Diego Garcia and Palestine – Myriad Links by Struggle against Military Occupation
25.03.2024
A friend wrote me an SMS saying she had watched the Mauritius “oral submissions” before the International Court of Justice on the Palestine case against Israeli illegal occupation case in February, and said she “didn’t understand much. [That it seemed] more about Diego than Palestine,” she said, and “understood comparison of length of occupation and possibly about ceasefire not interfering with ongoing negotiations but it was all very legalese.”
The questions she raises in her witty way are important.
What are the political struggles behind the fact that the Palestinian delegation, itself, three times mentioned the Mauritius ‘2019 judgment on the illegal British occupation of Chagos while submitting on the Palestine case? And the fact that the African union delegation, too, referred to Mauritius’ case on Diego Garcia innumerable times? Why? Other countries’ delegations, too. And, of course, the Mauritian delegation, in its oral submissions on Palestine’s occupation that my friend was referring to in her SMS, relied heavily on the precedent set by the 2019 Mauritian ICJ judgment. What are the connections, beyond the “legalese”?
We can start by noting three minor-seeming facts, as background information before we wade in to answering the question in a way beyond the “legal”.
First, a practical fact which is clearly an indicator of the close links between the two cases i.e. that Palestine decided to select the same two barristers that helped Mauritius win its case in 2019, Philippe Sands and Paul Reichler. Second, which seems unrelated, is an activist-related fact that remains somewhat hidden inside the Olivier Bancoult British High Court case for the Chagossians against the British State, the case famous for having exposed for all in the world to see the genocidal treatment the USA-UK meted out to the people of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands. We had, of course, been opposing this military occupation by the UK-USA of Chagos including Diego Garcia here in the streets, and in every imaginary activist way, for 50 years. But the fact to note is that the barrister representing the “defendant”, none other than the British State (or “the Queen”, then) spent one whole hour of his summing-up time denouncing LALIT’s long battle on the issue of Diego Garcia and Chagos, and saying how LALIT posed such a danger to poor little UK-USA alliance that any links that Olivier Bancoult and the Chagossians had with us in LALIT somehow made him and the Chagos Refugees Group he leads, in turn, a danger to the great white USA-UK empire. The judgment for that case was in the year 2000. Third, a geo-political historical fact, that at the same time that the UK-USA was beginning its illegal military occupation of Chagos-Diego Garcia, 1967-8, Israel with UK-USA backing, began its illegal military occupation of the totality of Palestine.
Anyway, keep these three facts in mind, as symbols, somehow, of the importance (and limitations) of international organizations like the ICJ and also the importance of proper political organization and struggle at the grassroots on the ground where we live, in Mauritius and in Palestine, and the importance of constantly linking up with each other and with others abroad.
I started to reply to my friend on my phone, and then thought let me write a meandering article for us all, including myself, instead.
My aim is, I guess, to show how it is the nitty-gritty political activism over the past 50 years on these two issues that has brought progress – whether in Palestine including Gaza, or in Mauritius including Chagos that includes Diego Garcia, and how there are even international links at the grassroots level, and at the same time, on the other end of the spectrum, show what exactly the role is of big, historic international institutions like the ICJ in an overall long-term political, repeat “political”, grassroots struggle. So, hopefully this short article may just help young people train themselves into becoming adept at the long-term thinking and the sustained inter-related political actions required over time, in order to build up real momentum in society for useful collective political action to change the course of history – political action that is not merely electoral, nor merely defensive, but that imagines another kind of society ahead for humanity, one day.
This long-term grassroots engagement is essential in times when we are all bombarded with short-term images and news, facts and fakes, that conspire together to daze us, prevent us using our heads in a logical way to analyze properly, and reduce us to reacting only on “immediate” issues, thus eternally kept on the defensive. We even wait for genocide to explode before our eyes on the screens and then, only then, react to something that has, in fact, been there, as an unfurling genocide, for 75 years. And this way we do not see and cannot act upon the cause of even a genocide, for example, at the same time as against the thing itself. Just as the Palestinians have been hounded off their land from 1948 onwards, and the totality of it since 1967, so the Mauritians living on Chagos were totally uprooted from Chagos including Diego Garcia between 1965 and 1973, when the last shipload were ripped from the Chagos and brought, like slaves, in the ship’s hold.
Linking the Palestine case and the Chagos-Diego-Garcia helps us make visible and oppose the underlying thing itself: colonization-and-imperialism, the late stage, as Lenin put it very early on, of capitalism. Mauritius including Chagos including Diego Garcia and Palestine including Gaza plus the West including East Jerusalem have suffered the same fate – over the same time period, and it is inflicted in the interests of the same empire. The two struggles have laid bare the vested interests – military and economic.
So, let’s go!
