Urgent Open Letter to Human Rights Watch – Be Careful not to Fall into U.K. Trap on Chagos Issue!
Posted: 16th January 2023
Dear Yasmine Ahmed, Mausi Segun, Clive Baldwin at Human Rights Watch (London) c/o Anthony Gale,
Dear Director of Human Rights Watch (New York),
Urgent Open Letter to Human Rights Watch – Be Careful not to Fall into U.K. Trap on Chagos Issue!
We have taken note of your letter of 15 December 2022 to Mr. James Cleverly, UK Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, concerning the Mauritius-UK negotiations on the implementation of Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. The sovereignty issue, itself, has been decided. We note, however, that the UK state apparatus intends to defy international law and maintain control, or partial control, over Chagos, especially over Diego Garcia. So, this is a moment of all dangers.
It is a moment when it is essential to isolate the UK state apparatus.
The Chagos sovereignty issue is not a bilateral one, but one decided already by international law.
“Negotiations” between Mauritius and the UK, we have warned our Government, should be uniquely on the issues of when exactly the UK and its ally, the USA, intend to depart and on how they intend to clean up the environmental mess the UK-USA have made on Diego Garcia. Reparations for Chagossians are due as of right. We are afraid that you may well be falling into a UK government trap, set up in its ultimate bid to maintain control, even by flaunting international law, over this part of the Republic of Mauritius. Perhaps at Human Rights Watch you do not see decolonization as part of human rights? Or you believe that decolonization can be put on hold? We just fail to understand why you are not in favour of the ICJ Advisory Opinion and UN General Assembly vote that says Mauritius has sovereignty. Leaving aside reparations payments, everything you are asking the UK to do, like “hold consultations” or “referendums”, is not the UK’s responsibility. Chagos is an integral part of the Republic of Mauritius. Did you miss this?
We realize that single-issue organizations like yours have difficulty, by your very nature, in addressing complex geo-political decolonization issues like that of the Chagos. We hope you do not find this formulation too patronizing. We explain. In the past, for example, we in LALIT were obliged to denounce Greenpeace, another single-issue NGO, in an Open Letter not unlike this one, when Greenpeace fell straight into a previously crafted UK state apparatus trap, despite our publicly warning them that that was what they were about to do. The UK government simply lured them into the trap by dangling a “Marine Protected Area” around Chagos, even though Chagos was not the UK’s to dangle anything in front of anyone’s eyes about. Greenpeace, being single-issue on the environment, seemed, curiously, to fail even to notice the filthy military base, a nuclear one at that, right there – let alone that Chagos was illegally occupied by this very UK State apparatus, that the people living there were simply transported slavery-style mainly to Mauritius main island, now suddenly concerned about the welfare of coral and tortoises, and let alone that the UK had illegally rented part of its stolen “property” to a receiver of stolen goods, the USA, to pollute. Greenpeace replied to us, but they were somewhat cavalier, given their total ignorance of the truth about the geo-political situation. Theirs was a case of ignorance, or perhaps complete denial. But the truth has a canny way of triumphing. The Wikileaks Cables, when published so bravely, finally proved we had been right all along: the whole “Marine Protected Area” plan was a UK ruse to trick the likes of Greenpeace and to reassure the USA (to which the UK so shamelessly kowtows), and it worked. And today the “ignorance” on decolonization that may have been their excuse then is no longer an excuse anymore for you now, after the United Nations system has, since then, publicly made clear what the international law actually is. Chagos is part of the State of Mauritius. It is fact, now. And it is public. The UK must get up and get out.
Anyway, we write this Open Letter to you today about your letter to the UK Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, which we consulted on your site.
We are concerned about your apparent lack of understanding of the long struggle for the re-unification of Mauritius, at one end of the spectrum of your misunderstandings, and perhaps lack of understanding of the logic of the international law on decolonization that underpins this kind of illegal occupation of a former colony, at the other end. All the while, your letter, curiously, fails even to mention the USA’s military base, as if it were, at most, an appendix, while it is in fact the very source, as you are well aware, of the human rights atrocities perpetrated so violently by the UK and USA occupiers.
