And surely enough not long afterwards, the remaining population were loaded on to ships and allowed to take only one suitcase. The innocent people left behind their homes and furniture and their happy past. One one journey in rough seas, the copra company’s horses occupied the decks while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertiliser. Brought like prisoners to Mauritius, the people were unceremoniously dumped in the docks to take care of themselves.
The Guardian reported that in the first months of their exile, the Diego Garcia creoles had to fight to survive. Suicides and child deaths were common, unemployment, drugs and prostitution took care of the survivors. The creoles took their case to court. But the British courts were hand-in-glove with the government. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned from returning to their ancestral home `for ever’. That showed up the nature of British justice.
Britain had teamed up with the United States to turn Diego Garcia as the world’s largest spying centre. The fate of over 2000 simple islanders was of no consequence to the imperialist powers. It was Anglo- American totalitarianism at its worst. But the world took no notice of it. The Anglo- American news agencies played down the stories and the media soon forgot that such a place as Diego Garcia even exists.
In comparison, to what the British and the Americans did to harmless people, the Modi case comes through as totally irrelevant. In the first place there would have been no riots in Gujarat if two railway coaches had not been set on fire by a Muslim mob at Godhra. Inthe second place there was no extradition of Muslims from their villages and homes. If some took temporary shelter in camps, it was for a short duration. All of them went back to their homes and normalcy has been happily re-established. There was no organised attempt to drive Muslims out of the state. As in the past they remain where they belong.
In the case of the 2000 odd creoles living in Diego Garcia every one, right down to the last child, was forced to vacate their homes and were literally thrown to the wolves. What does that say of the British and the Americans? Not a single creole was allowed to stay in Diego Garcia which has now become a home for Americans. Dego Garcia is now home for more than 2,000 U.S. troops, an anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and even a golf course.
Reportedly, Diego Garcia is now called Camp Justice. Nobody can say that the Americans do not have a sense of humour. Are our Indian liberals and intellectuals aware of what happened in Diego Garcia? Does anybody care? Has India refused a visa to any U.S. army officer, associated with Diego Garcia? The United States does not require the assistance of Saudi Arabia or any nearby state to bomb Iraq.
Planes flying from Diego Garcia can do the job equally well. Has India ever challenged the United States for spying on it? If it has, it is one of the best kept secrets. The U.S. can get away with murder and it does. But Vietnam and Diego Garcia are not the only two instances of wholesale U.S. violation of Human Rights.
In June 2004, Roger Normand, a Director of the Centre for Economic and Social Rights, a Human Rights organisation based in New York, writing in The Hindu pointed out how “each new revelation of torture, abuse, lies and covers-up exposes the American occupation of Iraq as a criminal enterprise masquerading as liberation”. Wrote Normand: “The US has imposed collective punishment on Iraqi civilians. Tactics include demolishing civilian homes, ordering curfew in populated areas, preventing free movement through check points and road closures, sealing off entire towns and villages and using indiscriminate force in crowded urban areas, causing widespread and unnecessary civilian casualties”.
Our liberals are not moved. One can’t criticise the United States. Of course, one can criticise Narendra Modi. He is a good target. The attack on Vietnam, as the attack on Iraq as indeed the evacuation of the people of Diego Garcia were all uncalled for. They have been brutal beyond words. They have brought about immeasurable sufferings. But the US gets away scot-free. As does Britain which can treat `natives’ with cruel abandon. It is time, Indians, at least, are made aware of US hypocrisy, even if they can do little about it. And Vietnam’s celebration of Liberation Day is a good occasion to remember the past, even if the tears won’t fall freely.
The story of the withdrawal of a visa given to Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi by the United States is now old hat and it has been all but forgotten. Modi, probably could not care less. The US visa was withdrawn on the grounds that Modi had violated Human Rights and had endangered the lives of minorities. It was the silliest of excuses but one is reminded about America’s own despicable record of human rightsviolation as Vietnam celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the final liberation of territory from US forces.
