Chagos Islanders Next for Deportation?

Following the exposure this week of the Tories’ policy of expelling British citizens of the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants, there’s been speculation which group of British citizens of lawful immigrant origins will be next. Mike mentioned in one of his piece that in 2019-20 it may be the Ugandan Asians. These were the Asian population of Uganda, who were expelled in the 1970s by the dictator, torturer and mass-murderer Idi Amin. Their plea for asylum was turned down by a number of countries, including India. But they were taken in by Britain under Ted Heath. it’s to Heath’s credit, just as the clandestine removal of the citizenship laws protecting the Windrush people and their forcible removal from this country shows how vile and racist David Cameron, Theresa May and the rest of the Tories are. I’ve already posted up a piece making it very clear how despicable it would be if Tweezer’s government then turns on the Ugandan Asians.

But there was a piece in the I last week suggesting that she may also be about to target the Chagos Islanders. The Chagos Islands are in the Indian Ocean, and have been a continuing imperial scandal since the mid-70s. The Islanders were forcibly removed from their homes after Britain gave the islands to America to build a massive military base. Because Cold War, need to stop global Communism and all the rest of the horrific reasons Britain and America have given for treating ordinary people in the Developing World as dirt.

Of course, the British Empire has been taking over indigenous peoples’ land and removing them since it first started to appear in the 16th century. When the British and other European nations arrived in the Caribbean to challenge Spain’s possession of the New World, they embarked on a campaign to cleanse their newly conquered territories of the indigenous Caribs.

In the early 20th century, in a close parallel to this, the British also removed a South Sea island people from their home to Fiji, so that it could be mined. This trashed the island, making it uninhabitable. The islanders have been trying to sue the British government since in order to get compensation and a recognition of wrongdoing, but they’ve had no success.

The Chagos Islanders have also been trying to sue the British government, and they also have received zero justice. There have been a series of articles about the British government’s maltreatment of them in Private Eye. The minister responsible for the decision to grant the island to the Americans was Denis Healey. The Eye contacted him to question him about it, but as far as I can recall they received the usual ministerial non-answers. I’ve got a feeling that they might also have been a bit tetchy as well.

According to the I, after the decision was made, the Islanders were deported to Mauritius and other countries, from whence some of them migrated to Britain. And so they’re now left vulnerable to being deported from this country, which owes them justice, under the same squalid and racist policies that have seen the expulsion of over 7,000 children of Windrush immigrants. This is despite the fact that, as David Lammy showed in his tweet, the Windrush migrants were British citizens under the terms of the 1948 British Citizenship Act.

It’s not hard to see the ministerial logic which came down in favour of their removal from their homeland. There are only a few thousand Chagos Islanders, and so under the utilitarian logic of the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ the government clearly decided it could easily sacrifice them to keep the Americans happy, preserve the Special Relationship, and keep global communism at bay.

It’s still a global injustice, and one that will be compounded if Tweezer and his minions decided to deport them from Britain.

May, Rudd and the rest of the Tories have shown themselves to be utterly racist in passing and supporting this legislation. Get rid of them, before they attack anyone else.

Tags: 'Special Relationship', Amber Rudd, British Empire, Caribs, Chagos Islands, Conservatives, David Cameron, David Lammy, Denis Healey, Deportations, Ethnic Cleansing, Idi Amin, Immigration, Imperialism, Military Bases, Mining, Private Eye, racism, South Seas, Ted Heath, Theresa May, Torture, Twitter, Ugandan Asians, Vox Political, Windrush Migrants