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title: "Diego Garcia: The Most Controversial Island in the World"
description: "## Introduction\n\nDeep in the heart of the Indian Ocean, nearly two thousand kilometers from the nearest continental landmass, lies the humble island of Diego Garcia. A modest, ring-shaped atoll of just over thirty kilometers squared in total land area, Diego Garcia snakes through the water like any one of the hundreds of similar islands scattered around the world. View it from thirty thousand feet, and it might seem so tiny, so utterly inconsequential that it only exists at all because no wave has yet come by and swept it away.\n\nBut the story of Diego Garcia is not just the story of any old island. From its early settlement by France, and then by the British East India Company, to the expulsion of a community who had made the atoll their home for generations, to the immense geopolitical relevance of Diego Garcia in the modern world, the island has been a lightning rod for controversy for the better part of three centuries. This story winds through indentured servitude, forced exile, military occupation, WikiLeaks, environmental conservation, and even an alleged CIA black site, all in service to the island of Diego Garcia.\n\n## Where in the World is Diego Garcia?\n\nThe voyage to Diego Garcia is an arduous one, no matter which way you slice it. Embark on a journey to the island from the Tanzanian coastline, and you'll have to sail a ship over 3,500 kilometers of nearly entirely open ocean. Set sail from Australia, and the journey's even longer, just short of five thousand kilometers. Your best bet is to leave from the city of Kanniyakumari, India, but even then, you'll sail a line nearly directly south for eighteen hundred kilometers before you can finally set foot on dry land.\n\nDiego Garcia is a coral atoll, situated on the southernmost tip of a massive underwater mountain range. Along that range, you'll find the Maldives, the Indian island chain of Lakshadweep, and the Chagos Archipelago, of which Diego Garcia is the largest among some sixty individual islands. On the scale of global atolls—a type of ring-shaped, coral-rimmed island encircling a lagoon—Diego Garcia is the largest in the world. However, that certainly doesn't mean that it's big; although it occupies about 174 square kilometers in total, just a small portion of that, 27 square kilometers or ten square miles, are actually dry land. Circling around a large central lagoon in a shape that, if you squint a bit, looks almost like a bent version of Greenland, Diego Garcia is no more than a couple of hundred meters wide in some parts. The atoll, plus a few scattered islands in the immediate vicinity, sit barely above the surface of the sea, enduring frequent earthquakes that, at times, can measure at a 4 or higher on the Richter scale.\n\nPerhaps the most pleasant way to imagine Diego Garcia is to see it almost as a vacation spot. Its equatorial climate is warm all day and night, hitting around thirty degrees Celsius, eighty-six Fahrenheit, on the warmest days of the year, and despite its humidity, the island is washed in a constant westerly breeze that rarely ventures above ten knots. It's got a clear wet season and dry season; thunderstorms typically sweep through the area on summer evenings, and as far as extreme weather goes, it's at almost no risk of cyclones compared to most of the Indian Ocean. There are no mountains or cliff faces to navigate, either; the highest point on the atoll is all of 22 feet, seven meters, above sea level. Rainwater can be easily collected in cisterns or taken from a few natural depressions, and what little inland area exists on Diego Garcia is largely overtaken by tropical wetlands, with the occasional marsh or scrubland. The outer-facing and lagoon-facing edges, of course, feature enough sandy beaches to make a sunbather weep with joy.\n\nThe story of Diego Garcia is the story of an island that has been fundamentally altered by the presence of humans, but in order to really understand that story in full, we've got to first take a look at what the island would have been like before people showed up. Diego Garcia was completely uninhabited before its discovery by Portuguese explorer Pedro Mascarenhas, although it may have been host to the occasional stranded prehistoric fisherman or have been visited by Austronesian or Arab voyagers. As we've just described, the atoll is teeming with plant life, but like many of the islands of this area, there are no mammal, land reptile, or amphibian species native to Diego Garcia. Instead, it's a critical breeding ground for seabirds and both hawksbill and green turtles, while its beaches are ruled by the surprisingly hefty coconut crab and the warrior crab. It's one small part of a sprawling oceanic ecosystem, one that likely existed without much change for millennia before humans arrived.\n\n## Life Before 1967\n\nAfter Pedro Mascarenhas and his ship arrived at the atoll in 1512, the first order of business was to give the place a name. It wouldn't have been a bad guess when you first started in on this story to assume that the island of Diego Garcia was named after some guy named Diego Garcia—but no such luck. The atoll was first dubbed Dom Garcia in honor of the Portuguese nobleman Garcia de Noronha, the benefactor who had funded Pedro Mascarenhas' voyage. Although the atoll was largely forgotten after Mascarenhas' departure, the \"Garcia\" name came back in 1544, when another explorer rediscovered it. This guy's name *was* Diego Garcia, specifically Diego Garcia de Moguer, and he named the island after himself, leading to a lot of confusion on the maps of the time. Making matters worse, a prominent map that did depict the atoll featured a misspelled note in the area of the island, which was meant to say \"deo gracias,\" or \"thank God,\" and even though the first English-language map that depicted the island called it Diego Garcia, this was likely a misreading of either \"D. Gratia\" or \"Dio Gratia\" on a Portuguese-language map. But by this time, the atoll had already stumbled its way into the name \"Diego Garcia,\" and when that name was picked up by subsequent mapmakers, it became as good as official. All this, to disabuse you of the thought that prior generations of explorers had their shit together.