Three forgotten, grainy films shot more than 40 years ago reveal the evidence of a crime committed by British governments against some of its most vulnerable citizens. What they tell is a shocking, almost incredible story in which the Blair Government has played a major part. One of the films, made in 1957 by the government's Colonial Film Unit, shows the people of the Chagos islands, a British Crown colony in the Indian Ocean.
The setting is idyllic; a coral archipelago lying midway between Africa and Asia: a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace where, says the commentator, "most of the people have lived for generations". There are thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. In the second film, shot by missionaries, the islanders' beloved dogs splash in a sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon catching fish; and there is a line of proud mothers, in their finery, with their babies awaiting their baptism. Here surely was Britain's Empire at its most benign.
The third film marks the end of all this: an act of ruthlessness and duplicity with few Imperial parallels. The year is 1961; a stocky man strides ashore in Diego Garcia, the main island of the Chagos group.
He is Rear-Admiral Grantham of the US Navy and his visit 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. Today on Diego Garcia there are more than 2,000 American troops, anchorage for 30 ships, including nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, a satellite spy station and two of the world's longest runways from which B-52 and Stealth bombers have attacked Afghanistan and Iraq.
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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=6470
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