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There's a place in the Indian Ocean, a thousand kilometres from anywhere. a tiny tropical atoll that looks like a desert island. It isn't. A massive runway for stealth bombers cuts through the palm trees. Those are radar domes watching the sky. That lagoon holds up to twenty warships. Nuclear submarines dock here. American bombers and gunships took off from here to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and now Iran. American troops here enjoy tater-tots and cheerleading performances. But this island isn't American. It's technically
British but the population is entirely made up of American soldiers and imported migrant workers. It's called The Footprint Of Freedom. For decades, the official story was that nobody ever lived here. That was a lie. Here's where we are. Roughly the midpoint between East Africa and Indonesia. The Chagos Archipelago. About 60 islands, fifty-six square kilometres of land in total, smaller than San Marino. The islands sit very close to the equator. No extreme weather. Coconuts grow year-round. The waters teem with fish. Until the late 1700s nobody lived here.
The French arrived, planted coconuts, and shipped in enslaved people from Madagascar and Mozambique to work coconut plantations. In 1814, Britain took these islands along with the French colony of Mauritius. The Chagos would be administered from the Mauritius colony 2,000km away. After slavery was abolished, the plantation owners brought indentured labourers from India. From these origins, French, African, Malagasy, Indian, a people formed. The Chagossians. Roman Catholics, with their own distinct identity, language, Chagos Kreol, based on French. Their own music. It was a plantation society. Life was tough, nearly everyone worked the coconut plantations, producing copra,
dried coconut flesh, used to make coconut oil. Everyone had work. Nobody paid rent. Housing passed from parent to child. School, healthcare, pensions, funerals were free. Families had plots of land to raise animals and grow vegetables. They were poor, they worked hard, but life was very predictable. Two thousand people lived on these islands in 1961 when a boat arrived carrying an American. Following World War II the United States built the largest network of military bases in human history. Today there are more than 750 U.S. military bases
in over 70 countries where they station missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers, spy ships, bomber squadrons, long-range missiles, and nuclear weapons that can reach any target, that can make demands in any corner of the world. Island bases, easy to control and defend, and with small local populations that cannot protest were considered the best base locations. In 1961, an American survey team was sent to Diego Garcia, the largest and most populated island in the Chagos. It was perfect. But the Chagos were part of Britain's Mauritius colony and Mauritius wanted independence. The Americans preferred a base on British rather than Mauritian soil.
The US told the British to detach the Chagos from colonial Mauritius to create a new colony, one that would guarantee base rights to the US. Britain, winding down its empire and taking a subordinate role in the rising American one, was happy to cooperate. But, there was a still a problem, the locals. The US wanted the islands under its "exclusive control (without local inhabitants)." On a US document titled "Copra workers on Diego Garcia" a Navy official wrote three words: "Absolutely must go." The islands were to be 'fully sanitized'. While the American base would only be on Diego Garcia the British
guaranteed "no indigenous population shall remain" on any of the islands. In August 1945, as World War II's victorious Allies drew up the charter for the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, they named a new crime: crimes against humanity. The British drafted the exact wording of what would be considered crimes against humanity and they included "deportation" of a civilian population. The United Nations accepted this definition at its very first session. Under the UN Charter, a colonial territory's population had rights to self-determination, it was the coloniser's obligation to prepare colonies for independence as soon as possible.
For Britain though laws were for other people's empires. The British immediately saw the problem with their plans to deport the Chaggosians: "To recognise that there are permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights have to be safeguarded." So they had to pretend "there were no permanent inhabitants in the archipelago." In the British Foreign Office files there is a memo by Anthony Aust titled "Maintaining the fiction" that advised the British government to argue the Chagossians were 'only a floating population' because 'this would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population'. Aust wrote: "We are able to make up the rules as we go along" to "To provide legal power to deport
people who will not leave voluntarily…to maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population" In February 1964, a secret Anglo-American conference in London finalised the base deal. But first Britain had to get the islands from colonial Mauritius before it became an independent country. In 1965, during the independence negotiations, Britain told Mauritius to give up Chagos for £3 million or there would be no independence. Mauritius took the deal and became independent in 1968. Five years earlier, the UN General Assembly had passed Declaration 1514 on decolonisation, which stated colonies
should not be broken up into new colonies. Britain ignored it and on the 8th of November 1965 created a brand-new colony - the British Indian Ocean Territory. They did not pass the law in Parliament, but by Order in Council, a medieval British practice in which a secret council stands in a semi-circle before the Queen, reads out proposed laws and with no debate and no vote, the Queen declares them laws. The new colony had exactly one purpose: to prepare Diego Garcia for the Americans. In a secret memo, a Colonial Office official
stated 'One of the things we would like to do in the new Territory is to convert all the existing residents into short-term, temporary residents by giving them temporary immigration permits, describing them as inhabitants of Mauritius or the Seychelles.' The British now demanded all residents on the island must have a legal permit, then refused to give the islanders any. Because they were born on British colonial territory, the Chagossians were automatically Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. The British adopted a "policy of concealment" to hide the fact that Chagossians were British citizens, a 1971 memo
noted 'not at present HMG's policy to advise "contract workers" of their dual citizenship'. If Chagossians were merely foreign contract laborers, Britain wasn't deporting a population, it was simply letting some employment contracts lapse. If they were what they actually were, British citizens born on the islands, Britain was expelling its own people. Another secret Foreign Office letter stated 'We would not wish it to become general knowledge that some of the inhabitants have lived on Diego Garcia for at least two generations and could, therefore, be regarded as "belongers".
Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart wrote in a secret document that "by any stretch of the English language, there was an indigenous population." The most blunt secret correspondence within the Foreign Office however was this 1966 memo "The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." Underneath, a colleague added "Along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure." On 30 December 1966, Britain handed Diego Garcia to the United States for fifty years, "without charge." In reality,
the Americans paid for it secretly, as a $14 million discount on the Polaris nuclear missiles Britain was buying to arm its submarine fleet. Construction of the American base was slated to begin in March 1971. The Governor of the Seychelles, Bruce Greatbatch explained that the fastest way to get rid of these people was to "drop the islanders on a pier at Mauritius and sail away quickly." In 1968, Rita Bancoult brought a sick daughter to Mauritius.
separated from their home, possessions, jobs, and everyone they knew. without warning. Those on the islands were left to wonder why people weren't people returning. Britain closed the plantations. It cut off supplies. Food and medicine ran out. One islander recalled "They tried to starve us." Rumours were spread that the islands would be bombed. The Chagossians were prepared to live on the outer islands, 300km from Diego Garcia. 'The Americans would have regarded that as unacceptable.'
The US Navy's construction crew landed on Diego Garcia in March 1971. Bulldozers ripped the trees from the earth. They shattered the coral reefs with explosives. Diesel fuel defiled the once pristine waters. And then, before the final deportations, something happened that I can't stop thinking about. The Chagossians loved their dogs. In 1971, the British and Americans rounded them up. The order came from Bruce Greatbatch: "destroy all the dogs, but save the horses" Unable to shoot enough of the dogs, the US and British agents lured them into a warehouse and gassed them.
While the overseer tasked with the destruction said it was not their intention to threaten the islanders with this, he wasn't surprised that they assumed they were next. Lizette Talate who watched this happen recalled "The children cherished their dogs…Nothing was the same after that. We were covered in sadness." From 1971 on the islanders were put on boats and deported, first to the outer islands, then out of the Chagos entirely. "We were assembled in front of the manager's house and informed that we could no longer stay on the island because the Americans were coming for good. We didn't want
to go. We were born here. So were our fathers and forefathers who were buried in that land." On the 27th of April 1973 on Peros Banhos, a twenty-year-old Liseby Elysé was forced onto a rusty ship with around four hundred others. She was pregnant with her first child. This was the final deportation from the Chagos. Greatbatch insisted the horses travel in the best conditions. The people were loaded into the hold, forced to sleep on piles of guano, bird shit.