\n\nRegardless of the name it carried, Diego Garcia went uninhabited until the late 1770s. By then, the atoll and the rest of the Chagos Archipelago were under the administration of the French, and a short-lived settlement cropped up there courtesy of one Monsieur Dupuit de la Faye. As best as historians can tell, not much went on in this settlement except for a bit of fishing and coconut-collecting, which, now that we think of it, is not a euphemism but really should be. French surveyors had found the atoll somewhat useless in terms of an expanded settlement; in the words of one Lieutenant La Fontaine, who appraised the island in 1770, \"A great number of vessels might anchor there\"—meaning in Diego Garcia's lagoon—\"but the principle object is wanting: for though it is covered with woods, it is not provided with fresh water.\" By 1786, Diego Garcia's early settlers were already gone, and so the atoll was abandoned again when, in that year, the British East India Company came calling. Despite their attempt to settle the island, with an initial community of some 275 people, a nearby shipwreck of another East India Company ship all but doomed the settlement when another 250 survivors clambered ashore, desperately in need of food and water. By now, travelers to the area had already learned that shipwrecks were common on the great underwater reefs that surrounded the atoll at this time. The castaways' drain on supplies ended up making the settlement untenable, and the East India Company, too, picked up and left. France had actually sent a naval frigate to try and boot the British off the island, but by the time it arrived, they were already gone. Next, Diego Garcia was a destination used by the French colony of Mauritius, who decided to maroon some lepers there, and a few years later, France moved back in, this time bringing slave labor to the atoll in an effort to start a coconut plantation. Two ships, each carrying some twenty-five men as well as slaves, were able to establish themselves on the island and form a profitable settlement, this one producing sun-dried coconut flesh, or copra, and coconut oil. With their success, more oil manufacturers arrived, and after Mauritius continued to send lepers to the island, it developed several smaller communities, including a leper colony.\n\nBy 1814, Diego Garcia passed from French control into British hands for good, courtesy of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded a number of French territories over to the Crown after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. By then, the atoll had already proven its worth as a small plantation colony, and it was split into several plantations across the island: East Point, Minni Minni, and Pointe Marianne, with small pockets of workers scattered in villages across the rest of the island. Unfortunately for the Diego Garcia ecosystem, but predictably, the advent of large-scale plantation farming led much of the island's wetland forests to be razed to the ground, and a number of new plant and animal species were introduced to the island. Although we don't know exactly when each new species was introduced, we know that there are today about 280 terrestrial plant species on the island, compared to 36 that would have been there prior to the introduction of humans, and rats, Sicilian donkeys, horses, dogs, housecats, cane toads, and chickens formed their own version of the Diego Garcia ecosystem, grafted on top of the one that had existed there before.\n\nWith the arrival of the British came the British policy of abolition of the slave trade, but with so many former slaves now out of work and without other means to support themselves or leave, they were kept on as indentured servants working the same plantations as before. The island was surveyed and developed further, and with its high potential to generate coconut oil, compared to the relatively few resources it demanded, Diego Garcia became more and more profitable. Judging by the available data on just how much coconut oil was being produced at this time, it's likely that nearly the entire island was overtaken by growing operations, and it was able to ship out several times more of its product than comparably sized islands in the area. By 1883, the three plantations on the island had been united under the command of a single manager, a man named James Spurs, who instituted strict policies on liquor consumption, sent quota expectations through the roof, and was apparently able to keep the island in check anyhow, mostly owing to what period sources describe as his competency and benevolence toward the island's workers.\n\nAround this same time, portions of the island were set aside as coal depots for ships making the long journey across the Indian Ocean, with some 180 ships a year being fueled within a couple years of the operation's start. So as not to infringe on the work of the plantations there, visiting ships were prohibited from allowing their crews and passengers to set foot on the island other than to refuel, but these guidelines were quickly and frequently violated by large ships filled with migrants, whose crews had trouble keeping everyone hemmed in when land was in sight. The rise in unlawful entries led to the establishment of a police force, which in turn exacerbated the labor disputes already ongoing between the plantations and their workers. In the words of one G. C. Bourne, who visited the island in 1886, speaking about a friend who had visited previously: \"Mr. Leconte told me that on his arrival on the island three years ago, he found the Negroes in a most insubordinate condition, and that within a month of his landing, his verandah was besieged by a body of thirty men, armed with knives and bludgeons, who declared that they would not leave the place until they had taken his life. Luckily for him they were as cowardly as they were insolent, and he was able to keep them at bay presenting a revolver, until he had succeeded in reducing them to a more reasonable state of mind.