B-2 Stealth attack Bombers Gather on Diego Garcia to further Promote the Genocide in Palestine
27.03.2025
Suddenly we wake up Tuesday to news that B-2 “Spirit” stealth bombers are gathering to augur ill intent. And they do it, in unprecedented numbers. One-third of the total USA’s fleet of killer-planes gather. And they gather, boding ill as always, but this time, they gather on Mauritian land.
They gather on land for which we are morally and even legally responsible. Land that was stolen by Britain, then rented out to American “receivers of stolen goods”, who now gather these awful, steel, bat-like creatures, ready to vent their destruction and death on innocents.
We refer to the hideous-looking US bomber planes, right now concentrating their presence on our beloved Diego Garcia. There are reputed, now, to be already seven of the total fleet of 21, biding their time before wreaking their havoc.
They prepare to attack Yemen.
And then Iran.
We are at war with neither.
Yet our land is used in order to kill, and to kill civilians, in these countries. The USA, acting like a bandit state, uses Mauritian land for these actions?
And worse still – “worst” there is none – both countries, Yemen and Iran, have held a mirror up to all the West, this “West” that assists as the USA implements its Israeli-led strategy to speed up the genocide against the people of Palestine.
The state of Israel and its loyal ally the USA, by contrast, see this moment as “an opportunity” – as they put it – to “finish the job”. They mean to finish the job of their genocide. A genocide that began in earnest in 1948.
So, the partition “collapses” between the issue of Diego Garcia and the issue of Palestine.
Diego Garcia over which we have the sovereign, democratic responsibility of getting the US military base closed down and compensated for; Palestine over which we have the responsibility as ordinary human beings to protect from genocide.
And, the fact that these two issues are, and indeed have been for a long time, ONE issue and not two becomes clear in a flash. Suddenly we can see with “integrity”, in the true meaning of the word “integrity” signifying “as a whole” – everything as one – and thus perceive beyond the corrupted “parts” we usually see as “single issues”. Yes, the USA’s base on Diego Garcia is to be used to allow the Israeli genocide against the people of Palestine to continue, to worsen.
So, it is in this context that tomorrow, on 28 March 2025, as many as 20 organizations have come together, as if predicting this unity of the two apparently unrelated issues (Diego Garcia and Palestine), to invite you and your friends to join us all in a street march on these two intimately related topics: To call for the closure of the UK-USA military base on Diego Garcia, to say “No” to war, to militarism and to the genocide against the people of Palestine.
So, keep Friday 4 April free. We will set off from near Company Gardens at 11:00 am, and march through the centre of the capital city, Port Louis. Join us in this peaceful march.
This way we are insisting collectively, by our action, that we will not just watch live on our screens what is nothing less than a cruel and inhuman genocide – when during 18 whole months people have been hounded out of Gaza and the West Bank, rounded up in Gaza, bombed, starved and deprived even of water, fuel, electricity as well as of clothing, hospitals and health care, schools and education, history and its museums – all this done on purpose. All of this, including at least 50,000 people, two-thirds of them women, children and the aged, have been slaughtered in cold blood. Babies battered. Old people flattened against the walls of their bedrooms. Children amputated. Pregnant women left without health care in their time of need, as they go into labour and give birth. It is a crime beyond crimes ever witnessed by humanity ever before. And we have been made to watch it in real time. Before our very eyes, and within the hearing of our very ears. And now, this crime of all crimes is to be perpetrated directly from the land for which we, as Mauritians, are responsible: the infamous US military base on our beloved island Diego Garcia, stolen by the British State colonizer, sub-let to the USA for its filthy war crimes and for its endless chain of crimes against humanity, culminating in this crime of crimes of genocide, including the aiding, supplying, and abetting the State of Israel as it wipes out the people of Palestine.
President Trump has said his intention is to turn Gaza into a real estate project, build a Riviera, and make money. What comment can humanly be made in reply to that?
Nor will we watch as our Government sells our sovereignty over Chagos, in particular over Diego Garcia, and accepts that our land be outside the democratic control it is supposed to be under.
On 28 March, tomorrow, one week before the demonstration, we will publish the text of the call for the demonstration on these two related themes. We will list the 20 organizations that have signed the call. It is all those that signed the petition to the Prime Minister to call for the closure of the military base and for the abolition of all foreign military bases.
In these tumultuous times, when all sensitive souls hesitate to look at the devices in our hands or on our tables, we have to act, to act based on what will work to encourage the Mauritian Government to initiate action at the UN. We turn on TVs or Radios with trepidation. What will we see next? What will we hear next? What should we do?
These are times when the partitions between different parts of our lives collapse. And they collapse in unexpected places and at unexpected times. As the American empire falls, there will be all manner of increasingly violent crises. We must learn to take courage, to analyze what is happening, and to act. Right now the Diego Garcia issue and the issue of the genocide against the Palestinians have seen the partitions between them collapse. We must act, and our action must make clear our increasing understanding of what the source of the problem is: this United States capitalist empire, this kind of imperialism, is in its death throes. This is a time of all dangers.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT.
