De-Colonizing Development: Knowledge & Technology Transfer To Benefit Indian Ocean Communities
Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake
The ‘politics of distraction’ seemed to achieve new heights as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled in one of the most important and long-awaited cases of its history a month ago on February 25. In what has been termed ‘a block buster judgment’ the United Nation’s highest court rejected the United Kingdom’s claim of sovereignty over the Indian Ocean, Chagos Islands, and determined that Britain should return the islands to its former colony, Mauritius, ‘as rapidly as possible’. The ICJ ruling deemed UK’s occupation of the Indian Ocean archipelago that houses the secretive United States, Diego Garcia military base, illegal under international law.
The same week, by design or accident, a flurry of international activity in the “Indo Pacific” glossed the landmark ICJ ruling: Global media was attention focused on Donald Trumps’ visit to Vietnam to shake hands with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and fighting flared on the Indo-Pakistan border in Kashmir; while in Sri Lanka, media focused on the visit of former US Ambassador to the United Nations and Harvard Don, Samantha Power, who waxed eloquent about Human Rights to the island’s political elite at the BMICH. Ms. Power’s discourse to felicitate Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera discreetly made no reference to the ICJ ruling that effectively implies on-going human rights violations against Chagossians, who were forcibly displaced from their island home in the 1960s –not too far from the southern coast of Sri Lanka by the United Kingdom.[1]In 2015 the US, UK and allies took the Govt. of Sri Lanka to the UNHRC and are holding it accountable for grave human rights violations during a 30 year armed conflict.
Although the unravelling of European empires was one of the formative moments of the modern world system, including the birth of South Asian States, the ICJ ruling that UK should end control of what it terms ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ (BIOT) in 2019, underlines the fact that the process of de-colonization is far from complete.
The UK took control of Chagos Islands from Mauritius 50 years ago. The British government then evicted the entire population before leasing one of its largest atolls to the United States to build a large military base– Diego Garcia. Mauritius was in the middle of negotiating its independence from the UK at the time and repeatedly condemned the deal. In February 2017 the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ to offer its opinion in on whether the process had been concluded lawfully. Mauritius argued that it was forced to give up the islands in 1965 in exchange for independence. The ICJ ruled that the islands were not lawfully separated from the former colony of Mauritius. When UK broke off the islands from Mauritius in 1965, it violated UN Resolution 1514 (XV) on Decolonisation that argued against the break-up of colonies. The ruling puts the US naval base Diego Garcia in question and has implications for Sri Lanka and other small island nations in the IO. The Heritage Foundation in its recent report noted a US marine logistics Hub is in the works in Trincomalee, a deep-water natural harbour coveted by competing big powers in the Indian Ocean
For years, the Diego Garcia base has been vital to the military, serving as a landing spot for bombers that fly missions across Asia, including over the South China Sea. The ICJ ruling which is “advisory” raises questions about its future, as UK has a history of following ICJ rulings. CNN quoted Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, said that the Indian Ocean base was “very important to US operations in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean” and its loss could have a major impact, forcing the US “to change logistics support” in the region. “It wouldn’t weaken (US military strength) necessarily but logistics are everything,” he added. Diego Garcia was used to guide tactical aircraft supporting US military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and featured remote satellite tracking stations, an Air Force Space Command and Pacific Air Force support and logistics teams.
The United States has faced legal challenges to its Diego Garcia naval base for the past five decades. The bereft Chagossians took their case to British courts, hoping to exert pressure to return the islands to them. Subsequently, the attempt by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the United Nations to constitute the Indian Ocean as a ‘zone of peace’ posed a challenge to US operations on Chagos Islands. In 1970, the Non-Aligned summit in Lusaka, Zambia, declared that the Indian Ocean must be a ‘zone of peace from which Great Power rivalries and competition, as well as bases’ must be excluded. The United States attacked this idea. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt told the US Congress in 1974 that the USSR stood atop the ‘central part of the West’s energy jugular down to the Persian Gulf.’ For that reason, the Indian Ocean – and Diego Garcia – has ‘become a focal point of US foreign and economic policies and has a growing impact on our security.’
Zone of Peace? IO Coastal Communities, poverty and military bases
Like the Chagossians who were forcibly displaced to Mauritius and Seychelles, Sri Lankan and other Indian Ocean Rim coastal communities tend to experience high rates of poverty, debt and socio-economic hardship. Fisheries are one of the most significant renewable resources that Indian Ocean countries possess to secure food supplies, maintain livelihoods and assist economic growth, in addition to the IO’s non-living resources that include hydrocarbon, LNG, and valuable minerals. The ICJ ruling that Britain needs to vacate Chagos Islands may shine a light and facilitate a long overdue process of de-colonization of the IO, and enable education, knowledge, and technology transfer to ensure policy and legal frameworks that enable Indian Ocean rim countries and their often impoverished and debt-trapped, coastal communities to benefit from their rich marine resources, both living and non-living.
