Agreements signed in 1966 leased the island to the US for 50 years initially, with a possible extension for a further 20 years. The arrangement was rolled over and is set to expire in 2036.

Government documents state that the islands were chosen “not only for their strategic location but also because they had, for all practical purposes, no permanent population” – This is a bit disingenuous because when the UK took control of the Chagos Islands – Diego Garcia is the southernmost – from former British colony Mauritius, it rapidly evicted its population of more than 1,000 people to make way for the military base.

According to a British diplomat at the time, the islands were home only to “some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius”.

The entire population of the Chagos Islands was forced to leave their homes in 1967, while pets were rounded up an killed. Chagossians have told stories of being herded onto cargo ships and transported to the Seychelles or Mauritius with a large number of Chagossians moved to the UK after being granted citizenship in 2002.

In testimony given to the International Court of Justice years later, Chagossian Liseby Elysé said people on the archipelago had lived a “happy life” that “did not lack anything” before the expulsions.

“One day the administrator told us that we had to leave our island, leave our houses and go away. All persons were unhappy. But we had no choice. They did not give us any reason. Nobody would like to be uprooted from the island where he was born, to be uprooted like animals.”

Chagossians are still fighting to return to their home, but the island is no longer the place they knew.

Seeing an opportunity to foster ‘close military ties with the US’, the UK agreed to a “token British presence” – but there was also financial motivation as the US agreed to a $14m discount on the UK’s purchase of its Polaris nuclear missiles as part of the secret deal over the islands.

Close military ties and discounts on nuclear missiles do nothing to dispel the aura around Diego Garcia, but according to Cuddy, there is a chilled feeling in the air as servicemen ride around on bicycles and windsurf or play tennis around the base.

Matthew Savill, military sciences director at leading UK defence think tank Rusi, says Diego Garcia is an “enormously important” base, “because of its position in the Indian Ocean and the facilities it has: port, storage and airfield”.

The island is one of an “extremely limited number of places worldwide available to reload submarines” with weapons like Tomahawk missiles, says Savill, and the US has positioned a large amount of equipment and stores there for contingencies. After the 9/11 attacks, US B-2 bombers that had flown from the US to launch the first airstrikes on Afghanistan were refuelled by tankers operating off of Diego Garcia. Additionally, aircraft were deployed straight from the island to Afghanistan and Iraq during the ensuing “war on terror.”

For a while now there have been rumours about the real purposes of Diego Garcia, one of which is that it was formerly a CIA “black site,” where terrorist suspects were detained and interrogated. After years of assurances that they hadn’t, the UK government finally acknowledged in 2008 that rendition planes transporting terror suspects had landed on the island in 2002.

Years later, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Vice News that intelligence sources had told him that Diego Garcia had been used as a site “where people were temporarily housed and interrogated from time to time.”

Despite the unprecedented access to Diego Garcia, journalist Alice Cuddy eventually left the island with little more than a better understanding of the displaced locals. While military aircraft took off regularly, there was little visible in terms of the inner workings of the island.

Whilst there, Cuddy was watched 24/7 and escorted everywhere, and after her time came to an end, she even received an email thanking her for the visit and asking for feedback so her hosts could ensure that “every guest experiences nothing less than a welcoming and comfortable experience”.

While one can not really expect a reporter to be given unrestricted access to a supposedly secret military base, it does, however, seem that the mystery around this tropical base has more to do with the dodgy way the UK and US manage to steal the island from the locals and less about what occurs there.

[source:bbc]