The US, UK and the sufferings of the Chagos Islands

Written by: (Contributed) on 25 October 2024

Above: September 2018 Chagos Islanders protest at the Hague

An intelligence-type assessment and report about the Indian Ocean region has revealed just how close Australia has been drawn into US-led regional military provision.

In early October the Starmer government in Westminster announced that Britain was ceding sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius; a new 99-year lease for Diego Garcia, however, was also part of the package thereby allowing the US to continue to use the island for its sensitive intelligence facilities well into the next century. (1) The agreement was officially greeted by US President Biden, with the announcement, 'I applaud the historic agreement and conclusion of negotiations between the Republic of Mauritius and the UK on the status of the Chagos Archipelago'. (2)

Moves will soon take place to enable Chagos Islanders the right to return to islands from which they were displaced decades ago. Those former residents of Diego Garcia, however, will not be allowed the right of return.

The decision follows decades of legal proceedings and court cases. It would appear that the continued British colonial-type control of the remote islands was eventually regarded as increasingly untenable.

Situated about halfway between Africa and Indonesia, the Chagos Islands remain highly geo-strategic and central to the Indian Ocean. No reference was made in the report about recent Pentagon proposals to enlarge their present three-stage Asia-Pacific Island Chain Theory to include fourth and fifth chains across the wider Indo-Pacific; the Chagos Islands are, potentially, an important part of the proposals and more useful to the Pentagon when inhabited by local people who possess first-hand knowledge of the terrain, rather than being uninhabited and vulnerable to incursions from elsewhere. (3)

The Chagos Islanders were forcibly removed from the homelands in the late 1960s, when the British government began high-level diplomacy with the US to eventually use Diego Garcia for intelligence facilities. Opened in early 1973, the facilities were linked to similar facilities at Silvermine, South Africa, Argentina and Pine Gap, Australia, as the Southern Ocean Defence Plan (SODP). (4)

On a Peters Projection World Map, Actual Size, the four nodes of the SODP are all equidistant, revealing the range and capacity of the satellite and radar system. (5) The SODP was primarily concerned with the military control of the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and came to include numerous further formal and informal military agreements. (6)

There has remained little controversy about who controlled the intelligence network; fixed direct radio communications with Whitehall were routed through Mauritius, and the US through Puerto Rica. (7)

The US-led intelligence facilities have been subject to almost continual upgrades for hegemonic purposes. (8) The basic function of the facilities, however, has remained the same, from the previous Cold War to the present one. More recent upgrades have included both Diego Garcia and its counterpart in Guam becoming hubs for US-led military operations, with Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia being the support centre; both hubs rest on an arc from Pine Gap, Central Australia. (9)

The US, however, has had problems, historically, with the whole SODP; the role of South Africa raised serious questions about US support for Apartheid, the inclusion of Argentina, likewise, was difficult due to the Dirty War and later invasion of the Malvinas. Those in control, therefore, hid behind diplomatic silence as a matter of course. It continues.

The matters, however, came to a head during the 1975 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kingston, Jamaica, where Gough Whitlam, representing Australia, played a significant part in supporting the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace, normalising diplomatic relations with Cuba, and supporting national liberation movements in South Africa, Angola and Mozambique. (10) They proved controversial.

The moves were also reinforced by the British Labour Government of the time, led by Harold Wilson, not renewing the Simonstown Agreement, and thereby isolating Apartheid South Africa.

The fact that Whitlam was dismissed later the same year and Harold Wilson, also suddenly announcing his retirement early in 1976, has left little to the imagination about hidden hands at work inside the corridors of Commonwealth power and the displeasure they had caused the faceless wonders who maintain the huge bureaucracies through which their patrons wield class and state power.

The intelligence-type assessment and report from Canberra did not take any of the above into account; it began, nevertheless, in classic Cold War-style with an opening sentence 'that Australia and the US are livid with the Starmer Labour government in London over its giveaway of a major military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean that is vital to Western interests'. (11) So much for the well-publicised Biden statement, quoted above!

In an indignant, terse writing style the statement then continued, noting, 'for Australia, Diego Garcia is a strategic asset available for military operations in the Indian Ocean and beyond. It anchors Australia's presence in the Indian Ocean and provides a friendly port in the vastness of the region'. (12)

Throughout the whole statement concern was raised that the present government in Mauritius 'is under increasing Chinese influence … with fears arising that … Chinese surveillance ships, no doubt disguised as fishing fleets, will be able to monitor the US long-range bombers stationed at the base'. (13) No recognition was given to the fact China has, more likely than not, used satellite surveillance of the US intelligence facilities based on Diego Garcia for decades.

Fears apparently exist that Mauritius will follow the lead of the Maldives which has a government supportive of China, alongside Beijing's moves across the Indo-Pacific to establish the String of Pearls of useful outposts in Ski Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan. (14)

In order to reinforce the Cold War nature of the assessment and report attention was drawn to noted left wing influences; references to Trotskyist groups inside the British Labour Party were used together with criticism of Foreign Secretary David Lammy who was quoted as labelling Donald Trump as a 'woman-hating, neo-Nazi sociopath'. (15) The Australian, furthermore, takes every opportunity to applaud Trump, despite his continued appalling behaviour and attitudes. Elsewhere, a massive five column highly critical feature spread about the Starmer government and its declining popularity in another edition of their newspaper, did not contain a single reference to the Chagos Islands controversy. (16)

In conclusion, the intelligence services have used a classic ploy to 'leak' an assessment and report into mainstream Australian media in order to polarise opinion against Labour governments, both in the UK and Australia. They then sit back from their hidden vantage points in government bureaucracies and use the eyes and ears of their agents in secret networks to assess the political fallout before moving onto their next project. The real life Slow Horses have been at work with a covert operation. It has also shown vividly how those lurking within the corridors of power recruit from right-wing groups and compliant media outlets to serve the interests of those wielding class and state power:

We need an independent foreign policy!

1. UK cedes key islands to China ally, The Weekend Australian, 5-6 October 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. See: Wikipedia -Island Chain Theory, Fourth and Fifth Chains, Indian Ocean.
4. Wikipedia: Diego Garcia; and, 'Maritime Operational and Communications HQ', The Star (South Africa), 10 March 1973; and, Security in the Mountain, The Star (South Africa), 17 March 1973; and, Not in Europe Alone, John Biggs-Davidson M.P., Brassey's Annual: Defence and the Armed Forces, (1972), pp. 78-89; and, Essential Instruments of US strategy – Two New Gendarmes: Iran and South Africa, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1976; and, The UKUSA SIGINT Network, The Ties that Bind, J.T. Richelson and Des Ball, (Sydney, 1985), page 323.
5. See: Map of the World, Peters Projection, Actual Size, New Internationalist.
6. See: The politics of South Atlantic Security: a survey of proposals for a South Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Andrew Hurrell, Journal of International Affairs, February 1983, pp. 179-93.
7. Star, op.cit., 17 March 1973.
8. See: Diego Garcia and Africa's Security, Oye Ogunbadejo, Third World Quarterly Journal, Volume 4, Number 1, December 1982, pp. 105-20.
9. US intensifies military presence in the Indo-Pacific, The Global Times (Beijing), 24 July 2018; and, Map of the World, Peters Projection, op.cit., Actual Size.
10. CHOGM, Kingston, Jamaica, 29 April-6 May 1975, Final Communique, Sections: 13-26.
11. China's boost in the Indian Ocean, Editorial, Australian, 18 October 2024.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. See: Trust in flames as Kier Starmer hurtles to earth, The Weekend Australian, 19-20 October 2024.