British Government Continues its Campaign of Aggression against Iraq

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British Government Continues its Campaign of Aggression against Iraq

Iraq Government Says All Reasons for Attack Eliminated

Iraqi Government's Letter to the UN

No Use of Diego Garcia for US Bombers! The Rights of the People of Diego Garcia Must Be Respected! No Attack on Iraq!

Islanders Contest Rights of US Military Base Used in Afghanistan Air War

In his comments on the decision of the government of Iraq to re-admit UN weapons inspectors, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, once again reiterated the government’s view that it "must keep up the pressure on Iraq by continuing to work on a new UN resolution". In other words the government is not satisfied with the declared intention of forcing Iraq to "re-admit inspectors with unfettered access", but wishes to impose other conditions that may be impossible for Iraq to accept. It will then use refusal as a pretext for further armed aggression and what is now referred to as "regime change" – overthrowing the government of a sovereign state by military means.

The British and US governments are seeking all kinds of justifications for their aggression against Iraq. Jack Straw, in his speech to the UN General Assembly last Saturday, attempted to justify Anglo-US aggression by referring to the alleged need to help prevent "failed and failing states", the need to end the proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction" and what he referred to as "global terrorism". But it is neo-liberal globalisation and the interference of the big powers themselves that creates the conditions for instability and weakens states. It is Britain and the other big powers that not only have the greatest stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons but are also the largest arms manufacturers and traffickers and the greatest perpetrators and backers of state terrorism throughout the world.

The British and US governments have sought to give their campaign of aggression against Iraq and their plans for "regime change" a semblance of legitimacy and to combat the growing international opposition to their plans by utilising the UN. At the present time they are still hoping to produce a UN resolution that will facilitate military intervention in Iraq, despite the fact that two members of the UN Security Council, Russia and China, appear to be reluctant to immediately agree to such a course of action. But it has already become clear that if they cannot manipulate the UN, they will continue and step up their attacks on Iraq, just as they have carried out their murderous and almost daily bombing raids in the past.

The British government is unable to provide any evidence that the government of Iraq possesses any "weapons of mass destruction". Already Jack Straw has let it be known that the government’s so-called dossier on Iraq contains nothing new and he has warned people not to "expect something they’re not going to get". The government has no mandate for its continued bombing of Iraq, nor for its campaign of aggression against the people and government of that country.

Far from removing the threat of war, its actions threaten to destabilise the whole region and to create even greater dangers for the world’s peoples. It is clear that the aims of the British government are connected with the geo-political and strategic interests of Anglo-US imperialism. In these circumstances, the British working class and people must strengthen the movement to stop the military adventures of the British government and demand that it stop supporting the US. They must strengthen their programme and movement for the alternative, for a new just society and an end to the danger of war.

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, addressing a conference in Baghdad, said that Iraq was ready to work out a plan with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the return of UN weapons inspectors.

"All the reasons for an attack have been eliminated," Tareq Aziz said during the opening of a solidarity conference. "Yes, we agree on the return of weapons inspectors and we are ready to work with the Secretary-General in order to put this decision into effect," he said.

"If the inspectors come and act honestly, professionally in order to check the truth, let them reach the truth within a reasonable period (of time)," the Deputy Prime Minister told reporters later. "But if the Americans were using this matter as a pretext, they might use other pretexts in order to commit their aggression against Iraq."

Tareq Aziz urged France, Russia and China, all permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Annan to check the performance of any future inspectors. "When the inspectors do not act honestly and professionally, they should tell them 'you have to behave yourself and act according to what the Security Council wants and not what the United States and Britain want'."

He said that the US and British reaction to the decision to readmit the inspectors had revealed their "true intentions towards Baghdad". "We are honest and frank and we are ready to bear the consequences of what we believe in," Tareq Aziz said. "They are describing the decision as a tactic and a manoeuvre. It is not true because it is not the nature of the Iraqi leadership to manoeuvre and make tactics in such a genuine issue."

He said that the Britain and the US coveted Iraq's oil wealth and wanted to divide the Middle East. "They have been shocked by Iraq's courageous and balanced decision," he said. "The United States has no pretexts or genuine reasons to justify its aggression against Iraq," he added.