\" We can only imagine, in retrospect, what the context behind such an act may have been, and what the actual objective of thirty armed, organized plantation workers may have been.\n\nIt wasn't long after this point that coaling operations on Diego Garcia were shut down. Not only had they led to turmoil on the island, but the whole endeavor had been unprofitable too, and before long, the atoll was strictly dedicated to providing coconut products again. A chapel was built on Diego Garcia, then a church, then a jetty and light railway, and then a center of commerce at East Point, in a sign of the growing economic stability—or even economic power—of this little island. New technologies made the Diego Garcia plantations favor production of copra instead of coconut oil, and by this time, it's believed that production was reaching its eventual maximum, some 5.3 million coconuts yielded per year—just about half the coconut production of the entire British Indian Ocean Territory.\n\nBut coconuts weren't the only reason that Diego Garcia mattered at the turn of the twentieth century; with global war on the horizon, its spacious lagoon, located way out in the middle of nowhere, was a perfect oceanic anchorage for any one of the world's major powers to, say, park a battleship or two in advance of major hostilities. In 1899, the atoll hosted the German warships *Bismarck* and *Marie*, and the British warship *Hampshire*, and after war broke out in 1914, a German ship, the *Emden*, stopped over at Diego Garcia to refuel and clean while it was being chased by English warships. Although Diego Garcia was very much a British protectorate at that time, and thus on the other side of the war, word hadn't yet reached the island that there was a war at all, so the *Emden*'s damage was explained away as having come from storms, and its officers were wined and dined before departing just in advance of their British pursuers. By and large, World War I avoided the Indian Ocean, and Diego Garcia was not otherwise involved in the conflict, but in World War II, it was used to support naval craft, refuel flying boats like the Catalina, and otherwise keep British operations going in the area.\n\n## Forcible Expulsion and Militarization\n\nUp until this point, Diego Garcia had been a quiet, stable settlement that was, if not frozen in time, then at the very least resistant to change. Increased productivity had raised the overall quality of life on the atoll, the occasional visitors by sea had added to island life in both positive and negative ways, but all told, the status quo on Diego Garcia hadn't substantively changed in well over a hundred years. Through modernization, through abolition, through the Great Depression and two World Wars, Diego Garcia carried on as it always had.\n\nBut it was the arrival of the Cold War that would change everything on Diego Garcia, not in those first few desperate years of factional alignment and nuclear development, but in the years that immediately followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1965, the British government detached Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Archipelago from the oversight of Mauritius, and instead incorporated it into the British Indian Ocean Territory, just in time for it to be subject to an agreement made with the United States. According to this pact, both nations would share free, unrestricted use of the British Indian Ocean Territory for military purposes, for a period of at least fifty years.\n\nAs we'd mentioned before, Diego Garcia has had the potential to be militarily significant since it was first charted. If, say, fuel could be stored there, or supplies, it could be a valuable depot way out in the ocean, and its large lagoon ensured that numerous ships could potentially stay over, but in an era of ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and ships with ranges of up to thousands of kilometers before refueling, plus the arrival of the first nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, an island like this was a massive strategic asset for whomever controlled it. Similar to how Soviet ties to the island of Cuba made it a regional player in the affairs of Central and South America, a US/UK-controlled naval base at Diego Garcia could allow both nations to extend their influence all up and down East Africa, South Asia, the Philippines, and Australia. Not only that, but it could serve as a valuable home base in American efforts to interdict Russian oil moving out of the Persian Gulf. With the Vietnam War still very much an active conflict, plus a whole range of other unfriendly nations in the area, the value of a militarized Diego Garcia was apparently too great to ignore.\n\nBut after they signed their compact with the Americans, the British military didn't stay for long. By 1968, Britain had made public its intent to withdraw from all military holdings east of the Suez Canal, including not just Malaysia and Singapore, but Diego Garcia as well. Although this decision was ultimately an unavoidable one for the waning British Empire, beset as they were by a stark economic decline and forced to recalibrate toward Europe, it had the collateral effect of raising questions about what an Indian Ocean without Britain's influence would look like. This so-called \"Vacuum in the Indian Ocean\" didn't last for long, of course; after all, the United States and the Soviet Union both had something of a reflexive reaction to send military assets to any corner of the world that didn't seem sufficiently involved in their global standoff. Predictably, this turned into yet another small arms race in a war of many arms races, and by the time Britain left the area, the Americans and the Soviets had more than filled in the gaps.