LALIT began to militate decades ago for the Mauritian State to take the issue of the decolonization and end of military occupation of Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos to the ICJ. We did this, why? Because while struggling alongside the people of Diego Garcia and the other Island of Chagos against the US military base there, for complete decolonization, and for the right to return – street demonstrations, arrests, petitions, forums, marches, fighting criminal court cases against us for illegal demonstration, women’s all-night vigils, hunger strikes, open letters, preparing a ship and then even a flotilla to go to Diego Garcia, international conferences, gathering international support for the issue, joining the world-wide “No Bases” movement, and even sharing its leadership – we were so deeply committed that we had to think about all the issues involved. What was the driving factor for this cruel, illegal behavior? How did this colonization just continue? How does it? How did this military occupation of Mauritius continue? How does it? Why is it invisible, this thing that has happened, and is happening?
Even as we were being arrested and charged, we studied all the UN General Assembly resolutions warning Britain not to dismember Mauritius prior to Independence, and then every few years since it did so anyway, denouncing Britain and its US partner, again and again. At some point we realized that the way to go, on an additional level to grassroots activism and to putting pressure on our own Government, was by way of forcing our Government to get a General Assembly resolution, which we proposed come from the whole of the African union, which in fact happened, to get the ICJ to decide the issue. We militated for this at the same time as continuing all our other activism, not instead of it – LALIT members, as well as continuing to militate at the grassroots in Mauritius also speaking at international political meetings in every major city on every continent about the need to fight for three things – (i) for Britain’s complete decolonization of Mauritius and for an end to the US-UK military occupation of Chagos thus concluding the decolonization process, (ii) for the military base on Diego Garcia to be dismantled, it being the prime mover of the UK-USA cruelty, and then it being environmentally cleaned up and turned into something useful for humanity, and (iii) for the right of return of all Chagossians and full reparations to be paid by the UK-USA criminals that displaced them by force. International law is already clear on this occupation being illegal. We knew that. In calling for the Mauritian state to go to the ICJ, we relied, inter alia, from 2004 onwards on the Palestine case against the Israeli Wall, for some of the arguments. We knew about this because since 1978, as well as struggling against the military occupation of Chagos, including Diego Garcia, we in LALIT were also struggled on the international level for the liberation of Apartheid South Africa and simultaneously for the end of Israeli occupation of Palestine. The judgment in the Palestine case against the Israeli Wall – even in the same year we had members helping in brigades alongside Palestinians in the West Bank – showed the way for Mauritius, too, to go to the ICJ and, in fact, win, and then did win. Anyway, helped by two LALIT international conferences on Diego Garcia in 2010 and 2016, we finally succeeded.
The Mauritian State got the African union to win a UN General Assembly resolution to call for the ICJ to give an Advisory Opinion on the issue of this occupation, and the ICJ well-nigh unanimously said Chagos is Mauritian and must be decolonized immediately. The General Assembly of the UN then voted a resolution giving Britain a six-month ultimatum to leave the whole of Chagos, including Diego Garcia where the US base is. Victory! But, British colonization and US-UK imperialism does not, of course, collapse just like that. It dies hard. It continued its decades-long manoeuvers, of course, using postponements and deception in its supposed negotiations, as it always had. But, now, the UK-USA, at the General Assembly, were so isolated that they had voting with them only THREE countries – Israel (that gives away the direct link), Hungary (of right wing Orban) and Australia (at the time of right-winger Scott Morrison). We note that Maldives had been a fourth, but changed its initial stand.
But, there is another link somewhere in there for LALIT’s internationalism working. We have been the only force in Mauritius – and not for lack of trying – to consistently stand with Julian Assange in the torture he has suffered at the hands of the US-UK empire by his doing no more than the great work of publishing the truth about the exactions of this USA-UK empire. He did no more than any upright journalist should do. He published the truth. In addition, when Wikileaks published all their huge batch of “cables”, we in LALIT immediately shared out the whole batch on Mauritius/Seychelles USA Embassy links with the US Secretary of State. And we found something we published widely. There was a cable in which the UK and USA exposed proof that they had engineered a “Marine Protected Area” around Chagos in order to outwit the Chagossians’ legal cases and the Mauritian State’s demand for re-unification of Mauritius by the UK decolonizing Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos. And it was this fact that made it possible for two things to happen. LALIT finally got proof that Greenpeace had, in fact, like other more tame environmental organizations been hoodwinked by the British State as we accused them of being. Greenpeace was amongst the NGOs that, out of being single-issue on the one hand, and out of allowing themselves to be part of the “state apparatus” of imperialism on the other, gave their blessing to this outrageous colonial British Marine Park not only on someone else’s land and sea, but also to be placed right bang in the middle of the most notoriously polluting of US military bases – already the most polluting of establishments – the nuclear polluted Diego Garcia base, and without them even mentioning either fact. This is important because it breaks the hegemony of colonial thinking that is so profound, even in those who think they are anti-imperialist, like Greenpeace, and more recently, equally egregiously, Human Rights Watch, when it fails to realize that the BIOT it wants to “negotiate with” is the colonial imposter they should be opposing – even after the ICJ judgment that the UK has to get up and go at once, HRW still goes on sucking up to the British State and its illegal British Indian Ocean Territory, an illegal colony, and asking for it to negotiate with them as representatives, somehow, of Chagossians.
