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Stealing
a nation: a special report by John Pilger
ITV1,
Wednesday 6 October, 11pm
Don't
miss this upcoming documentary on the Chagos islands! This is ITV's press
release on the programme:
“This
is a shocking, almost incredible story. A government calling itself civilised
tricked and expelled its most vulnerable citizens so that it could give their
homeland to a foreign power…ministers and their officials then mounted a
campaign of deception all the way up to the prime minister.”
John
Pilger
John
Pilger’s new documentary is an extraordinary film about the plight of people
of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean - secretly and brutally expelled
from their homeland by British governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
to make way for an American military base. The base, on the main island of
Diego Garcia, was a launch pad for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
A
remarkable dossier of evidence has been put together by Pilger and producer
Chris Martin, all from official files, charting one of the most shocking
conspiracies of modern times, which continues today.
Diego
Garcia is America’s biggest military base in the world, outside the US.
There are more than 4,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a
satellite spy station. The Pentagon calls it an “indispensable platform”
for policing the world.
Before
the American’s came more than 2,000 people lived on the islands, many with
roots back to the late 18th century. There were thriving villages,
a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life. The
islands were, and still are, a British crown colony.
In
the 1960s, the government of Harold Wilson struck a secret deal with the
United States to hand over Diego Garcia. The Americans demanded that the
islands be “swept” and “sanitised”. Unknown to Parliament and to the
US Congress, the British government plotted with Washington to expel the
entire population – in secrecy and in breach of the United Nations Charter.
At
first, they starved them of essential supplies; then rumours spread that the
islands would be bombed; then the people watched their pets gassed to death
before they were herded on to boats and dumped in the slums of Mauritius.
Rita,
now in her 70s, lost her husband and three of her children following their
deportation: “I am a British citizen and they threw us out of our homeland
in the name of the Queen.”
Lizette,
in her 70s, says: “My children died from sadness. When we were forced out,
she died, the youngest fell ill and the doctor said to me, ‘I can’t treat
sadness’. What they did to us was no different from the treatment of the
slaves.”
Charlesia
says: “What hurts most is that we were never told what they were doing with
our islands. If it had been built for poor people to work, fine. But it’s a
base for bombers – and the bombs that fell on Iraq came from our paradise.”
John
Pilger and producer Christopher Martin have acquired hundreds of astonishing
official documents which, in the words of officials and ministers, reveal how
the conspiracy was hatched, then covered up. “The documents show clearly
that the conspiracy to expel the population rested on a big lie,” says John
Pilger. “This claimed that the population were itinerant workers, when the
government knew this was a population that went back generations. Most had
never left the islands.
“One
Foreign Office document is headed, ‘Maintaining the fiction’. Another
says, ‘We propose to certify these people, more or less fraudulently, as
belonging somewhere else.’ We have secret memos that propose how the
government should lie to the world. I have never read anything like them.”
Pilger
also reveals how the scandal continues today.
The
director, writer and presenter John Pilger, has made more than 50
documentaries for ITV, including his famous exposes of Pol Pot’s killing
fields in Cambodia and the genocide in East Timor. He has twice won Britain’s
highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year. He has been
International Reporter of the year and holds the United Nations Media Peace
Prize, the Richard Dimbleby Award given by Bafta and an American television
academy award, an Emmy.
The
producer and co-director is Christopher Martin, whose last two films with John
Pilger have brought Bafta nominations.