\n\nDiego Garcia was a particularly thorny issue during this time, on both sides of the divide. American logic at the time held that the Soviets would try anything to keep America from establishing a large-scale naval presence, for which Diego Garcia was something of an ideal center if it could be consistently resupplied, while the Soviets were particularly concerned about the US turning the atoll into a communications base. If that were to happen, the Soviets believed, then it would be because Diego Garcia had become a command-and-control center to coordinate the operations of ballistic-missile submarines in the Indian Ocean, submarines whose missiles would, of course, be pointed at the Soviet Union. America never acknowledged whether or not these submarines were present, Russia began dispatching its own warships to the Indian Ocean much more frequently, and the \"Vacuum in the Indian Ocean\" quickly became the least of anyone's concerns.\n\nNow, even with all this upheaval in the region, Diego Garcia's plantations had been able to survive, harvesting coconuts and churning out copra oil at an average of four million nuts a year. But all that changed on January 23, 1971, when a nine-man team from the US Navy arrived to survey potential locations for a beach landing. Within two months, those nine men would swell to over two hundred, clearing beaches, installing navigational aids for incoming ships, and mapping the underwater areas under both the lagoon and the seas surrounding Diego Garcia. By March 24, 1971, the Navy broke ground on its so-called US Naval Communication Facility Diego Garcia, along with a nearby runway—first an interim version, and later, a fully functional, permanent military airstrip.\n\nThen, full construction began, and any Diego Garcia inhabitants who might have thought this would only be a minor change to their way of life were quickly disabused of their optimism. Transmitter buildings, receiver buildings, a full military encampment, and the atoll's permanent runway were all under construction by the end of the year, and on Christmas Day, 1971, the Bob Hope Christmas Troupe arrived aboard a C-141J cargo transport, breaking in the runway for a good bit of caroling.\n\nBut as the US Navy's Seabees were enjoying their hot cocoa, the people of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago were suffering a very different fate. By the time Bob Hope's singers landed, most Chagossian inhabitants of Diego Garcia were already gone, with their entire population of about 1,500 islanders picked up and taken elsewhere. And we absolutely must be clear that this was not a willful or even a compensated departure for the islanders, but a forced expulsion.\n\nStarting in 1965, the Diego Garcia islanders had been systematically rounded up, processed, and directed to leave the island. First, Britain and the US declared that all Chagossians who were not on Diego Garcia at the time of their arrival would not be able to return regardless of the reason they had left. Not only that, but those remaining on the island were informed that they could not seek employment with the incoming naval base in order to stay. Then, a regime of import restrictions was used to create scarcity all up and down the atoll, taking away not just frivolous goods but fundamental ones. Then, the threats began; the islanders' beloved pet dogs were rounded up and killed, with a mix of poison, gas, burning, and bullets, and their homes were demolished, as ordered by the British commissioner of the Indian Ocean Territory, and carried out with the direct assistance of the US Navy. Finally, 1971's Immigration Ordinance No. 1 was passed, prohibiting all Chagossians from entering or remaining on the islands.\n\nWhen the time for evictions finally came, the Chagossians were mostly transported in the cargo holds of rusted-out ships, with some accounts of the islanders being forced to sleep on bird fertilizer. It should go without saying that this alone, done by British administrators to a mostly-black population whose ancestors had come to Diego Garcia as slaves, was already reminiscent of a long history of slavery and forced expulsion. Taken to the Seychelles, they were detained for a time until the British government decided what was to be done with them, and once a decision was made, they were loaded up again and shipped to Mauritius. There, instead of the homes and jobs they were promised, they found broken-down, dilapidated housing, formerly used by dock workers, with no access to clean water or electricity. Interviews with those who have survived, done by journalist John Pilger for Al Jazeera, describe the death of no fewer than twenty-six of Diego Garcia's families in those conditions, at least nine suicides, and several instances of girls being forced into prostitution on Mauritius in order to feed their families.\n\nTheir predicament wouldn't even be minimally addressed until 1982, a full decade or more after most had left Diego Garcia, and in the same year that Britain went to great lengths to protect and transport a roughly equivalent number of white islanders from the Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina. In that year, demonstrations by the Diego Garcia islanders in 1982 earned them compensation of less than 3,000 British pounds each. In exchange for those payments, Chagossians from not just Diego Garcia, but the entire archipelago, were expected to sign or thumbprint documents that gave up their right to return to the archipelago. Those documents, written in English and using legal terms that were never explained to the Chagossians, were apparently more than enough for the British government to feel as if they'd washed their hands of the matter. And even this, for the Chagossians of Mauritius, was better than what waited for those who sought refuge in the Seychelles. They, a population of 232 souls, received nothing.