Commenting on Iraq's decision, MP George Galloway, who is in Baghdad, said, "This is very good news. I think there will be a huge sigh of relief and hope for the world that we may have the opportunity to avoid a catastrophic war."

"If it's a climb-down, let's grab it with both hands or thank the Lord...because perhaps it will avoid many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of young and old lives being unnecessarily lost and the region being plunged into chaos," he said.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said, "This is the beginning of a process of easing the tensions." Arab League chief Amr Moussa also welcomed Iraq's decision.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad urged Washington to stop beating the "drums of war" and to work with the United Nations to resolve the crisis. The Syrian President said that US threats against Iraq had caused "chaos and turmoil in international relations, and stemmed from going to extremes in threatening to use force and impose its decisions...on the rest of the world".

Full text of letter sent to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan from the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, dated 16 September 2002.

I have the honour to refer to the series of discussions held between you and the Government of the Republic of Iraq on the implementation of relevant Security Council resolutions on the question of Iraq, which took place in New York on 7 March and 2 May and in Vienna on 4 July 2002, as well as the talks which were held in your office in New York on 14 and 15 September 2002, with the participation of the Secretary General of the League of Arab States.

I am pleased to inform you of the decision of the Government of the Republic of Iraq to allow the return of the United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq without conditions.

The Government of the Republic of Iraq has responded – by this decision – to your appeal, to the appeal of the Secretary General of the League of Arab States, as well as to the appeals of Arab, Islamic and other friendly countries.

The Government of the Republic of Iraq has based its decision concerning the return of inspectors on its desire to complete the implementation of the relevant Security Council resolutions and to remove any doubts that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction.

This decision is also based on your statement to the General Assembly on 12 September 2002 that the decision by the Government of the Republic of Iraq is the indispensable first step towards an assurance that Iraq no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction and, equally important, towards a comprehensive solution that includes the lifting of the sanctions imposed on Iraq and the timely implementation of other provisions of the relevant Security Council resolutions, including resolution 687 (1991).

To this end, the Government of the Republic of Iraq is ready to discuss the practical arrangements necessary for the immediate resumption of inspections.

In this context, the Government of the Republic of Iraq reiterates the importance of the commitment of all member states of the Security Council and the United Nations to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq, as stipulated in the relevant Security Council resolutions and in Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations.

I should be grateful if you would bring the present letter to the attention of the members of the Security Council.

The US Defence Department has said that Britain has given permission for the construction of special hangars on the British Indian Ocean Territories island of Diego Garcia to house B-2 "stealth" bombers, according to reports.

That would place the aircraft much closer to Iraq than their normal operating base in the United States. The B-2s, which can carry 16 satellite-guided bombs, have previously flown very long missions over Afghanistan and Kosova from their base in Missouri, though stopping off in Diego Garcia on their way back from the devastating bombing-runs over Afghanistan. Reports have suggested that the Pentagon is looking to house six of the "stealth" bombers on Diego Garcia.

Diego Garcia was also critically important as a refuelling base during the 1991 Gulf War; and during Operation Desert Fox it served as a base for B-52 bombers, which on December 17, 1998, launched nearly 100 long-range cruise missiles aimed at Iraq. Beginning on October 7, 2001, the United States again used Diego Garcia when it launched B-1 and B-52 bomber attacks against Afghanistan.

Just one week before September 11 last year, the Bush administration announced that Diego Garcia was being expanded to take in all the hardware and troops from US bases in Europe that, they added, would from then on be gradually phased out.

The history of Diego Garcia island is of the trampling of the rights of the people there by British colonialism, including a long history of enslavement and forced labour of the native Ilois and their eventual forced removal by the British government.

In November 2000, the High Court delivered a judgment against the British state in a case brought by the people of Diego Garcia. The people were affirming their right as inhabitants to return to the island. The relevant facts had been declassified in 1998 after a 30-year period.

In the court case, Sir Sydney Kentridge QC, barrister for the Chagos islanders, the Ilois people, described their forced removal as "a very sad and by no means creditable episode in British history".