We note, en passant, your failure, as an organization, to contact us in LALIT or, if you are afraid of political struggles, even to contact the women’s organization also involved in this struggle over the decades, the Muvman Liberasyon Fam that we, the undersigned, are also members of, when you did your consultations in Mauritius. These two organizations are well known to have been perhaps the only ones that have, in a consistent manner, struggled, often alongside Chagossian organizations, over the nearly 50 years since the UK-USA’s original crime. Both organizations’ roles in this struggle are well known – well beyond political circles. And had LALIT’s role not been so well known, the barrister of the British state would not, for example, have gone on-and-on about LALIT for an hour in his summing up during the 2000 case in the UK High Court. On our website alone, just a Google search away, there are dozens, if not hundreds of articles, over half of them written in your language, English, for you to read, as well as a 200-page book published in 2002 (lalitmauritius.org).
But be that (i.e. your failure to contact us), as it may. It is merely an indication of your lack of thoroughness.
We are concerned that, unaware of the bigger picture, and we do not know on what credentials, you are setting yourself up as a co-ordinator of or even spokesperson for Chagossians. This comes at the very moment in history when the UK is so isolated and so cornered that it is about to be reduced to its PLAN B. You should know from the history of the UK’s colonization of Chagos that its state apparatus does not shy away from trickery. You may, like Greenpeace did before you, end up being an ally to the UK state apparatus in its new attempt to hang on to Chagos. It seems you are doomed, unless you re-think urgently, to follow Greenpeace into a second such trap. The UK wants to avoid withdrawal from Chagos, especially Diego Garcia. That is for sure. Once the UK is totally on its knees after having been exposed internationally as an illegal occupier, and more isolated than it has ever been on this issue, it will turn, as we have been warning publicly for decades, to its Plan B: to hold an illegal “referendum” or illegal “consultations” amongst Chagossians (i.e. as if it were not the colonizer), and to attempt to use this as a proof of Chagossians desire to be British, and thus for Chagos or part thereof to remain British. They have spent quite a sum of British tax-payers’ money on trying to buy off any number of individual Chagossians in preparation for this Plan B, as well as British Council funds. But this Plan B is now, since the international law has been publicly stated in so unequivocal a way, plainly and patently illegal. The UK, however, is unable to change its “Plan B” because, quite simply, it is cornered and alone. It has no other Plan B available anymore. So, it pushes ahead with the non-viable, illegal one anyway, and lures in other forces, like your NGO, by its side so as to attempt to decrease its isolation.
But, and the “but” is big, the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and the UN General Assembly Resolution, have already put that original PLAN B to rest. Decolonization, by definition, does not and cannot allow states’ populations to be broken up this way for “separate referendums” run by the colonizer as a condition for independence. It cannot single out a “part” of a colony’s population and hold separate referendums or consultations, with a view often to holding on to an attractive bit of the colony in question. Otherwise Britain could have had dandy little referendums in gold-rich areas (dangling offers of reparations money there) and given barren deserts to newly independent countries all over the world. It is ludicrous to consult only part of a country. Only colonizers are blind, or pretend to be, to this. It would be worse, in international law, than the referendums in the Donbas organized by Putin’s Russia, precisely because Mauritius was colonized by the UK, and the United Nations Organization was set up with the aim, inter alia, and expressed in its very Charter, of ending exactly that kind of decolonization, and precisely because the illegality has already been statuted upon – by the both the UN’s highest Court and its highest democratic forum, as well as in the binding judgment of its International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea. As even former UK High Commissioner to Mauritius (2000-2004 and Deputy Commissioner of the BIOT colony itself from 1995-7) now Coordinator of the Chagos Islands All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK, David Snoxell, concedes in L’Express of today 5 January, “The ‘people’ to which self-determination applies is the entirety of a non-self-governing territory, in this case the population of pre-independence Mauritius including Chagossians. Their self-determination rights are subsumed within those of Mauritius as a whole. Chagossians are not considered to have a right to self-determination in international law distinct from the people of the former colony of Mauritius.” It is by extending this point of international decolonization law so as to cover cases like the break-up of the Soviet Union that is being argued by the US and UK in refusing to accept the Russia-organized referendums in the Donbas.
The negotiations set to begin are about Mauritian sovereignty over Chagos having been decided. Note the past tense. The UK state does not accept this. Why fall into its scenario?
We also note that notorious right-wing UK MP, with Orban and Meloni connections, Mr. Daniel Kawczynski, in the Daily Mail (arguably the most right wing newspaper in the UK), also suddenly calls for “consultations” with Chagossians, as a final attempt to help to “keep” at least part of Chagos when the UK has been clearly instructed to depart, by both the ICJ and the UNGA. Are you at HRW really putting this into question?
