The Lemmeys Lay an Egg in the Chagos

Chagos Islanders helping the Seabees, Diego Garcia, 1971

Okay, imagine this, you have a home, a large home on 14 square miles, shared between you and 1100 other people. You are told, mysteriously, by the British government that you will be evicted to build a military base. If you have an extremely long ancestry on the island, you're entitled to some compensation, and only a little bit, several years too late to help you out in any significant manner, but if it's only you or your mother or your grandfather, you're entitled to none. Worse, brutal measure including depravation of supplies, threats of bombing, and the destruction of domesticated animals are used to achieve these ends.

But here's the strange part: the military base isn't even in your chain of islands, but on a larger island 30 miles away.

And thus you have the Chagossians. They've been forced out of a home that wasn't even needed for anything, and at one point, the British did not believe they were entitled to any compensation. They described them as "Tarzans" and "Man Fridays," and dumped them on the nearby island of Mauritus without so much as food and water to fend for themselves in the Port Louis slums. At most, an eviction of Diego Garcia might have been in order, probably to the other islands, and certainly not by these means.

This leads me to wonder, just what are they doing with those islands? There are allegations of black sites by the US Intelligence community on those islands. There are also large areas of solid farmland and excellent mineral resources and fishing completely off limits to any economic development. And then there are the poor souls forced to live in urban slums because some idiot in London, or DC (the story varies), decided this was honestly a good idea.

Mauritus is now seeking control of the islands. While the US millitary has a legitimate claim to the neccessity of Diego Garcia, I see no reason at all that they should so much as whine at some reasonable level of economic development on a bunch of islands that aren't even reasonably near them. If they had been willing to make the people there American or British citizens on the Chagos Islands, and only rearrange the lives of those directly affected by the military base, maybe my feelings would be different, but after 39 years of reckless unethical behavior towards an entire society, methinks that neither London nor DC nor Port Louis, Mauritus, who sold their people out for 3 million pounds, can be trusted at all with the greatest Lemon of Lemmeyland. This is totally irresponsible, and no official associated with these acts should be allowed to keep their job, and no bureau associated with the duties regarding the British Indian Ocean Territory should avoid thorough scourging and discipline.

Those people have a home they have been deprived of. Now, the UK wants to declare a giant nature preserve to keep them out of their home forever. This is not the first time that eco-nazism has hurt the people of the Chagos - another proposed site for the current base at Diego Garcia was an uninhabited atoll rejected because it was the site of a rare breed of turtle. Please, please, please let them come back, and there is no reason at this point why someone else should not control those islands, especially when the British have abused them so thoroughly:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." -The Declaration of Independence

Government comes from the people, and thus the British Government has lost it's right to the British Indian Ocean Territory, pure and simple. Who will it go to instead? I don't know. Not Mauritus, not the UK, and not America, that much has to be certain.