A submarine prepares to moor at Diego Garcia. Flickr/U.S. Navy. Some rights reserved.
Diego Garcia is the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago, a collection of tiny specks in the central Indian Ocean that together comprise the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The history of this outpost of empire – the last ever colony, in fact, to be created by the British Empire – is a dark one, sullied by the mistreatment and dispossession of its indigenous population and, more recently, by suspicion that the territory played host to torture during the Bush-era war on terrorism. Recent events give hope that a new page will be turned. Yet a better future for BIOT is far from assured and critically depends upon hard choices being made by politicians at Westminster.
Since the late 1960s, London has made Diego Garcia available to the U.S. for military purposes. Originally a modest communications facility, the American base grew during the late Cold War to become a vital naval installation – one of the clearest and most significant manifestations of the Anglo-American “special relationship” at work. Both the base and the colony of BIOT (which was created purely in order to facilitate unfettered U.S. access to Diego Garcia) have been caked in controversy ever since their establishment.