In 1965, in the preparation for the independence of Mauritius, the Harold Wilson Labour government had decided to act illegally and to cut out part of Mauritius and hold on to it, as a condition for independence, which was to be granted in 1968. This was in flagrant violation of the UN Charter. A colonising power cannot impose conditions on a part of itself, that is to say, on one of its colonies, in exchange for independence. Britain added some of the Seychelles Islands, which were still a colony, and made up a "new" colony.

Independence was granted to Mauritius, but only after the Chagos Islands were separated in November 1965 by an Order in Council and renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT.

There had been UN resolutions, year after year, for the reunification of Mauritius through the return of Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos. Only the US and British governments voted against, with the effect of a veto.

The 1995 UN "Pelindaba Treaty for a Nuclear-Weapons Free Africa" was signed by all the countries concerned, but on the insistence of the representatives of Britain and the US, "dotted lines" were pencilled in around Diego Garcia.

The BIOT is one of fourteen British overseas territories: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena and Dependencies, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Under the notoriously racist British Nationality Act 1981, most of the people of the overseas territories have British Dependent Territories (and not British) citizenship. British Dependent Territories citizens (BDTCs) do not have the right of abode in the United Kingdom. Following the judgment in the High Court which upheld the right of the people of Diego Garcia to return to their territory, the British government was forced to include these persons in an offer of British citizenship. The total number of BDTCs is around 200,000.

Now, once again, in pursuit of nefarious interests, the British government is once again forming a devilish pact with the US administration and violating the wishes of the people of Diego Garcia. The racist nature of this pact can be seen from comparisons with, for example, the Malvinas where the British government refers to the right of these islanders to determine their own future. The government is interested neither in the will of the people of Diego Garcia nor the will of the people of Britain nor the will of the Iraqi people, as Anglo-US imperialism gears up for aggression and war against Iraq.

The following article is dated January 28, 2002. It is by Jim Lobe, who is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and a journalist for Inter Press Service, an international news agency.

Building on a big victory in the British courts 15 months ago, the exiled inhabitants of the Chagos Island chain, which includes Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean atoll used as the main base for Washington's B-52 bombers in its Afghanistan campaign, have sued the US government for reparations and the right to return to their homeland.

The class action, which was filed in US federal court in Washington, DC in mid-December, charges the US government, as well as a number of individual defendants, including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and most of his predecessors at the Pentagon, with trespass, intentional infliction of emotional distress, forced relocation, racial discrimination, torture, and genocide.

The plaintiffs' attorney, Michael Tigar, is hoping the lawsuit will push Washington into negotiations on a settlement that would include money damages and the right of the Chagossians (who are also often referred to as the Ilois) to return to the islands from which they were evicted more than 25 years ago to make way for the US base. He has stressed that the Chagossians have no intention of throwing out the Americans and are willing to work on the base.

"The US government has not shown any disposition to negotiate at this time, but we remain hopeful," he told Foreign Policy in Focus last week, adding that the US case is built largely on the British High Court's judgment in November 2000 that the islanders' eviction was unlawful and that they should be permitted to return home.

The Court found that both the British and US governments deliberately misled the United Nations and their own legislative bodies about the islands' inhabitants by insisting that they consisted entirely of seasonal contract workers from Mauritius and the Seychelles and thus had no rights to remain where they were. It also found that the two governments took virtually no responsibility for their welfare after their eviction.

While some were taken to the Seychelles, most of the Chagossians were simply dumped at dockside in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius whose slums they have inhabited ever since. Some 3,000 to 4,000 Chagossians, including some 500 survivors of the more than 1,500 original evictees, and their descendants live there now.

The islands, situated almost at the mid-point of the Indian Ocean, equidistant from East Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia, were first inhabited in modern times by African slaves who worked copra plantations established under French colonial rule in the 18th century. They were joined by Indian plantation workers, who were brought there by the British after the French were forced to cede the 52 islands that make up the Chagos archipelago at the end of the Napoleonic wars.

The islanders practised subsistence agriculture while continuing to work the plantations over the next 150 years, according to British records.

