Heavy irony (and more?) in proposed UK action at the Chagos islands

This Friday (5th March), the UK Government ‘could make history by creating the world’s largest Marine Protected Area around the Chagos Islands’. This is according to the environmental campaigning organisation, Avaaz.

As it says, our ocean ecosystems are literally dying under pressure from mass, uncontrolled commercial fishing and from pollution. The establishing of a Marine Protected Area there could start to stem this dereliction.

Commercial fishing companies are opposing the move, with short term profits unsurprisingly ahead of long term ecological security.

Avaaz is calling for people to: ‘send the UK government a tidal wave of public support’.

We cannot do that in this case and, read on, w wonder how innocent Avaaz is in this.

It was the UK government who mercilessly and deceivingly cleared these islands and particularly the chief island in the group – Diego Garcia – of their human populations in the most immoral and inhuman way.

Why?

To curry favour with America, of course.

Diego Garcia has since become a massive and protected American base in a strategically useful position, leased from the British on condition that it had no sitting tenants when contracts were exchanged.

The Americans wanted no indigenous peoples around to get in the way of what they were doing. And the British were more than complicit in this matter.

Read our previous story on this shameful – and continuing – episode.

So we won’t be cheering the UK. What sort of value system dumps people because, poor and trusting, they’re easy to fool -  but then goes for green kudos in protecting ecosystems. Humanity is an ecosystem the UK didn’t protect in the Chagos and it maintains its refusal to do so.

And why the Chagos islands? Is this too at the Americans bequest? Does it stop fishing bpats getting a little too close? And does Avaaz not know about this? What we did in the Chagos Islands is no secret and the American base on Diego Garcia certainly is not.

Is Avaaz itself trading an ecological gain against the good of a wronged and powerless people who want to come home? Among other issues as a displaced people, their family graves are on the Chagos islands. This is important in their culture.

We have drawn this matter to the attention of Avaaz and have asked them to think again – or to think differently on this matter.