"The boat was very overcrowded…the conditions were filthy. They had taken four days to travel and many of the women and children were sick. The boat deck was covered in manure, urine and vomit and so was the hold." The first stop was the Seychelles, to drop off Greatbatch's horses, while there the Chagossians were housed in a prison. Then they continued the multi-day journey to Mauritius. "And that's when the nightmare started." On arrival, no one from the British or Mauritian government was there to receive them. They had nowhere to go, no money, no accommodation. A self-sufficient people, who lived an isolated, predictable life in
a tight knit community were abandoned on the docks of a foreign country. In a cash economy they didn't understand. Some cried at the docks, waiting, hoping a ship would come and take them home. Others jumped into the sea. The Chagossians have a word in Kreol for what happened next: sagren. Dying of sorrow. Within a few years entire families died in poverty, many others took their own lives, girls were forced
into prostitution. Rita Bancoult lost four of her children. One mother said "I was so sick I was in hospital and both my children were, too. They died in the January, within eight days of each other". The British Foreign Office response was: "Some deaths are bound to have occurred in the normal course of events." A 1972 US memo noted "the relocation of the former copra workers on Diego Garcia has worked out fairly well, with little adverse publicity". in Diego Garcia, entertaining the troops. With few job opportunities, no savings, and a lack of familiarity with interest and the Mauritian economy, the Chagossians were
easy prey for loan sharks, who they borrowed from to pay for basic necessities. Years after their deportation the Chagossians, considered outsiders by most of Mauritius, earned about two dollars a day, half couldn't read. Drugs and alcohol tore through the Chagossian slums. All those involved knew how their actions impacted the Chagossias. The Washington Post reported in 1975 "The islanders are now living in abject poverty…Washington has rejected all responsibility for their plight, and London has placed the onus on Mauritius". "Some of the men…would like to return to Diego Garcia to work on the American base and look after the church and cemetery where their relatives are buried." The
Americans refused to hire Chaggosians. The British were paid. The Americans got a base. The plantation owners were compensated by Britain. Mauritius was paid for the islands. But the Chaggosians were left with nothing. During the planning, execution, and aftermath of the deportations three British prime ministers, Labour and Conservative, and their cabinet ministers had personal knowledge of the expulsions. Not one objected. None even mentioned the islanders in a memoir. Denis Healey, the Defence Secretary who handed Diego Garcia to
the Pentagon, when asked decades later said "I have no memories of the Chagos archipelago." They had been erased from history. When the plan was first mentioned in Parliament, Foreign Secretary Stewart stated "All that is involved is a modest naval communications facility. It will in no way constitute a base, as there are no plans to station operational forces there, nor will the facility provide logistic support.' Today, Camp Justice and the Footprint of Freedom, the names for Diego Garcia house two massive runways capable of landing B-52 nuclear bombers. A deep water port for warships, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines. Satellite tracking facilities. and one of
the very few places on Earth that can reload a submarine's Tomahawk missiles, the same missile that killed 200 girls in school in Iran. Around four thousand people are stationed here: half military personnel and half civilian contractors. Its first war was Vietnam. It was vital to Saddam Hussein's US-backed invasion of Iran. In 1991, it was a critical, high-volume launchpad for the Gulf War. B1, B2, and B52 bombers dropped thousands of bombs on Afghanistan and Iraq. The base was vital to attacks on Somalia, Yemen, and now Iran. Diego Garcia was also a CIA black site, a vital node in the US's torture and rendition program that streched across the planet. KBR,
the Halliburton subsidiary that built Guantánamo's prison, also built one on Diego Garcia. The British government denied Diego Garcia was a black site: Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament in 2004 there were no detainees, and in 2005 dismissed the reports as "conspiracy theories" In 2008, Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted the government lied. The US had used Diego Garica for rendition flights. Colin Powell's former chief of staff later described it as a site for "nefarious activities"; the US Senate torture inquiry found it was used with full UK cooperation.
For its new inhabitants life is good. There's a nine-hole golf course. Fresh tater-tots, tennis courts, pools, a "Brit Club" with themed party nights. Cheerleaders are shipped out to entertain the troops. The work is done by imported labourers, mostly from the Phillipines, on around two dollars an hour, nine hours a day, six days a week. Since 1973, the only inhabitants of the Chagos Islands are US and UK military personnel and contracted individuals. The Chagossians did not disappear. They organised. Chaggosian women founded the Chagos Refugees Group. Rita's surviving son Olivier now leads it.
Chaggosian women led a movement for their rights. During a protest in Mauritius Charlesia Alexis was arrested and beaten; a photograph of her being dragged into the back of a police van embarrassed London. When Chagossians went on hunger strike the British agreed to 'talks' - not with the Chagossians, but with the Mauritian government. In 1982 they offered a "full and final" settlement of a few thousand pounds per Chagossian, barely enough to pay off the debts they had incurred since being abandoned in Mauritius. To receive it, islanders had to sign away their
right of return. The forms were written only in English, a language Chagossians did not speak. Those who couldn't write signed with a thumbprint, Chagossians stranded in the Seychelles got nothing at all. 5 days after they placed their thumbs on the paper Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a British colony. The British government spent over a billion pounds to send troops to defend the Falklands. Britain claimed the right to self-determination of the 2800 Falklanders was "paramount" and that they had to be protected under the UN Charter.
One can only wonder why the UK treated Falklanders so differently. In the 1990s, Chagossians learned of their UK citizenship, they used it to take their case to British courts. In October 2000, Olivier Bancoult flew to London to testify. On the 3rd of November 2000, the High Court ruled. They overturned the law that kept the Chagossians out. The Chagossians could finally go home. Since 2000 British judges ruled the Chagossian expulsion illegal three times. Tony Blair's government refused to accept the laws of their own country. They claimed the islands were uninhabitable, but wealthy 'yachties' spent months on the outer islands, and thousands lived on the western part of Diego Garcia, the eastern part was and still is entirely empty.
