About Chagos

Almost four decades have elapsed but Dervillie Permal remembers clearly the summer day in 1971 when the British Government evicted him from the Chagos Islands, the tropical idyll in the heart of the Indian Ocean that was his home.

Now 73, his face contorts with anguish as he recalls in his native Creole how he had just left work at a coconut plantation when armed soldiers stopped him, told him he had to leave immediately and escorted him to a ship that was packed with weeping islanders. He was not permitted a final visit to his home. He was allowed to take only the possessions he had with him. His dog and livestock were killed.

A week later the Nordvaer deposited its wretched human cargo 1,200 miles away in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius, a British colony at the time. There he was reunited with his wife Marie Aimee, who had taken their two children to Port Louis for medical treatment two years earlier and had been barred from returning to the sun-blessed archipelago.

The islanders – mostly illiterate, unskilled and penniless – were given no help to resettle. They lived in dirt-floor shacks in the slums of the city. Mr Permal scraped a living unloading rice from ships. Mrs Permal earned a few extra pennies from sewing. They raised seven children. Last year Hengride, their daughter, brought them to live with her in a three-bedroom, semidetached house that is occupied by ten Chagossians in the Sussex commuter town of Crawley.

The Permals are the polar opposite of most immigrants to Britain. They want to go home but the Government will not let them. They have never stopped dreaming of their palm-fringed coral islands. Their hopes suffered a further blow this week when the Government quietly launched another round of its legal battle to prevent the islanders from returning.

It did so despite three unanimous court rulings in favour of the Chagossians in the past seven years, the entreaties of parliamentarians of all parties and widespread condemnation of a policy that is, in the words of the most recent court judgement, denying the islanders “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings”. As the legal process drags on, the original Chagossians are dying. Of about 2,000 evicted from the islands in the late 1960s and early 1970s, barely 700 are still alive, according to Olivier Bancoult, the leader of the exiles, who has lost a father and brother to what Chagossians call “sadness”, a sister who killed herself and two other brothers who drank themselves to death.

Mrs Permal told The Times through an interpreter: “The British Government is playing with us until one by one we die and there is nobody left and they can silently close the case.” Richard Gifford, the lawyer for the islanders in London, said: “I’ve lost count of the old folk I’ve met who have subsequently died broken-hearted at the fact they couldn’t see their beloved homeland.”

The Permals and their fellow Chagossians are the ultimate victims of geopolitics: they were evicted because of the Cold War and are prevented from returning by the War on Terror.

Their suffering began in 1966 when America was looking for a military base in the Indian Ocean to counter the Soviet threat. It struck a secret deal with the Government of Harold Wilson – a 50-year lease on Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands, in return for discounted Polaris nuclear missiles. One nonnegotiable condition was the removal of the indigenous population of the island.

Documents from the Internal Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), released under the 30-year rule, reveal just how cynically the Government set about doing that. Officials described the islanders as “mere Tarzans and Men Fridays” with “little aptitude for anything except growing coconuts”. They wrote that “there will be no indigenous population except seagulls”. They agreed that the deportations should be “ordered and timed to attract the least attention”, but if word leaked out the islanders would be described as “migrant contract labourers” with no right of abode – even though their families had lived there for generations.

The Government split the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, which was heading toward independence, and created a new colony – the British Indian Ocean Territory. It proceeded, in violation of the UN Charter, to remove the islanders through trickery, intimidation and force, by encouraging them to take trips then refusing to let them back, by shutting down the plantations and stopping supply ships.

Some were taken to the Seychelles. The rest were consigned to a life of poverty and unemployment in Mauritius. Many turned to alcohol, drugs and prostitution. Some died from malnutrition. Several committed suicide. They staged demonstrations and hunger strikes, but to little avail. In 1982 the Government awarded the exiles a paltry £4 million – less than £3,000 a head – in compensation, provided that they renounced their right to return.

Few could read the documents that they signed with thumb prints. In 2002 they were granted full British citizenship, which is why many now live in Crawley, the town nearest to Gatwick where they first arrived.

The legal battle began in earnest in 1998 and, in 2000, they won their first victory when the Divisional Court ruled that the deportations were unlawful and “official zeal in implementing those removal policies went beyond any proper limits”. The Government did not appeal and Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary at the time, agreed that the islanders should be allowed to return to any of the islands except Diego Garcia.

Then came September 11, 2001. The military base of Diego Garcia – with its B52 bombers, surveillance aircraft and support facilities – became a vital launchpad for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also where top al-Qaeda suspects are allegedly held and interrogated.

In 2004 the Government abruptly issued two Orders in Council, allowing it to bypass Parliament to negate the court ruling. In 2006 the High Court ruled that the Government’s move was unlawful and “repugnant” and, in May this year, the Court of Appeal agreed. It accused the Government of abusing its power: “The freedom to return to one’s homeland, however poor and barren the conditions of life, is one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings.”

The Lords granted the Government leave to appeal last week, provided that it paid all costs regardless of the outcome. Supporters of the Chagossians begged the Government not to prolong the agony of the islanders. In a letter to The Times a cross-party group of MPs and peers referred to Gordon Brown’s recent speech on liberty and declared: “For the FCO to proceed with a further appeal would waste more public funds, delay justice for the Chagossians and expose the Prime Minister’s words as hollow. Can we please have a return to good sense, justice and British liberties?” On Tuesday, when attention was on the Queen’s Speech, the Government lodged its appeal anyway.

A spokesman for the FCO said that the Government was required by treaty to preserve the islands for the defence needs of Britain and the US, cited a government-commissioned study which suggested resettlement was impracticable and argued that the court ruling raised issues of constitutional law that could “adversely affect effective governance of overseas territories”.

The Chagossians and their supporters said that the study was fixed and that it is nonsense to suggest that they could not survive on islands where their families lived for generations and where 3,000 military and civilian officials presently exist quite happily. They have commissioned their own study with a £15,000 grant from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. They also argue that their return to islands more than 150 miles from Diego Garcia could not possibly pose a security threat.

The decision to appeal by the Government has brought a barrage of criticism and the Chagossians plan to demonstrate outside Downing Street tomorrow. Mr Bancoult said that it disgraced a government that “always presents itself as a champion of human rights”. Robert Bain, the deputy chairman of the UK Chagos Support Association, said that it was shameful that the Government “continues to drag this out at massive expense to the taxpayer and great emotional cost to the islanders . . . Justice delayed is justice denied”.

Baroness Ludford, a Liberal Democrat MEP, said that the Government had missed “a chance to remedy 40 years of shame on Britain and betrayal of the Chagos islanders by a graceful acceptance of legal rulings in their favour. To continue with a stubborn and perverse insistence on defying the rule of law and the dictates of morality is strikingly at odds with the Prime Minister’s recent paean of praise to freedom and constitutional propriety”.

Mr Gifford expects the appeal to cost £500,000 on top of the £2 million that the Government has already spent, and has been told to expect no ruling before next summer at the earliest. Even if the Chagossians win, they would still have to persuade the Government to provide the transport and infrastructure required to return – a process that could take another year or two.

The Permals meanwhile sit in their crowded house in suburban Crawley. Their health is deteriorating as they wait for justice that never comes. Their eyes fill with tears when they remember their life in the Chagos Islands – fishing, hunting, growing crops, tending livestock.

“It was paradise,” said Mrs Permal. “We were like birds that were free. Here it is like we’re in prison.”