Chagos and Diego Garcia: UK-USA Kidnaps and Sequestrates 119 People
24.05.2022
The UK and USA have last week been exposed as bandit States. And this comes at an embarrassing time for these colonial rulers of the world.
What has happened is that Britain’s occupation of Mauritius’ Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia that it sublets illegally for a USA military base, is suddenly exposed to the bright sunlight of public scrutiny: the hideous truth that the UK and USA have acted like bandit-states is now exposed, as their continued colonization becomes untenable.
Britain and the USA on 3 October last year, it has come to light on 20 May in reports in both The Guardian and Al Jazeera, intercepted and escorted to Diego Garcia, or more accurately, kidnapped and illegally imprisoned 89 Sri Lankans on a part of the Ocean that the UK-USA alliance illegally occupies. The UK-USA kept their kidnapped prisoners on Diego Garcia in secret for six weeks. Incommunicado. Those kidnapped this way include 20 children, many of whom are less than 10 years old.
The UK and USA then proceeded to keep them all locked up without any due process in sweltering tents for seven months. Where they still are today. The UK and USA have no legal cover whatever for this outrageous kidnapping and sequestration. A further 30 refugees from a second vessel have been added to those sequestrated in limbo like this.
The UK and USA have no business continuing to occupy Chagos. The UK just stole it, and rented part of the stolen goods to its ally, the USA. That’s the bare truth of it. Now they kidnap and sequestrate people there?
They never had the right to occupy Chagos after 1968, but this has now been decided by the UN’s highest Court. The decision was in 2019. Well-nigh unanimous, it was. Now, they are formally expelled, to boot, by the UN’s General Assembly. That also happened in 2019. The UK and USA were so isolated that they got support in the vote only from Israel, Hungary, the Maldives (which had a side-issue) and Australia (whose representative spoke as if she would vote the other way). Talk about being outside international law.
The International Court of Justice at The Hague, after a long hearing, gave its legal opinion following the UN General Assembly’s request for one. Then, the General Assembly, based on this legal advice, voted in favour of the resolution for the UK to withdraw from Chagos including Diego Garcia within six months. Six months have now come and gone. The International Tribunal under the Law of the Sea has subsequently declared that Chagos is part of Mauritius, and this is binding. So the international law is clear. Britain and the USA are in Chagos illegally. Even the International Postal union has ruled illegal the postal stamps issued by the so-called British Indian Ocean Territory (the fiction the UK invented to cover its stolen “new colony” at the time of the theft). The Indian Ocean Tuna Fishing Commission has ruled Britain not a “coastal state” therefore no longer a member of the Commission.
So, when a shipping vessel is in distress in waters near Chagos, as this one coming from southern India bearing 89 Sri Lankan refugees of the Tamil community who had fled exactions in the years following the defeat in 2009 of the Tamil Tigers separatists, and when they are seeking refugee status, who are the UK and USA authorities to arrest them? Is this not illegal sequestration? Is it not kidnapping? Do these 89 people not have as much, if not more, right to be there than the UK-USA kidnappers have? No international organization has told them to pack up and go.
Who exactly are Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden to imprison people in distress this way?
Who do the UK and USA think they are to keep these 89 people, including 20 children incommunicado for six weeks? Who do the UK and USA think they are to keep them imprisoned for SEVEN MONTHS? With no due process as asylum seekers? And with no locus standi as the State responsible for Chagos?
It is truly shocking.
Only last week did The Guardian and Al Jazeera bring this to light. Once forty-two of the refugees began a hunger strike, their imprisonment had to become public. This illegal sequestration now sheds new light on just how like bandits the UK-US alliance has acted relative to Mauritius, the African union that set in motion the UN proceedings, and the entire international community. The exposure is particularly harmful to the USA and UK coming at a time when they claim the high moral ground in exposing Russia’s crimes during its illegal occupation of Ukraine.
We, in LALIT, call on the Mauritian Government immediately to get the UN Security Council to take the matter up and to force the UK and USA to give immediate due process to these refugee seekers.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. This kind of crime cannot continue on Mauritian land and seas.
