36 Mauritsius
36.1 .io Top level domene
Chagos
In 1965, while planning for Mauritian independence the UK constituted the Chagos as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Mauritius gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1968, and has since claimed the Chagos Archipelago as Mauritian territory.
.io considered harmful
ISO 9660, for example, describes the structure of CD-ROM disks. ISO 8601 describes date and time representation. And since 1974, ISO 3166 has described an ever-growing set of two-character codes to represent the countries and territories of the world. The United States of America, for example, was assigned “US”. Britain got “GB”. And the British Indian Ocean Territory was given “IO”.
The .io top-level domain funds and legitimises Britain’s exile of the Chagossian people from their homeland. Here’s the history and the facts.
Out in the middle of the Indian Ocean lies the small coral Chagos Archipelago.
With the coastlines of Africa, Asia and Antarctica thousands of kilometres distant, the archipelago is amongst the most isolated on the planet. The islands are tiny, too, with a total land area of 56 km²; about half the size of Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
The first Europeans to stake a claim to the Chagos Archipelago were the French. They settled the nearby Isle de France in 1715. By 1793, a French coconut plantation housed the first permanent settlement on the archipelago’s largest island, Diego Garcia.
This being an 18th Century European settlement, of course it was built on the backs of slaves. The colony was French, but the people were Malagasy and Mozambican.
After Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the French ceded Isle de France and its dependencies to Britain. Britain reinstated the isle’s Dutch name – Mauritius – and continued to govern the archipelago and its plantations from there.
After the abolition of slavery in 1835, many now-freemen chose to stay on the archipelago and were joined by labourers from India. Beautiful people being beautiful people, they were fruitful and multiplied. New families made the archipelago their home, and an integrated Chagossian society blossomed for generations. By the 1960’s, the archipelago was home to some 2,000 people.
The end of World War II in 1945 led to the start of the Cold War. Soviet influence grew across Europe and Asia, and the United States of America sought to expand too.
And she had just the spot in mind.
No matter where in the world the next inevitable war was to break out, those idyllic coral islands smack in the centre of the Indian Ocean would be the perfect staging platform for attacks against a dozen countries’ supply lines, communication hubs and military targets.
But how could the United States acquire the archipelago? The land was Mauritian territory, and – even though Mauritius was a British territory – Britain had no claim over the islands. No matter what the United States’ offered her war-time ally, the land wasn’t legally Britain’s to trade.
And so, Britain traded the land illegally.
On November 8th, 1965, the British Foreign Office redrew the map. Public servants in London created, on paper, a new British territory – the British Indian Ocean Territory – which encompassed the Chagos Archipelago, then transferred governance of the islands from Mauritius directly to London.
By the Foreign Office’s reckoning, the islands were now British. And in exchange for a $14 million discount on a nuclear missile, the British Indian Ocean Territory was leased to the United States of America.
The American military-industrial complex was not amenable to sharing the islands.
The people were removed; first by terror, then deceit, then force.
Exile
At 1pm on October 15th, 1971, the remaining people of Diego Garcia were summoned to the office of Sir Greatbatch’s magistrate, John Rawling Todd. They were told they were to be loaded onto the cargo ship MV Nordvær and immediately expelled from their homeland.
They were allowed one suitcase each. Anything of cultural, emotional or financial value that they couldn’t carry had to be abandoned. Sir Greatbatch demanded that the horses ride on-deck, while each family was permitted one mattress and forced to sleep on the ship’s cargo of bird shit.
In an instant, not having bank accounts or currency of significant value, the Chagossians were poverty-stricken; no farms, no ocean to fish, no money, no homes.
The Nordvær sailed to the Seychelles, where the Chagossians were marched uphill to a prison and held until passage to Port Louis, Mauritius, was arranged. Then, at Port Louis, they were dumped and abandoned on the docks.
Cassam Uteem, former President of Mauritius, recalls:
Some of them stayed on the docks, waiting for the next ship to take them back home. There was never to be a ship to take them back home.Eventually, they were taken to the derelict Estate Beau Marchand housing estate. They were given no water, no electricity, no doors, and no windows.
Many of the islanders died; of poverty and – in their own words – of “sadness”.
Of heartbreak, despair, and suicide.
Those who lived couldn’t afford to pay for funerals.
By the end of 1975, the expulsion and exile of the Chagossian people was complete. A survey showed 26 families had died together in poverty. Young girls were forced into prostitution to survive. 9 people committed suicide. And Mauritian slums are still prisons to Chagossians today.
This was nothing less than ethnic cleansing. The war machine
Today, the archipelago’s two-thousand Chagossians have been replaced by two-thousand military personnel.
Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia is owned by the British Ministry of Defence, leased to the United States Navy, and operated together.
“One Island, One Team, One Mission,” they say.
Nearly 4 km of Diego was paved into a runway where American bombers have launched attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. There are piers and warehouses to support aircraft, ships and submarines. The island even hosts a satellite tracking station code-named “REEF”.
How the fuck did they get away with this? They knew it was illegal
From the very beginning of the conspiracy to expel the Chagossians, the British and United States authorities knew it was illegal.