Chagossians, as well as being Chagossian, are and always have been Mauritian (and many, having been displaced, also have additional nationalities). In LALIT, and in the MLF, we have, for example, and have always had, members that are Chagossians, and LALIT has had candidates in elections that are from Chagossian families. We, the undersigned, have been in general strike movements alongside Chagossians, who are trade union delegates, for example. We have been in adult literacy sessions, in housing movement actions of all kinds, in co-operatives, alongside Chagossians for nearly 50 years. All this to say, Chagossians are also Mauritians, for the simple reason that Chagos has always been part of Mauritius and is now, too. And this is what the ICJ and the UNGA have made abundantly clear to everyone in the whole wide world. Why deny it?
This is true, however much the British State tries to buy off individual Chagossians, which it has tried to do and also actually done for decades, or however much money the British State pays, as it must pay, the reparations that they owe.
This is true, now no longer just “true”, but the clearly statuted truth, as established by international law.
This has been decided by the highest UN Court, the ICJ, on the request of its General Assembly, on a resolution by the whole of the African Union. Have you no respect even for the whole of the African Union? The ICJ decision has been voted upon (massively) by the UN General Assembly. However complicated it might be, that is the bare bones of the truth: Chagos is part of the Republic of Mauritius. It seems, in our experience, hard for many western NGO’s to get their heads around this. We suggest people in NGO’s read the arguments by representatives of different former colonies before the ICJ attentively, and the Advisory Opinion itself, so as to refine their education on this issue. Once again, the analyses are only a couple of Google searches away. Once again we hope you do not find our formulation patronizing.
Colonization is over. It is time for the UK and USA to close the base and leave.
We say all this in this letter so as to concede that the issue is a complicated one. We happen to know this precisely because we have been in it, feet on the ground, together with Chagossians since the 1970s. That is how we learnt. We were in the movements that forced the Mauritian elite and the Mauritian State to take note of the cruelty suffered by the displaced Chagossians. Working people, especially in and around the capital Port Louis, already knew of this suffering because many families in the capital city had taken into their arms the Chagossian people left by the UK-USA on the Port Louis dock, helped introduce them to the meagre social services available, to nearby schools, tried to help them find jobs and housing in times of terrible poverty for the whole working class, even as many areas were being torn apart, and many Port Louis families were themselves internally displaced during what is referred to as “the race wars” that coincided with the US-UK “depopulation” of Chagos.
We in LALIT have been in street actions that ended up forcing the UK to offer the first modest compensation money, which they offered only so as to prolong their illegal occupation. We have been in vigils, hunger strike movements, street demonstrations, international forums like the No Bases movement and the Anti-War movement, alongside Chagossians and their elected representatives. We, in LALIT, have held two international conferences, and our members have spoken at international conferences in literally dozens of countries on literally all continents. We have written open letters to Bush and Blair. We have had perhaps 12 poster campaigns over the years. We have organized huge international petitions, and national petitions. We even had a Greenpeace ship lined up for a visit, when it fell through only because the ship due to take us all got iced up in the Antarctica. That was in the 1980s. We were even organizing a “flotilla” to Diego Garcia when the UK state apparatus – they are so clever – organized a ship to take Chagossians to Chagos, themselves, all be it for a short and heavily supervised “visit”. That was in the 2000s. To do all this, one has to get one’s head around complicated, interrelated issues, including those concerning decolonization and de-militarization, as well as human rights and, say, the environment. That is how we know so much on these difficult issues.
Anyway, it was, and still is, a long struggle. It aims at the triple human rights issues of closing down the US military base (a nuclear one, at that) on Diego Garcia and getting the UK to withdraw its colonial administration (another human rights issue), and the right to free circulation of all Chagossians and Mauritians in all of the country (a third human rights issue). This struggle has culminated in us (together with many others in other Mauritian grassroots organizations, trade unions, as well as with various different Chagossian organizations) finally getting the Mauritian Government to go take the matter before the UN system for redress: first to the Tribunal of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and then to the ICJ, via the General Assembly. In the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion (unanimous, if you discount, we suggest fairly, the opinion of the only UK-USA judge on the panel of 15 judges), the UK was judged to be an illegal occupier and told to get out of Chagos. So, get out it must. From the whole of the archipelago. And take its illegal tenant, the USA, with it when it goes.