But the second effect is vast. Much greater than exposing the small fry that get used by the great USA-UK empire. Look how the Wikileaks Cables, once published, helped both the Mauritian case at the ICJ, and then later, in a chain reaction, is helping the Palestinian case against occupation by Israel. Look what happened. When Navin Ramgoolam was Prime Minister and Arvind Boolell Foreign Affairs Minister, armed with the “fact”, which Julian Assange’s organization published, that the Marine Park was part of a strategy to keep USA-UK control over Diego Garcia, and encouraged by LALIT’s continued struggle at the grassroots, got the courage to put in a pre-case, that, in turn opened the way for the Jugnauths’ ICJ case that would then follow from this first victory. The Ramgoolam Government called for the UN Tribunal on the Sea to declare the Britain’s Marine Protected Area illegal because it is not Britain’s territory to make such declarations over. The victory was even bigger than that. Two of the judges wrote a minority judgment in which they said the Tribunal had the power to declare, and ought to have declared, the Chagos, including Diego Garcia, is part of Mauritius. When Aneerood Jugnauth became Prime Minister, he took up from there and, again with constant political pressure from LALIT’s actions, forged ahead with the ICJ case.
In LALIT, we did not stop our ongoing actions on Chagos and Diego Garcia. Throughout all this time, we held demonstrations, vigils, conferences, forums and debates. We informed the BDS (Palestine) group of the victory, and they, in turn, asked us for all the details of how we had got the Mauritian State to go to the ICJ and to win there. We think they learnt some things from us, and added this knowledge to their political actions. Anyway, we had a lot of correspondence because Alain Ah Vee had met Omar Bargouti, the co-founder of BDS at an anti-war meeting in South Africa in 2014. LALIT had taken the initiative of setting up the BDS-Mauritius in 2014, which was later, in 2020, subsumed into the present-day Solidarite Morisyin Ar Lepep Palestinn (SOMALP). Anyway, LALIT told the Palestinian activists about the Mauritian case, and they pushed the Palestinian authorities to put in a case, and they hired the same two lawyers. Once we knew there was a case put in by Palestine at the ICJ, in LALIT, we started militating for the Mauritian Government to participate in the case, and to give oral submissions as well as written. And they did.
And so, when the two issues suddenly come into stark clear light at the ICJ, one after the other, we can begin to see, with our own eyes, that they are the same issue: British colonization, continuing with USA becoming the big partner in the UK-USA alliance, and maintaining military occupation – one in Palestine, and the other in Mauritius (the part of Mauritius called Chagos including Diego Garcia). The same issues are, therefore, to reply to my friend’s query, being dealt with in the same way at the same Court – with activist interventions, at the level of Mauritius and Palestine, allowing this to take place apparently seamlessly.
And this is presumably why the British State’s barrister took one whole hour to attack LALIT – in the case of the year 2000. Because they know of the power of mobilization at the grassroots level, when it is international.
LALIT internationalized the struggle to close the USA’s base on Diego Garcia, to end British colonization of the whole of Chagos, and to keep this linked intrinsically to the right of return of all Mauritians, but most specially Chagossians. At two points we very nearly went to Diego Garcia in a ship. First, in March 1999 there was a window of opportunity with Greenpeace that planned to use their ship Arctic Sunrise to take Chagossians and us to Chagos. There was a technical problem: the ship got iced in at the Antarctic. Later Greenpeace could not agree – due to the organization’s dependence on donations conditional on the NGO not challenging US foreign policy. Later, in the build-up to the No Bases meeting in the wings of the 2004 World Social Forum, when we were looking for “a boat” to take us, we ended up with offers of a number of smaller boats, making our attempt grow into a “flotilla”. That was then the British Authorities themselves affreighted and paid for a ship to, themselves, take Chagossians to Chagos, and thus took the wind, so to speak, out of our collective sails. At that Mumbai world meeting of the No Bases organization and the Anti-War Movement, Diego Garcia was put as one of the main bases to aim to get closed urgently.
LALIT members have spoken about closing this base down, exposing its use in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, for rendition and torture, and its violation of the Pelindaba Treaty for a Nuclear Arms Free Africa that is a legacy of Nelson Mandela to the world, all over the world – in London and Johannesburg, in Mumbai and Sydney, in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as in Paris, in Quito and in Copenhagen, in Melbourne and in Ahmedabad – as well as welcoming speakers here from all over the world.
So, all this is the beginning of an answer to my friend’s SMS.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