Before the Chaggosians could raise enough funds to resettle the islands, in 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq over 'weapons of mass destruction' which did not exist. Many planes bombing Iraq launched from Diego Garcia. The base was now considered vital. In 2004. The Blair government used the same tool as the government in the 60s, the Queen's Orders in Council. It overturned the High Court ruling and once again banned returning to every island in the Chagos. This was over 20 years ago, when many more Chaggosians that experienced the expulsion were still alive, the British
government decided they should die in exile. 2010. The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, declared the entire archipelago a Marine Protected Area. Apparently to protect the rights of the fish. WikiLeaks published a US cable from 2009. In it, British officials explained to the Americans that a marine reserve would be "the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands' former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT." They reassured the Americans that no "Man Fridays" would return to the islands. The Foreign Office's Colin Roberts told the Americans:
"We do not regret the removal of the population." Rita Bancoult died in Mauritius in 2016, aged 91, waiting to go home. The Chagossians did everything the rulebook asked of them. They went to court. They won. And Britain ignored it. The Chagos Refugee Group teamed up with Mauritius, a state, with a seat at the UN, a flag, and leverage. And Mauritius wants those islands too. Not for the Chagossians, but for the exclusive economic zone that comes with them: fishing rights, tourism, a bigger footprint on the map. Mauritius took London to the international courts, arguing that the 1965 severing of Chagos was illegal. In 2019, after a court case with extensive
testimony from Chagossians, the International Court of Justice ruled 13 to 1 that Britain had unlawfully separated Chagos from Mauritius and must end its administration "as rapidly as possible." They also noted that the Chagossians were "were forcibly removed and prevented from returning" The one dissenting judge was the American judge. The UN General Assembly backed the ruling, 116 votes to 6, and gave Britain six months "to cooperate with Mauritius in facilitating the resettlement" of Chagossians. Backed by the U.S., the British refused to comply. Until 2022 when Liz Truss' short
lived Conservative government quietly opened negotiations with Mauritius. In October 2024 the new Labour government finalised the negotiations. Foreign Secretary David Lammy explained: "The status quo was clearly not sustainable," and a binding judgment against the UK "seemed inevitable." The UK did not care about the other islands, its only concern was Diego Garcia and the military base. The deal was that the UK would give the Chagos back to Mauritius. But Diego Garcia would be leased back to the UK for 99 years, at £101 million a year.
The Chagossians were not involved in the negotiations. It had no guaranteed return and Diego Garcia would be off-limits for another century. Every Chagosian born on Diego Garcia would die without ever seeing it again. Mauritius would also be incentivised to please the Americans at any cost, including not resettling Chaggosians, in order to keep that 101 million a year rent coming in. Donald Trump called the deal "a great act of stupidity" and "a very woke thing" in January 2026. Then said it was the best deal available in early February. Then in mid February he demanded "DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA." The treaty stalled, Starmer said it won't go ahead without American approval. Then in late February
the US and Israel attacked Iran and the UK gave the US permission to use Diego Garcia as a launch pad for its bombers. Diego Garcia once again proved itself vital to America's wars. While US bases in the Gulf states could easily be targeted by Iran in retaliation to US-Israeli attacks, Diego Garcia is out of missile range. With no end in sight for American wars Diego Garcia will continue to be expanded, a polluted, concrete floating aircraft carrier may well be all that remains of the Chaggosians homeland if Americans do not resist their empire of bases.
The deal has been shelved. The Chagossians once again are thrown into limbo and the real winner remains the US military who get to keep their base. Britain regularly speaks the language of democracy, sovereignty, self-determination, and international law. But only when it is in their interests. Diego Garcia has been used exclusively to project wars into other people's countries. People were erased from these islands, so that they could be used as a launchpad to erase people around
the world. We can only imagine how different this region would be if the US did not have an easy to use forward bombing base. There are over 300 people who were born on the island still living. They and their children want to go home. Whether they ever do is not decided in London. It's decided in Washington, in the President's office, by one man. Although America very nearly had three. For most of the summer of 1787, the men writing the Constitution couldn't agree on any of it. Three presidents instead of one. No Supreme Court. A Congress that could sack the President whenever it liked.
The America That Almost Was is a series about those forgotten arguments, the presidencies that never happened, the constitutions that were nearly written, and the compromises that produced the office that signs off on the wars flown out of Diego Garcia. The first episode, on the presidency, is out now only on Nebula, a streaming service owned by the creators on it. People like me. Nebula's team helped Spectacles produce an exclusive series with high quality animation, music, and a cinematic feel. There are tons of exclusive videos on Nebula because instead of clickbait, Nebula is built on subscriber satisfaction,
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