In the late 1960s, thousands of indigenous inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, an atoll in the Indian Ocean, were forced by the United States and the United Kingdom to leave their homeland to make room for construction of a U.S. military base.
For decades, the islands had been administered by the British colony of Mauritius. But in the early 1960s, the British government agreed to lease part of the colony to the United States to build a naval base, in the process separating the Chagos Islands from Mauritius to form a new British colony called the British Indian Ocean Territory.
According to court records, the U.S. government insisted that the Chagossians living there — a population descended from enslaved Africans brought by the French in the 1700s — be deported to make room for construction of the naval base.
In 1971, the commissioner of the British Indian Ocean Territory, Bruce Greatbatch, enacted an ordinance effectively banning native people of Chagos from the islands.
Chagossians would later testify before the International Court of Justice in The Hague that territorial agents threatened inhabitants who refused to leave. Then the British and U.S. agents began killing their dogs, according to court records and documents.
First, they tried to shoot the dogs with M16 rifles, according to a statement by the government of Mauritius filed in 2018 in the International Court of Justice. When that failed, they tried poisoning the dogs with strychnine. Finally, they used raw meat to lure the dogs into a shed, where they gassed the animals with exhaust from U.S. military vehicles.
For more than 50 years, Chagossians have argued that their rights have been violated. In 2004, they began filing for justice in international courts, arguing that the U.K. and U.S. governments violated their human rights by forcing them to leave home.
Last week, Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos Refugee Group, flew to Washington to meet with members of Congress and demand that the U.S. government issue an apology and pay reparations for the forced removal. In 1968, Bancoult and his parents were among more than 1,800 Chagossians driven into exile.
“What we are hoping to have is an apology from the U.S. government, together with reparations,” Bancoult said during an interview on Capitol Hill. “We want to put the U.S. government in front of their responsibility.”