The retrospective history of Diego Garcia

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A little-known and suppressed British atrocity in a faraway island tells us much about the function of globalisation
By John Pilger, New Statesman, 27 September 1996. Diego Garcia is a British colony in the Indian Ocean, from which American bombers patrol the Middle East. It is part of the Chagos archipelago, which ought to have been granted independence from Britain in 1965 along with Mauritius, but at the insistence of the Americans, it could only have its freedom if it gave up the islands.
Scandal of Diego Garcia: Thirty years of lies, deceit and trickery that robbed a people of their island home
By Ewen MacAskill and Rob Evans, Guardian (London), 4 November 2000. The return home—or at least adequate compensation—would bring an end to a shameful episode in British and US history in which both governments tricked the islanders out of their homes to make way for a US military base. The numbers involved are small—anywhere between 400 and 4,000 islanders might want to go home—but the issues raised are not.
Diego Garcia—How the Brits deported a nation
By John Pilger, Z Magazine, 22 October 2004. A crime committed by British governments against some of its most vulnerable citizens. The visit in 1961 of Rear-Admiral Grantham of the US Navy is followed by a top secret Anglo-American survey of the island for a military base—one of the biggest American bases outside the United States: what the Pentagon in Washington calls an indispensable platform for policing the world.