My Father spent the last few months of his life sitting on, and lying in, not wholly uncomfortable hospital beds waiting to see heart consultants who would stroke their chins and "Hmmmm..." a lot as they studied his file. We would fill the spaces between these disappointments with political discourse. Tragic, n'est ce pas? But I guess that's how we were able to connect. Indeed that's how we would always connect. I remember watching Saturday morning television and rooting for the Goody Cowboys against the Baddy Indians until one day he asked me: "What makes you think that the Cowboys are the Good Guys?" And that kind of changed my perspective forever. Basil Creese Senior and I would chat about politics a lot. I would read LOADS around a subject and then casually bring it up in conversation so I could dazzle him with my erudition. He, of course, would still be far better informed than me and with a perspective which would be genuinely disarming.
The last book I took to him whilst he was in Wythenshawe Hospital was Pirates and Emperors by Noam Chomsky. The central premise of this work is a story related by St. Augustine of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him “How dare you molest the sea?” “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.” St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent" and 1581 years after his death it still resonates as we consider the notion of "terrorism": a word whose original definition was to describe the acts of violence perpetrated by government to ensure the submission of the populace.
Basil pére read the book and was "amazed" at its power and wondered how come, if this book was in circulation and freely available, people weren't rioting in the streets. I was so pleased he had enjoyed it. I couldn't have been more elated if I'd written it myself. As I sat there feeling smug, he asked me, "Have you heard of Diego Garcia?"
"Was he on the subs bench for Brazil in the last World Cup?" I asked.
"No," he sighed wearily, and put his head back on the pillow. "If you want to know what the world is like, just look at Diego Garcia."
"Diego Garcia?"
I got a bit distracted and didn't look to research it straight away. My Father's Father, Hazel, had died whilst he (Basil Sr) and a friend were at the cinema watching Gone With The Wind, so I spent the next few days tempting fate by going to see lots of rubbish movies between visiting hours, and if Pater was ok when I got back to hospital then that meant everything was going to be all right.*
After his funeral, at which I delivered a joyful eulogy, Diego Garcia swam back into my field of vision and I decided to find out what the Big Fella was talking about.
The great John Pilger described it thus;
"There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia."
Diego Garcia was a British colony inhabited by the descendants of slaves who had been there for 200 years. In the 1960s the British Government leased the island to the US Military so that they could install a base which would act as a staging post for their Middle East interventions. The islanders (casually dismissed as mere "Man Fridays" and "Tarzans" by the Foreign Office) were expelled and repatriated to Mauritius, whilst successive governments perpetrated the fiction that the island had never been inhabited and that the islanders were only ever "migrant workers" meaning their rights would not come under the jurisdiction of the UN.
I mention all of this because more than 150 exiled Chagossians gathered in London about three weeks ago to call for a return to their Indian Ocean archipelago home. Sure enough a rebuttal came in the form of a piece written in the Guardian by a Pew Trust (a group who strive to "
acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy and the values of a free market")
representative who asserted;
"We believe the Chagos Islands and their surrounding waters should be protected for the resources and values they have today."
And that;
"The designation of the Chagos archipelago as the world's largest fully protected marine reserve is a bright spot we should all celebrate."
So far, so ho hum. These poor chaps can't return because of the their effect on the fragile ecosystem. Notwithstanding that B52's and Stealth Bombers roar in and out of the place on an hourly basis. Nor the fact that the recent Wikileaks controversy highlighted this as a mere strategy of obfuscation;
Friday, 15 May 2009, 07:00
C O N F I D E N T I A L LONDON 001156
NOFORN
SIPDIS
EO 12958 DECL: 05/13/2029
TAGS MARR, MOPS, SENV, UK, IO">IO">IO, MP, EFIS, EWWT, PGOV, PREL
SUBJECT: HMG FLOATS PROPOSAL FOR MARINE RESERVE COVERING
THE CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO (BRITISH INDIAN OCEAN TERRITORY)
REF: 08 LONDON 2667 (NOTAL)
Classified By: Political Counselor Richard Mills for reasons 1.4 b and d
Summary
More than 2,000 islanders were evicted during the Cold War to make way for a huge US military base. The islanders have fought a long battle to be allowed to return. British Foreign Office and American officials discuss plans to establish a marine park on Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands, which they say would effectively end the islanders resettlement claims.
Read related article
1. (C/NF) Summary. HMG would like to establish a "marine park" or "reserve" providing comprehensive environmental protection to the reefs and waters of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) official informed Polcouns on May 12. The official insisted that the establishment of a marine park -- the world's largest -- would in no way impinge on USG use of the BIOT, including Diego Garcia, for military purposes. He agreed that the UK and U.S. should carefully negotiate the details of the marine reserve to assure that U.S. interests were safeguarded and the strategic value of BIOT was upheld. He said that the BIOT's former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve. End Summary.
Diego Garcia is a tragedy which has been exacerbated by British governments of all hues. Luckily for us and our insistence on the right NOT to know. Anything. The coverage of this affair remains
virtually non existent in western mainstream media. Servitude to power regularly wears the cloak of silence and the fight of the Chagossians is a very good example of this.
Back in 1982, just before the Argentinians claimed the Falkland Islands, Mrs Thatcher's government made the first conciliatory move for 17 years; the Chagossians received approximately half of what they were due in compensation to allow them to rehouse in Mauritius. The British public were made aware of the Falkland Islands and the people who inhabited them whilst at the same time the Chagosians remained resolutely "unpeople". Anonymous and abandoned.
If you knew nothing about Diego Garcia, don't sweat it. Blame your parents.
* When the end came my brother was in the cinema watching Hellboy.
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