Covering up colonialism's crimes on Diego Garcia

Dear leaders of Greenpeace UK,

We understand that your organisation has taken Lalit de Klas [Mauritius' revolutionary socialist party] sent one of our members to have a formal meeting with your organisation at your headquarters in Amsterdam. The Rann nu Diego Committee, a common front of some ten organisations in Mauritius, including one of the two main Chagossian groups, the Chagos Refugees Group, endorsed Lalit’s request for a Greenpeace action on Diego Garcia to oppose the nuclear base there. One of our members, Ms Lindsey Collen, thus had a formal meeting at your headquarters with Ms Stephanie Mills, who she found to be a very capable, dedicated Australian campaign worker for your organisation.

Following this meeting, and following the dossier that we submitted formally at the same time, Greenpeace informed us by email that you had organised for one of your vessels (in a window of opportunity) to take a group of people for an action on Diego Garcia in or around March 1999, in protest against the military base, its nuclearisation, the forcible removals and the continued colonisation of part of Mauritius. We were already discussing how many people, preparing for a campaign to get support from peace and environment organisations worldwide, and thinking up the kind of media plan necessary.

Lalit immediately set in motion a very broad campaign for ‘background support’, which we got from a series of organisations literally all over the world in order to back up the planned action as soon as it would be able to become public. Response from all over the world was very good. The issue was coming up at the right moment. The only thing that prevented the vessel from actually doing this visit, which would have been truly historic, and which would have been one of Greenpeace’s greatest sources of pride as you looked back on your history, was thwarted, we were informed, when the vessel to be used got ‘iced in’ during a trip to the Antarctica in early 1999, and would, by the time it got out of the ice, be too late, as it was already booked for another action afterwards.

Later, in January, 2004, in the outskirts of the World Social Forum meeting in Mumbai, there was a second attempt, this time to ask Greenpeace if you could lead a planned flotilla to Chagos and Diego Garcia, given that the Chagossians had won a court case for the right to return (since overturned – in part by decree in the UK, and in part by a Privy Council appeal judgement last year). This time it was a joint request from the Chagos Refugees Group and Lalit. Greenpeace were unable to do this, but your leaders at the time were aware of the issues involved.

CAMPAIGN CONTINUES

We mention your past links with the Diego Garcia issue because we believe that your position on the Marine Protected Area which the UK is planning is erroneous. The UK is clearly trying to use the ‘environment issue’ as a desperate attempt to continue its continued colonisation of part of Mauritius. Greenpeace should not allow itself to be used this way.

At present our organisation is spearheading a campaign to call on the Mauritian government to do two things:

– Request the UN General Assembly pass a motion for the International Court of Justice at the Hague to give an opinion as to whose territory the Chagos is (the UK accepted compulsory arbitration except from cases put in by Commonwealth countries, and when the Mauritian government some seven years ago threatened to leave the Commonwealth in order to put a binding case, British prime minister Tony Blair just sent new instructions to his UN ambassador to change the exception to include ex-Commonwealth members. This shows the kind of lengths the UK state will go to.

– Request the UN International Atomic Energy Agency to do inspections of Diego Garcia for nuclear materials, given the coming into operation in 2009 of the Lalit de Klas, Mauritius.
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