\n\nReturning to the island of Diego Garcia itself, the removal of the Chagossians set off a full militarization of the atoll. Within a couple of years of their departure, the naval base there featured an 8,000-foot runway, plus supply depots, personnel accommodations, and logistical support infrastructure. The lagoon was cleared out of obstructions, including coral reefs, in order to form a ship channel and a turning basin, and the airport was dramatically expanded to store aircraft for the long term. A few years later, the island was designated a Naval Support Facility, and its runway was expanded to 12,000 feet in order to accommodate the largest aircraft of America's military arsenal. Its lagoon, now partially built into a harbor, was expanded and used to dock a permanent fleet of some seventeen ships, all loaded up with enough equipment, ammunition, and other supplies to support a Marine Amphibious Brigade on a moment's notice for crisis response.\n\nIn many ways, the size and scale of operations on Diego Garcia were a reflection of the many setbacks the US faced around that time, a long list of which happened within relative proximity to the island. The fall of Saigon, the victory of the Khmer Rouge, Soviet buildup in the region, and more, all clarified to the United States and the United Kingdom that anything less than an island version of a citadel risked a sort of unpreparedness in the region that the US was unwilling to stomach. After the Iranian Revolution and the Iran Hostage Crisis, the US relied on Diego Garcia to host heavy bombers and dozens of ships, including some of the largest naval vessels in the world, plus storage for well over a million barrels of fuel, and when US bases in the Philippines closed in the early 1990s, the base only got bigger.\n\nDuring the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Diego Garcia was placed optimally to support the global coalition's response, and achieved a level of operational readiness throughout the conflict that went well above and beyond what the military, or the rest of the world, had expected. Diego Garcia was the only naval base to launch offensive operations during Operation Desert Storm, and its personnel were able to handle up to a 2000% increase in their workload during the crisis, without missing a beat. So, too, was it a launchpad for air operations in Afghanistan, with heavy bombers and tankers completing an eight-thousand-mile round trip in order to get it done. Far from being a deterrent, that eight-thousand-mile trip was the one most favored by the US military, and Diego Garcia's coalition aircraft dropped more ordnance on al-Qaeda and the Taliban than any other US military unit during the entire War on Terror. The island even hosted high-tech B-2 Spirit bombers in specialized, climate-controlled shelters, and at times had some of the highest concentration of B-2s in the world.\n\n## Enter the 21st Century\n\nToday, Diego Garcia remains under the control of the US military, and under the ownership of the United Kingdom. Amidst rising tensions with China, escalation between India and Pakistan, and innumerable crises in Africa and Asia, the base on Diego Garcia is an increasingly important asset for the United States and its Western partners, one of only a few major bases in that part of the world. Personnel stationed there live without their families present, reliant on back-and-forth flights to Singapore for transit in and out, and expected to hop onto one of those flights to receive things like dental care. The island does have a nine-hole golf course, though, so… there's something, we suppose.\n\nHowever, the question of \"what's being kept on Diego Garcia\" has a lot less to do with a golf course, and a lot more to do with nuclear weapons. The United States has a longstanding policy of not confirming or denying whether nuclear weapons are present aboard its aircraft, naval vessels, and ballistic-missile submarines, but with so many nuclear-capable assets stationed there, it seems rather unlikely that not a single warhead would have ever passed across Diego Garcia's sandy shores. The African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty claims to cover Diego Garcia, but neither the US nor the UK agree with that interpretation, and neither government has ever clarified whether nuclear weapons have ever been stored there.\n\nAnd nukes aren't the only unwelcome visitors on Diego Garcia, either—or at least, not allegedly. In 2015, a former colonel of the US Army, Lawrence Wilkerson, claimed that Diego Garcia had been used by the American Central Intelligence Agency for what he called \"nefarious activities.\" Wilkerson, who had, until recently, served as Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, gave this cryptic quote to Vice News: \"What I heard was more along the lines of using it as a transit location when perhaps other places were full or other places were deemed too dangerous or insecure, or unavailable at the moment […] So you might have a case where you simply go in and use a facility at Diego Garcia for a month or two weeks or whatever and you do your nefarious activities there.\"\n\nWhat Wilkerson was referring to was the kidnap-and-torture program used by the Central Intelligence Agency in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Essentially, Wilkerson alleged that Diego Garcia is, or was, home to a CIA black site, a location where undisclosed or hidden projects or programs are conducted away from the public eye. According to the United Nations, the CIA is believed to have formed at least twenty black sites around the world since 9/11, and potentially more. At these sites, global observers allege, detainees are tortured brutally in ways that we won't be going into here.