This Opinion was followed by a UN General Assembly resolution that saw the UK-USA duo isolated so badly that they stood alongside only Mr. Orban’s, Mr. Netanyahu’s and Mr. Scott Morrison’s representatives, with the Maldives as a temporary ally over a side-issue now getting resolved. Not a pretty set of allies for the UK-USA, states that are self-proclaimed upholders of international human rights norms. The UNCLOS-ITLOS judgment has since given legally binding force to the ICJ Advisory Opinion. Of all this, Human Rights Watch must surely already be aware? Just as you clearly know the military base is there, as you mention it on your site. But then what is your role there? Are you the self-proclaimed spokespersons for part of the population of a colonized country, the Republic of Mauritius? Or what?
We write in the name of LALIT, a political party in Mauritius, or even the political party that has over nearly 50 years fought for the triple aims of:
- The closure of the illegal US military base on Diego Garcia.
- The complete withdrawal of the UK from the entire Chagos.
- The right of return of Chagossians to all the islands, and of free movement of all Mauritians in all of Mauritius, and full reparations as of right for Chagossians.
These aims were formally endorsed, inter alia, by Mauritian and international participants in LALIT’s 2nd International Conference on Diego Garcia in 2016. [https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/1890/second-declaration-of-grande-rivire-on-diego-garciachagos]
We believe that full reparations for the inordinate suffering of the Chagossians are a right. They have suffered a genocide perpetrated by the UK and USA. NGOs in the UK and USA did not prevent this. Nor did they do much to expose its cause: the military base and continued British colonization of Africa’s last colony. The Chagossians have suffered forced displacement to the main island of Mauritius, or, in the case of some, to Seychelles. They relied on the kindness of strangers. Chagossians learnt, on their own, and together with the Mauritian working people, especially during the 1979 general strike movement and the 1980 mass movement, how to invent all kinds of struggle. And it is through these forms of struggle, and particularly after the street demonstrations for three days in 1981 that the UK finally coughed up its miserable sum in 1982, and, against our advice, forced Chagossians to sign documents to the effect that this was supposedly “full and final” payment. All this to say that it is not ethical to use reparations as a kind of bait, dangled in front of peoples’ eyes; reparations for having suffered such cruelty at the hands of the UK and USA state apparatus are a human right.
Yes, the struggle has been long. We, the undersigned, for example, were arrested in a women’s street demonstration in Port Louis that we referred to in the previous paragraph, alongside six Chagossian women. That was in March 1981, on the third day of women’s street demonstrations, while a group of women were on hunger strike in open air in the Company Gardens. From our earliest days, LALIT and the Muvman Liberasyon Fam have Chagossian members. We, the undersigned, have known Olivier Bancoult, Chagossian leader since he was in his seventh year of school because he, like us, was member of an education co-operative. Of the few hundred women in the 1981 demonstration, the eight of us who were arrested, were charged with illegal demonstration, which carried a minimum jail sentence, and each Court hearing was an event in itself – in the presence of police with police dogs – and we were all found not guilty. We were found not guilty mainly because the police officers were unable to testify honestly, having both beaten up women, which they were ashamed of having done, and having taken some hits themselves from women defending themselves, which they were equally ashamed of. From before then, and since then, we have been in this struggle. In 2004, for example, we had a joint delegation with the Chagos Refugees Group to the NO BASES Assembly and the anti-war assembly around the World Social Forum in Mumbai.
And our participation in this long struggle has taught us one thing:
It is important to understand that the aim of the UK state apparatus is to maintain USA control over Diego Garcia.
For this, the UK state is obliged to prepare its infamous Plan B, “consulting Chagossians” – even though it is now, since the international law is known to be clear (it always was clear) – patently illegal to divide a colonized people into separate compartments for the purposes of referendums. We note in The Guardian of 2 January, there is even, as part of this “lobby” being described, a comparison being made with the Falklands’ “referendum”.
To achieve their aim, the UK state apparatus needs to scratch around for support. So, on one hand, it benefits from the support of the far right, which MP Kawczynski is providing in opposing any negotiations whatsoever on the false grounds that “China” is literally going to be granted a military base on Chagos by Mauritius. And the UK state apparatus also needs to pull “on board” apparent “left” forces like the more enlightened NGOs like Human Rights Watch. This is the danger. (We note that Mr. Kawczynski’s campaign in the UK is echoed by, or echoes, that of USA’s House of Representatives member, Mike Waltz, notorious anti-China hawk, on the right-wing of the right-wing Republican Party. It was he who paved the way for former President Trump’s anti-China campaign. He is one of those “reds-under-the-bed” Republicans left over from the McCarthy witch-hunt, and has the status, as you know, of being Ranking Member on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness.)
