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| http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/ap10-09-043830.asp?reg=EUROPE |
| ASSOCIATED
PRESS |
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Former residents of Diego Garcia lose
compensation claim
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| LONDON, Oct. 9 —
Indian Ocean islanders who were moved to make way for the U.S.
military base at Diego Garcia failed Thursday in their legal bid to
gain compensation from the British government for the eviction. |
The entire population of the Chagos archipelago — 2,000 people according to
the islanders, 1,000 according to the British government — was relocated
between 1967 and 1973. A few were sent to the Seychelles, but most were
shipped to Mauritius — both island nations off Africa's east coast.
Britain leased Diego Garcia, halfway
between Africa and Southeast Asia and part of the British Indian Ocean
Territory, to the United States, and in 1971 barred anyone from entering the
islands except by permit.
Judge Duncan Ouseley at London's
High Court ruled that the islanders and their families — now numbering more
than 5,000 — had no reasonable grounds for bringing the compensation claim
and seeking the restoration of their property.
During the hearing, the islanders'
lawyer, Robin Allen, said the move had left most of them destitute. Many were
illiterate and skilled only in coconut-picking.
''Their claim is about forced
displacement,'' Allen said. ''They did not go willingly. They were removed
from these islands by the British government.''
He cited a government note from
1966, which referred to the islands as ''some rocks which will remain ours;
there will be no indigenous population, except seagulls who have not yet got a
committee.''
''They had to deny the existence of
any permanent inhabitants, any population of people who lived there and had
done so for generations,'' said Allen. ''They had to deny — and to continue
to deny to this day — any government obligations to those people.''
In November 2000, the High Court
overturned a 1971 ordinance that banned the islanders from returning to their
land, clearing the way for the compensation claim.
But Ouseley ruled Thursday that
there was no prospect of the islanders showing that the British government
enacted the ordinance knowing that it was unlawful, or that any removal or
prevention of return before or after 1973 was unlawful.
''Ill-treatment does not require a
hopeless case to be allowed to continue. Indeed, to raise false hopes would
not be fair,'' Ouseley said, adding that he was ''acutely conscious'' of the
position of at least some of the claimants.
Diego Garcia, the only U.S. military
base in the Indian Ocean, is a submarine resupply station. B-2 stealth bombers
flew missions over Iraq from the base, which was also used for U.S. military
strikes in Afghanistan.
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