\n\nBy the time Wilkerson made his statements, enough people around the world had heard of a CIA black site on Diego Garcia that a number of international sources were compelled to speak out. A UN official, Manfred Nowak, added that sometimes, CIA detainees are held and tortured on US ships in the Indian Ocean. One terrorist known as Hambali, who was believed to have been involved in a 2002 bombing in Bali that killed 202 people, is believed to have spent two months on Diego Garcia. Human rights organizations had also dug around on their own and found that at least two aircraft known to be involved with the CIA's rendition program flew in and out of the Diego Garcia airstrip. Most damning of all, US sources testified that a CIA report on its own use of torture, presented to the US Senate Intelligence Committee, referenced its use of Diego Garcia multiple times. As more information came out about the rumored black site, the world learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the so-called \"principal architect\" of the 9/11 attacks, spent time there while in CIA custody. Whether that site still exists today, we don't know, but when a US Senate intelligence report was released in 2014, detailing the CIA's torture programs, Diego Garcia was never mentioned. We'll leave it to you to assume whether that means the site never existed at all, or whether it was deemed important enough to keep hidden for later use.\n\nThen, there's the continued efforts of the Chagossian population and their backers to return to Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands, efforts that have been consistently rebuffed by the US and the UK. Although Britain's High Court in London ruled their expulsion illegal in 2000, Tony Blair's government avoided repercussions by bypassing the courts with an archaic trick of the monarchy, and when the High Court ruled that Chagossians should be allowed to return to their home, the British Foreign Office successfully appealed the decision. In the words of journalist John Pilger, who we mentioned earlier: \"I was in the House of Lords—where the court then sat on the day of the judgment. I have never seen such shame-faced judges in what was clearly a political decision.\"\n\nAs if that weren't enough, the British government then went on to add insult to injury, attempting to insulate themselves further against a Chagossian return by attempting to designate the waters around the archipelago as a nature reserve. This action, along with many others of the time, was revealed via a WikiLeaks dump that published a 2009 cable from a US embassy about the issue. In that cable, the embassy directly stated that the establishment of a marine reserve would be \"the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands' former inhabitants or descendants from resettling.\" These revelations were confirmed with the exposure of another cable, in which the British government wrote, \"[…] the establishment of a marine park—the world's largest—would in no way impinge on USG use of the BIOT\"—that's the British Indian Ocean Territory—\"including Diego Garcia, for military purposes.\" And later, in the same document: \"[…] the BIOT's former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.\" This reserve, the Chagos Marine Protected Area, was declared in 2010, although it would be ruled illegal by the Hague in 2015 and dissolved.\n\nIn the following years, Mauritius would go to war with Britain over ownership of the Chagos Archipelago, supported by their close ally India in claims that the islands should have already been reverted to Mauritian control. But in terms of its potential impact on the Chagossian islanders-in-exile, Mauritius isn't much better of an alternative. The Mauritian envoy to the United Nations has claimed that if Mauritius did regain sovereignty over the archipelago, Chagossians will be allowed back to some of the islands, but not Diego Garcia itself. Instead, they'd be placed on three islands over a hundred miles away. The archipelago features prominently in Mauritius' own internal squabbles, specifically between two political dynasties who have passed power back and forth in the last few decades. Whoever gets back sovereignty over the islands can lease Diego Garcia back to the Americans and make a whole lot of money, while also opening up fishing routes that are currently closed off.\n\nAnd even after all this, there's yet more controversy to discuss around Diego Garcia—specifically, a conspiracy theory naming the atoll as the final resting place of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on the eighth of March, 2014 while en route from Malaysia to China. The incident, still unexplained to this day, sparked mass speculation on what might have happened to the flight, and Diego Garcia has played a rather prominent role. In an exploration of the MH370 pilot's personal belongings, investigators discovered that he had programmed the location of Diego Garcia, and its landing strip, into his home flight simulator. The reason why he may have done so is unknown. Other theories range from the digitally vulnerable Boeing 777 having been taken over by hackers, to the flight being shot down by the United States when the pilot, hypothetically, brought it close to the island for his own purposes.\n\nThe island has also hosted a group of migrants for nearly two years, after a fishing boat was intercepted near the island in October 2021. Struggling to move under its own power, the boat was stuffed with eighty-nine Sri Lankan Tamils, who claimed they were fleeing persecution at home. According to maps, diary entries, and GPS coordinates found aboard the boat, its passengers had believed that they would be able to make it to Canada and seek asylum, but ran into rough weather and were forced to sail toward the nearest source of light. But after arriving to the island, and being placed into temporary accommodation, these eighty-nine people have basically been swallowed up by the base there. Unsuccessful in lobbying the commander of British forces on Diego Garcia for safe passage elsewhere, they have since lived in makeshift tent encampments, with reports of suicide attempts, sexual assaults, and rampant mental and physical health concerns among the migrants. They've also started to get company, with other boats in similar situations either intentionally or unintentionally ending up seeking help from Diego Garcia in the intervening months. With many of the migrants there claiming fears for their own safety if they were to go back to Sri Lanka, in part due to some of their past affiliations to the Tamil Tigers organization, their situation is in limbo, and hunger strikes, even ones involving the children at their encampment, have not led to any change for the sixty-or-so people who haven't yet been sent elsewhere. Said one migrant, when quoted by the BBC: \"We are the parrots; We are in a cage.