On 30 April 1975 Saigon, then capital of South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese forces ending a long drawn out war, the bloodiest of our age. At the peak of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1969, there were half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam. By the war’s end 58,183 U.S. soldiers had died; the Vietnam losses were 1.3 million. And if one thinks of more than 4 million Vietnam civilians who had been either killed, wounded or maimed, one can imagine the terror that the U.S. had let loose an innocent country that had done America no wrong.
What isalso seldom realised is that during the long-drawn war, the United States had dropped over 300,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than all the bombs dropped the second world war. And what was it that had moved United States to this form of barbarism? Nothing, except that North Vietnam had decided to go the communist way. It offended the United States and it made Vietnam pay for it. The United Nations not move its little finger to stop US atrocities against innocent women and children. True, the war cost the United States over $ 165 billion.
In the end the US lost the war ingloriously but it is necessary to remind Washington its evil deeds perpetrated not so long ago. But that is only one of the many crimes against Human Rights that the U.S. has committed over the years. Not long ago, the British paper The Guardian (22 October 2004) had taken the trouble to remind what the U.S. had done in a little known group of islands called Diego Garcia lying about 1,600 kms directly south of Kanyakumari. The story of Diego Garcia, as John Pilger wrote in The Guardian “is shocking, almost incredible”. Diego Garcia is an island, one of unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago.
It was first settled in the late 18th century. Some 2,000 people lived there, most of them creoles, in several villages, with their, schools, a hospital, a church, a small railway, docks, a copra plantation and even a prison. They were a happy people with not a worry in the world andwas frequently referred to as paradise on earth. All that began to vanish when an American Rear Admiral stepped ashore and decided that Diego Garcia would make an admirable U.S. base from which to control nations of south Asia and countries on the periphery of the Indian Ocean.
Till then Diego Garcia was a British colony, though Mauritius which gained independence in 1968 had laid claims to it, very rightfully. And India had supported Mauritius’ claim. But the United States suddenly decided that Diego Garcia is strategically located and should be taken over.
Diego Garcia was ideally situated. If it could be developed into a strategic base it could be used not only to bomb countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, but to keep a watch India. Planes flying from Diego Garcia keep a close watch on Indian ship movements. Every square inch of Indian territory has been photographed and mapped out. It is the world’s biggest spying centre. And few have heard of it.
During the 1960’s the Labour Government of Harold Wilson decided in high secrecy to conspire with two American administrations to “sweep” and “sanitise” Diego Garcia. First all the 2000 odd Creoles living in Diego Garcia had to be bodily shifted to elsewhere. Says the Guardian report : “To get rid of the 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”. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966 “is to convert all the existing residents .... into short term, temporary residents”.
The Guardian adds: “What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality”. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, then 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”. And how was the task or emptying Diego Garcia of its population achieved? At first, says the Guardian, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving. Those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning.
As the Americans began to arrive and build a base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the Governor of Seycheles who had been put in charge of `sanitising’ ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. According to reports, almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. A creole citizen, Lizette Tallatte, is quoted as saying: “They put the dogs in the furnace and when the dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried”.
This was a warning to those islanders still living in Diego Garcia. They knew that their time had come to leave. And surely enough not long afterwards, the remaining population were loaded on to ships and allowed to take only one suitcase. The innocent people left behind their homes and furniture and their happy past. One one journey in rough seas, the copra company’s horses occupied the decks while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertiliser. Brought like prisoners to Mauritius, the people were unceremoniously dumped in the docks to take care of themselves.
The Guardian reported that in the first months of their exile, the Diego Garcia creoles had to fight to survive. Suicides and child deaths were common, unemployment, drugs and prostitution took care of the survivors. The creoles took their case to court. But the British courts were hand-in-glove with the government. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned from returning to their ancestral home `for ever’. That showed up the nature of British justice.
