Chagos Refugees
The MovementChagos
The Chagos Archipelagos a place of phenomenal beauty. It is also one of the most remote in the world. It is situated in the Indian Ocean 1200 miles (1931 km) north east of Mauritius.
The territory of the archipelago is immense – 21,000 square miles of ocean covering the peaks and troughs of an ancient Gondwanaland mountain chain known as Limuria.
Human settlement on these once gentle islands began in the mid – 1780s when a French sugar and plantation owner from Mauritius established a coconut plantation.
Worked on by dozens of African slaves the plantation soon prospered. Between the late 1700s and 1828 the islands temporarily became a leper colony, hosting sufferers from Mauritius – by the end of the 18th century, the colony numbered around 300 people.
After the Treaty of Paris in 1814, Chagos passed from the French to British flag. In 1835, slavery was abolished and soon after the leper colony was officially closed.
Records show that there were 448 people living in the Chagos archipelago with more than half living in Diego Garcia, six miles wide and thirteen long – the largest island in the group.
As more plantations were developed, new workers were needed. Many came from the Indian sub-continent and gradually integrated in settles society.
As Diego Garcia became populated, so too did Peros Banhos and Salomon to the north and the Egmont Islands at the western edge of the group.
By the beginning of the 19th century the entire islands’ population was around 750 people with around a third of that number inhabiting the curiously foot-shaped atoll of Diego Garcia.
Here there were three copra factories, a church, a hospital, a railway and a coaling station for Australia-bound steam ships.
Life was hard but afforded people the dignity of being self-sufficient; they fished off the coral outcrops in their off-duty hours, raised livestock and grew vegetables, turning them into small-scale farmers in imitation of continental peasantry.
A 1950s British government colonial Office film shows the islanders’ children splashing in a sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon. It noted that the people here ‘lived their lives in surroundings of wonderful natural beauty.’
Then, in the 1960s British foreign policy intervened and soon the Chagossian people would be forcibly removed to live in squalor. Their happiness was lost and the graves of their ancestors, nearing poignant lists of old family names would soon be a memorial to a way of life that would, in a little time, be gone forever. For the vast majority had lived and died largely unknown and un-regarded, and now it seemed their vanished world would keep its silence for all eternity.