\"\n\nAs for where things on Diego Garcia stand now, it's worth returning once more to the plight of the Diego Garcia islanders and the other Chagossians who were expelled from their homes, now over fifty years ago. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report detailing their forced removal from their island homes, and the degree to which the Chagossians had been deeply established on the islands prior to removal, with their own language, culture, and music. All this, contrasted with Britain's claims at the time of removal, that no people lived permanently on the Chagos Archipelago. The report brought Chagossian survivors and their families back into public consciousness, and calls for full reparations drew a response from both the US and the UK governments, although neither nation expressed any interest in a more comprehensive redress than what has already been done. This, according to the UK government, includes limited payments, education, community support, and sponsored trips back to the Chagossian Archipelago to visit—not nothing, but not even *slightly* the same thing as an actual plan to address the repercussions of Britain's actions.\n\nWith such a painful history, such a complex and shrouded situation in the present day, and so seemingly few points of compromise between the United States, the United Kingdom, Mauritius, India, and the Chagossians themselves, it looks as if the deeply uncomfortable set of compromises and realities around Diego Garcia will remain unchanged in the years to come. With American and British standing in the nations around the Indian Ocean only growing more contentious, it's unlikely that either nation would willfully relinquish their hold on the island, and so long as they keep it, the ancestral home of the Chagossian people will remain permanently out of their reach. It'll take a miracle to change that balance now, and of all the countless things that seem to weigh Diego Garcia down… miracles certainly aren't among them.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Diego Garcia, a small atoll in the Indian Ocean, has a complex history marked by colonial settlement, forced expulsion, and military use.\n- The island was settled by the French and British, with coconut plantations established and later managed by indentured servants.\n- In the 1960s, the UK and US agreed to use Diego Garcia for military purposes, leading to the forced expulsion of the Chagossian inhabitants.\n- The island has been a strategic military base, particularly during the Cold War, Gulf War, and War on Terror, hosting nuclear-capable assets.\n- Despite legal battles and international pressure, the Chagossians have not been allowed to return to Diego Garcia.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Where is Diego Garcia located?\n\nDiego Garcia is located in the Indian Ocean, nearly two thousand kilometers from the nearest continental landmass. It is situated on the southernmost tip of a massive underwater mountain range and is part of the Chagos Archipelago.\n\n### What is the size of Diego Garcia?\n\nDiego Garcia is a coral atoll with a total land area of just over thirty square kilometers. Only about 27 square kilometers of this area is dry land.\n\n### What is the climate like on Diego Garcia?\n\nDiego Garcia has an equatorial climate with warm temperatures year-round, hitting around thirty degrees Celsius on the warmest days. It has a clear wet season and dry season, with thunderstorms typically occurring on summer evenings. The island is also at almost no risk of cyclones compared to most of the Indian Ocean.\n\n### What is the history of settlement on Diego Garcia?\n\nDiego Garcia was first settled by France in the late 1770s, followed by the British East India Company in 1786. The island has seen various settlements and expulsions, including the forced removal of the Chagossian population in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for a military base.\n\n### What is the significance of Diego Garcia in modern geopolitics?\n\nDiego Garcia is a strategically important military base shared by the United States and the United Kingdom. It has been used for various military operations, including those in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The base is also suspected of housing nuclear weapons and alleged CIA black sites.\n\n### What happened to the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia?\n\nThe original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, known as the Chagossians, were forcibly expelled from the island between 1965 and 1973. They were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they faced poor living conditions and limited compensation.\n\n### What is the current status of the Chagossians' efforts to return to Diego Garcia?\n\nThe Chagossians have been fighting for the right to return to Diego Garcia for decades. Despite some legal victories, their efforts have been consistently rebuffed by the US and UK governments, which have cited military and environmental reasons for preventing their return.\n\n### What is the Chagos Marine Protected Area?\n\nThe Chagos Marine Protected Area was established in 2010 as a nature reserve around the Chagos Archipelago. It was later ruled illegal by the Hague in 2015 and dissolved. The reserve was seen as a way to prevent the Chagossians from resettling on the islands.\n\n### What is the controversy surrounding Diego Garcia and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?