Already the USA’s rendering and torture of kidnapped prisoners was exposed, after years of both the UK and USA lying through their teeth about it. Then, too, children were involved. The Guardian of 8 December 2015 reported that, “The victims of the rendition programme [on Diego Garcia] were not just men; they included women and children. The al-Saadi family was ‘rendered’ en masse to Libya in 2004: Sami, a prominent anti-Gaddafi dissident, his wife Karima and their four children, the eldest 12 and the youngest just six. Fatima Boudchar, the wife of another Gaddafi opponent, was five months’ pregnant when she was kidnapped with her husband and flown to Gaddafi’s prisons in the same year.” Now, in 2022, the UK-USA together sequestrate more people, including young children, on Diego Garcia. This is on land and on sea for which we, the people of Mauritius, are responsible.
Now, we in LALIT call for the prosecution of leaders in the UK and USA for committing both these sets of crimes. They can be prosecuted in international courts and in the Mauritian courts.
More details
The group of 89 Sri Lankans being held on Diego Garcia are represented by the British law firm Leigh Day. In their lawyers’ most recent letter to the British authorities, they said:
“Our clients feel increasingly desperate at the conditions they are enduring on Diego Garcia and the lack of any apparent progress towards finding a solution for them. They have been given no information about how, when or where they will be afforded the opportunity to claim international protection, how long they are to be kept on the island, where they might be sent, and/or when (if ever) their conditions might improve.
“We remind you that the group includes victims of torture and 20 children, many of whom are under the age of 10. The mental state of many of our clients can best be described as utterly despairing.” Some of the prisoners are ill, Al Jazeera reports.
They had spent 11 days traveling some 2,000 kilometres before they were “saved” by the UK-USA, when their vessel floundered, and then promptly sequestrated incommunicado by their “rescuers” and are being kept now in limbo.
Their lawyers now demand, according to Al Jazeera, that the UK government explain when and how it plans to enable the group to claim international protection in accordance with their rights under the Refugee Convention and customary international law. They said their clients, 42 of whom are on hunger strikes asked their lawyers “what the UK government will do in the event of their deaths on the island.” This gives an idea of what they are undergoing.
For the six months after the initial six weeks incommunicado, each asylum seeker has “had access to a landline for 30 minutes every nine or 10 days, allowing them to make outgoing calls but not receive incoming ones.” This is worse than any ordinary jail. And their jailers have no right to arrest them or hold them. Where they are is not their State.
Al Jazeera continues, “Lawyers at Leigh Day are preparing to file for judicial review against the UK government if the group does not receive ‘regular, private and unmonitored access’ to video calls, email and internet access. In a pre-action protocol letter sent to the UK government in late April, the law firm warned that restricting the group’s access to communications is ‘in breach of well-established common law rights of access to legal representatives for persons deprived of their liberty. Our clients are in a worse position than if they were prisoners,’ the letter said, because throughout most of their time on the island, they were denied ‘access to communications which would enable them to challenge the basis of their imprisonment’”.
On May 13, Al Jazeera says, a UK government spokesperson told them that the group had begun to be given unlimited access to telephone communications. They also report that earlier this year, some of the asylum seekers were flown from Diego Garcia to Bahrain for medical treatment and then brought back to the island. So, this band of UK-USA outlaws is carting the people it has arrested around the globe at its will. Meanwhile, the children are getting no proper schooling.
Al Jazeera reports that a further 30 asylum seekers were “rescued” on April 10 on a second vessel. They, too, were promptly sequestrated. This brings the number to 119 in all. “After the new group landed, the food has been very bad,” one asylum seeker told Al Jazeera. “The food size has been cut down, and the original group of us are thinking that if more people come, [the UK authorities] will start sending everyone back to [Sri Lanka or India].”
A UK government spokesperson told Al Jazeera: “We are supporting 119 people who were escorted to the British Indian Ocean Territory in damaged fishing vessels in the past year. We are working urgently with the group and our international partners on options and next steps, with their welfare being our top priority.” It sure does not look like it. It looks like the UK and USA are in a tight legal corner. On what legal grounds do they sequestrate people this way? Hold children prisoners this way? Deny people their rights this way?
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Al Jazeera reports, has been urging the UK government to consider the claims of these 119 asylum seekers “in accordance with its obligations under International Law”. The media outlet quotes an asylum seeker being worried that nine months turn into nine years, referring to six refugee families who were sequestrated on a UK military base in Cyprus for 20 years before being allowed to claim asylum in the UK, and that only happened in 2018, and only after a long legal battle.
In fact, the Mauritian Government should demand that the UN take action at once. It should also ask the International Red Cross to check on the prisoners being held on Mauritian territory illegally.
