Doubts raised over UK government’s refusal to permit return to Chagos
For more than half a century the displaced people of the Chagos Islands have sought to return to their home, a collection of coral reefs in the Indian Ocean that constitutes one of the more far-flung outposts of the British empire. But, despite interminable legal proceedings, their efforts have so far come to nothing, partly because studies commissioned by the UK government have concluded that a resettlement programme on what is officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory was just not feasible.
As a result, today the only people who inhabit the 60 or so islands that lie halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia are the thousands of US military personnel based on its largest atoll, Diego Garcia, which, under an agreement with Britain, has been transformed into a huge landing strip used by B-52 bombers and anonymous jets moving high value terrorist detainees to CIA black sites around the world. But now the officially sanctioned arguments made against allowing the Chagossians to return to the islands from which they were removed in the late 1960s have been thrown into question.
A former British high commissioner has questioned whether the Foreign Office tried to “massage” the drafting of a key study that put paid to any hope of returning by concluding that resettlement was financially “prohibitive” and too “precarious”...
...The UK must decide by 29 December as to whether the US-UK agreement over the use of Diego Garcia as a military base should be extended for 20 years...
/...http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/23/doubts-raised-over-uk-government-refusal-to-allow-islanders-to-return-to-chagos