Britain had teamed up with the United States to turn Diego Garcia as the world’s largest spying centre. The fate of over 2000 simple islanders was of no consequence to the imperialist powers. It was Anglo- American totalitarianism at its worst. But the world took no notice of it. The Anglo- American news agencies played down the stories and the media soon forgot that such a place as Diego Garcia even exists.
In comparison, to what the British and the Americans did to harmless people, the Modi case comes through as totally irrelevant. In the first place there would have been no riots in Gujarat if two railway coaches had not been set on fire by a Muslim mob at Godhra. Inthe second place there was no extradition of Muslims from their villages and homes. If some took temporary shelter in camps, it was for a short duration. All of them went back to their homes and normalcy has been happily re-established. There was no organised attempt to drive Muslims out of the state. As in the past they remain where they belong.
In the case of the 2000 odd creoles living in Diego Garcia every one, right down to the last child, was forced to vacate their homes and were literally thrown to the wolves. What does that say of the British and the Americans? Not a single creole was allowed to stay in Diego Garcia which has now become a home for Americans. Dego Garcia is now home for more than 2,000 U.S. troops, an anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and even a golf course.
Reportedly, Diego Garcia is now called Camp Justice. Nobody can say that the Americans do not have a sense of humour. Are our Indian liberals and intellectuals aware of what happened in Diego Garcia? Does anybody care? Has India refused a visa to any U.S. army officer, associated with Diego Garcia? The United States does not require the assistance of Saudi Arabia or any nearby state to bomb Iraq.
Planes flying from Diego Garcia can do the job equally well. Has India ever challenged the United States for spying on it? If it has, it is one of the best kept secrets. The U.S. can get away with murder and it does. But Vietnam and Diego Garcia are not the only two instances of wholesale U.S. violation of Human Rights.
In June 2004, Roger Normand, a Director of the Centre for Economic and Social Rights, a Human Rights organisation based in New York, writing in The Hindu pointed out how “each new revelation of torture, abuse, lies and covers-up exposes the American occupation of Iraq as a criminal enterprise masquerading as liberation”. Wrote Normand: “The US has imposed collective punishment on Iraqi civilians. Tactics include demolishing civilian homes, ordering curfew in populated areas, preventing free movement through check points and road closures, sealing off entire towns and villages and using indiscriminate force in crowded urban areas, causing widespread and unnecessary civilian casualties”.
Our liberals are not moved. One can’t criticise the United States. Of course, one can criticise Narendra Modi. He is a good target. The attack on Vietnam, as the attack on Iraq as indeed the evacuation of the people of Diego Garcia were all uncalled for. They have been brutal beyond words. They have brought about immeasurable sufferings. But the US gets away scot-free. As does Britain which can treat `natives’ with cruel abandon. It is time, Indians, at least, are made aware of US hypocrisy, even if they can do little about it. And Vietnam’s celebration of Liberation Day is a good occasion to remember the past, even if the tears won’t fall freely.
Labels: Hindu Human Rights
2 Comments:
As usual, I am shocked and shamed as an US Citizen. This is the country that I believed was the example of human rights and law for the rest of the world. Each day, now, I am sadly confronted by the reality that we have done so much harm to other people. As an individual, I am a member of Amnesty International and I support their efforts. What more can I do?
Its horrible but the west was engaged in a multi-decade long cold war with the Soviet Union and China. This sort of thing went on far too often (similiar security concerns/circumstances resulted in the horror of the vietnam war). It is tragic. I applaud the guardian for bringing it to our attention. Perhaps "60 minutes" can bring this to the us public's attention and we can find a suitable set of islands nearby in the archipelago where the islanders can be relocated. Agreements could be made establishing a very severe penalty for approaching diego garcia to ensure its security. Financial arrangements could be made to support the displaced islanders as well. If the information in this article is accurate then something should be done to compensate these people. Especially since the use of their island has been so critical to the us in afghanistan and iraq.
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