by Mark E. Rosen
The small island of Diego Garcia (DGAR) in the Indian Island is not a place that the U.S. Media knows or talks about even though it is arguably one of the most important pieces of real estate in DOD’ strategic arsenal. It is isolated in the middle of the Indian Ocean and that isolation enables it to have security from onlookers or foreign navies that would monitor challenge its activities. DGAR is closed to outsiders and that gives the U.S. military a great deal of freedom to preposition military equipment and use it as a staging area for military operations. As Tom Friedman has often said, the world is getting hotter and more crowded and these isolated little pieces of real estate cannot be replicated by the DOD. Given that, U.S. policymakers need to wake up to the challenges facing continued U.S. military presence on DGAR and take actions to shore-up its basis for remaining there— a long-term lease with the United Kingdom. That fifty-year lease commenced in 1966 and expired in 2016. The UK extended the United States’ lease to the DGAR facility in 2016 until 2036.
Technically an atoll, DGAR is part of the Chagos Archipelago and is under British administrative control. It is the largest of about sixty very small islets (roughly sixty-five square miles) that forms Archipelago south of India in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is 1,100 miles south of India and about 2,200 miles east of the Africa’s Eastern Coast. Its 12,000-foot runways can accommodate long range aircraft; including B-52, B-1, and B-2 bombers which can operate as far North as Afghanistan or as far Northeast as the South China Sea and Taiwan. DGAR is host for U.S. maritime prepositioning vessels, combat support vessels, communications facilities, fuel stores, and has the port and airport facilities to accommodate large vessels or combat aircraft. Since DGAR is sovereign British territory, it is beyond the legal jurisdiction of U.S. courts (and habeas corpus petitions) and for this possible reason it has reportedly been used as a terrorist detention site. Most importantly, DGAR is far enough away from China’s coast—and its artificial islands in the South China Sea—and presumably out of range of China’s HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles and YJ-12 supersonic anti-ship missiles that would otherwise threaten U.S. ships and aircraft operating in the Asia-Pacific region.
Key Historical Facts
Diego Garcia has been a refuge for mariners for centuries because of the availability of freshwater and ample fish and has been a valued military installation since World War II. According to Richard Edis’ account, France administered the archipelago as a dependency known as Ile de France until the British captured the territory in 1812 and renamed it Mauritius. About forty years later in the late 1770s the East India Company decided to establish a replenishment base on Diego Garcia and not long after a British military garrison was established. France ceded its rights to Great Britain in 1814 and administered it as a Dependency of Mauritius.
Even though slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1807, vestiges of the slave trade remained in remote parts of the empire including Diego Garcia and Mauritius until the mid 1830s when the small colony of slaves from Mozambique or Madagascar in DGAR were either abandoned or emancipated. Those remaining worked on three privately owned coconut oil plantations and helped in the resupply of vessels that made port visits. The overall population numbered 350–550 and, according to Edis’ account, the people on the island lived rather well (and peacefully) because of the abundant fisheries and their ability to purchase tools, medicine, etc., with revenues from coconut oil that was produced on the island.
In World War II, Diego Garcia and other Indian Ocean bases assumed increased importance to the British and at one point DGAR hosted a small squadron of Catalina seaplanes which were used for maritime surveillance. Throughout the remainder of the 1950s and early 1960s, DGAR’s military activities subsided and the actual population of labor associated with operation of the coconut plantations declined due to low birth rate.
After DOD expressed interest in establishing a base at Diego Garcia, the Chagos Archipelago, was detached in 1965 from the British Colonial Dependency of Mauritius to form the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The following year, the United States and Great Britain signed a fifty-year basing agreement until 2016. The coconut plantations were purchased (and closed) by the British government when the base was created. The legal justification for involuntarily the people was that none owned real property; all were contract workers with the owners of the coconut plantation. The remaining workers were offered, according to Edis, a “limited” degree of choice on where to live: Agalega, Seychelles, Mauritius, or to working plantations on two of the Northern Chagos Islands. The actual numbers of those evicted vary. Edis suggests that about less than two hundred were removed while other sources put the number at 483 men, women and children . Today, there are about 1500–1800 persons who call themselves descendants of the original residents.
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