For purposes of colonial administration, Britain treated the islands as part of Mauritius, even though some 1,200 miles of ocean separated the two territories. But when Mauritius gained independence in 1965, Britain separated the islands, renamed them the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), and negotiated an accord to lease them for 50 years to Washington, which was then concerned about possible Soviet naval expansion in the Indian Ocean.

In exchange for the lease and the removal of the Chagossians, Washington cancelled some $14 million owed by the British for the Polaris missile research and development programme.

Under international law, such manoeuvres would not have been possible if the Chagossians were found to be permanent residents of the islands. So the government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson insisted to the United Nations and the Parliament that they were temporary seasonal workers and their families, according to once-secret papers that were released during the High Court proceedings in 1999-2000.

As the senior Foreign Office official wrote at the time, "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours… There will be no indigenous population except seagulls."

As a result, most Chagossians were transformed overnight into citizens of Mauritius, whose government was later quietly paid some five million dollars not to object.

From 1965 to 1973, the Chagossians were removed from their homes, while the United States began building a communications and naval facility, which, over the next two decades, would be expanded to include an air base used by US bombers in both the Gulf War and the recent Afghan campaign. The construction has wiped out virtually all of the traces of Chagossian habitation, according to the complaint.

The expulsion was carried out essentially in three phases. First, residents who left the islands for other destinations were not permitted to return. In the second phase, Britain closed the remaining plantations and cut the flow of food and medical supplies to the islands to encourage emigration. The remaining Chagossians were simply rounded up and boarded onto overcrowded ships, which deposited some in the Seychelles and the rest in Mauritius--two countries that at the time were suffering high levels of unemployment.

Virtually penniless and new to a cash economy, the Chagossians sank into deep poverty, in which, with only a few exceptions, they have been mired ever since. When they applied for jobs as construction workers offered by civilian contractor recruiters in Mauritius building the US base at Diego Garcia, they were automatically rejected due to their Chagossian origin.

Olivier Bancoult, the lead plaintiff in the case, and chairman of the Chagos Refugee Group, left the islands in the first phase when he, then three years old, and his family travelled to Mauritius in 1967 to seek medical treatment for a serious injury to his sister. When they tried to return home several months later, they were informed that the islands had been sold and ship traffic there had ceased, according to the complaint. "The family was left to fed for themselves--with no compensation, no food, and no advice on relocation."

A second plaintiff, Marie Therese Mein, now 68, was one of those forced onto a ship in the latter stages of the relocation. US officials, she claims, told the residents they would be bombed if they did not leave.

She also blames a miscarriage on the six-day voyage to Mauritius. The overcrowding, the heat, and filth produced by farm animals on the boat made the passage exceptionally harsh, according to the complaint. She alleges that, while the horses were fed by the crew, the Chagossians themselves had to make do with what little they had been permitted to bring with them.

A third plaintiff, Marie Isabelle France-Charlot, was born to Chagossian parents in Mauritius in 1978. Because of the abject poverty in which the family found itself, she attended school only sporadically and eventually was forced to drop out. She has never been able to find work, according to the complaint, which notes that as a Chagossian, she is treated by Mauritians as one of "the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low."

As part of its decision, the High Court lifted a 1971 order that banned the Chagossians from returning to the islands, but precisely what the conditions of such a return may be is the subject of secret talks between London and Washington. Both governments are reported to oppose any return to Diego Garcia or any of the islands in the immediate vicinity.

In addition to the US government itself, defendants in the case here include virtually all of the defence secretaries, beginning with Robert McNamara, who served in the post from 1961 to 1968, to Rumsfeld, who served in the mid-1970s when the deportations were completed.

Halliburton Company, an oil equipment firm headed by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000, is also listed as a defendant since Brown & Root, a subsidiary, did most of the construction on Diego Garcia.

Yet another defendant is Eric Newsome, who headed the State Department's office of Political Military Affairs in the last two years of the Clinton administration. According to the complaint, he actively discouraged Britain's Foreign Office from permitting the Chagossians to return to any of the islands as part of a settlement in the British case.