We appeal to you, at Human Rights Watch, to distance yourself from being “on board” in these negotiations and instead that you maintain that your stand on human rights and reparations rests upon your base-line conviction that it is necessary, in the interests of human rights:
1. To close down the military base on Diego Garcia. An additional argument for this closure is that the base is in patent breach of the Pelindaba Treaty for a Nuclear Arms Free Africa. Human Rights Watch will remember that Nelson Mandela, in one of his finest legacies to the world, agreed to close down the nuclear arms facility at Pelindaba, making him the only head of state ever to have closed down a nuclear arms facility. This is a source of pride for the South African people. But, Mr. Mandela agreed on one condition: that the whole of Africa become nuclear-arms free. The Treaty was then signed (including by all the permanent members of the Security Council), and is in force. Thus, as soon as the international law had been publicly cleared up, the following is known to be true: Diego Garcia is part of Chagos, Chagos is part of the Republic of Mauritius, which is part of Africa and which is a member state of the African Union, which, in turn, put the case before the ICJ for the decolonization of the whole of Mauritius, by means of the UK getting right out of the Chagos, including Diego Garcia. We call on you to take a stand against the nuclear threat that the military base represents to Africa and for world peace, and to maintain it in all your positions.
2. To maintain a position in favour of international law on decolonization i.e. to support the ICJ Opinion and the UNGA resolution that defines Chagos, including Diego Garcia, as part of the Republic of Mauritius. This means that NGO’s from the colonizing and occupying States must constantly take position that their relative States (i.e. the USA, where HRW is registered and the UK, where HRW has a committee that has supported Chagossians in the European Court, and penned the letter to Mr. Cleverly) to get out of Chagos, including Diego Garcia, as well as paying reparations that are so clearly a human right.
3. To get the USA to perform an environmental clean-up when it closes its base and leaves.
4. To join us in LALIT – we do not shy away from denouncing our Government – calling for the Mauritian Government to withdraw at once its odious offer of accepting money (rent money) from the USA for continued US armed forces’ occupation of Diego Garcia. [See our position at https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/3108/lalit-warns-of-looming-dangers-on-diego-garcia-and-chagos-issue/]
5. To join us and the Chagos Refugees Group in calling for the Mauritian Government to set up regional democratic structures, not unlike those that exist in Rodrigues Island, another Mauritian Island, in consultation with Chagossians’ elected representatives.
The situation is grave.
The real sell-out is about to happen.
The base must close down, be cleaned up, and Diego Garcia, with the rest of Chagos, must be handed over. Mauritius, the last bit of Africa still colonized by the UK-USA, must be decolonized and re-unified. Reparations must be paid as of right.
We take note of Human Rights Watch’s Report “A Threshold Crossed” on another people cruelly occupied: the Palestinian people. We in LALIT, as an organization that is the very opposite of a single-issue one, are part of the “Solidarite Morisyin Ar Lepep Palestinyin: No to Israeli Apartheid” and, as well as mobilizing in Mauritius, our members have volunteered with Palestinian organizations in the occupied West Bank, and participated in the Palestinian march from Jenin to Jerusalem, confronted all the way by the Israeli armed forces. We do our best to understand all the political issues of this equally complex, if not more complex, issue. We, in LALIT, were, for example, “educated” by the ICJ case that the Palestinians put in, and won, on the issue of the Israeli “apartheid wall”. We saw how their case changed the balance of forces in their favour. We hope that their new case at the ICJ, voted for in the UN General Assembly a few days ago, will help change the balance of forces in favour of the Palestinians once again, as ours did in favour of all Mauritians, including all Chagossians.
And the truth about the Mauritius-UK “negotiations” and how the UK is trying to keep control over Chagos, in particular over Diego Garcia, by means of roping you in, will eventually be exposed, as the truth was exposed when Wikileaks published its cables. Greenpeace’s reputation has paid a price for the organization’s ignorance or for being in denial on decolonization in international law being part of human rights.
We would appreciate immediate confirmation of your receipt of this Open Letter, and a response soon.
Yours sincerely,
Ragini Kistnasamy and Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
LALIT
153 Main Road, Grand River North West, Port Louis, Mauritius.
Tel: 230 208 5551
5 January, 2023