\n\nThere is a conspiracy theory suggesting that Diego Garcia might be the final resting place of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014. This theory is based on the discovery that the pilot had programmed the location of Diego Garcia into his home flight simulator.\n\n### What is the current use of Diego Garcia by the US military?\n\nDiego Garcia is currently used as a strategic military base by the US and UK. It hosts a variety of military assets, including aircraft, naval vessels, and storage facilities. The base has been involved in numerous military operations and is considered a key asset in the region.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Places video: Diego Garcia: The Most Controversial Island in the World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsLmrnuwYM4)\n- [https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/34127/ARB_settlement.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y](https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/34127/ARB_settlement.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)\n- [https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/15/human-rights-watch-report-reparation-chagos-diego-garcia/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/15/human-rights-watch-report-reparation-chagos-diego-garcia/)\n- [https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636](https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636)\n- [https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636](https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636)\n- [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/psp.1754](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/psp.1754)\n- [https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/2/25/how-britain-forcefully-depopulated-a-whole-archipelago](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/2/25/how-britain-forcefully-depopulated-a-whole-archipelago)\n- [https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2010/12/british-government-mauritius](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2010/12/british-government-mauritius)\n- [https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/seabee/explore/online-reading-room/historic-topics0/diego-garcia.html](https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/seabee/explore/online-reading-room/historic-topics0/diego-garcia.html)\n- [https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/projects/dynamo/documents/history.html](https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/projects/dynamo/documents/history.html)\n- [https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/About/History/#:~:text=Diego%20Garcia%20was%20discovered%20by,ship's%20captain%20or%20the%20navigator](https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/About/History/#:~:text=Diego%20Garcia%20was%20discovered%20by,ship's%20captain%20or%20the%20navigator)\n- [https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/british-indian-ocean-territory/](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/british-indian-ocean-territory/)\n- [https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/overcoming-the-diego-garcia-stalemate/](https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/overcoming-the-diego-garcia-stalemate/)\n- [https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/mapping-cia-black-sites/](https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/mapping-cia-black-sites/)\n- [http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/secretdetentionmap.jpg](http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/secretdetentionmap.jpg)\n- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/cia-interrogation-diego-garcia-lawrence-wilkerson](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/cia-interrogation-diego-garcia-lawrence-wilkerson)\n- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/13/diego-garcia-cia-us-torture-rendition](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/13/diego-garcia-cia-us-torture-rendition)\n- [https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/09/asia/chagos-islands-feature-intl/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/09/asia/chagos-islands-feature-intl/index.html)\n- [https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-diego-garcia-air-base-indian-ocean-2019-8#from-1967-to-1973-the-british-evicted-the-entire-population-of-the-chagos-islands-known-as-the-ilois-to-make-way-for-the-us-air-base-10](https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-diego-garcia-air-base-indian-ocean-2019-8#from-1967-to-1973-the-british-evicted-the-entire-population-of-the-chagos-islands-known-as-the-ilois-to-make-way-for-the-us-air-base-10)\n- [https://veteranlife.com/military-history/diego-garcia](https://veteranlife.com/military-history/diego-garcia)\n- [https://www.britannica.com/place/Diego-Garcia-island-Indian-Ocean](https://www.britannica.com/place/Diego-Garcia-island-Indian-Ocean)\n- [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65777863](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65777863)\n- [https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/](https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/)\n- [https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/navy-support-facility-diego-garcia](https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/navy-support-facility-diego-garcia)\n- [https://inkstickmedia.com/the-us-base-at-diego-garcia-holds-a-dirty-secret/](https://inkstickmedia.com/the-us-base-at-diego-garcia-holds-a-dirty-secret/)\n- [https://amti.csis.org/decolonizing-diego-garcia-a-boon-for-india/](https://amti.csis.org/decolonizing-diego-garcia-a-boon-for-india/)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Diego_Garcia_Abandoned_Plantation.jpg) by Steve Swayne from Maleny, Australia / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage"
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<!-- aeo:section start="introduction" -->
## Introduction

Deep in the heart of the Indian Ocean, nearly two thousand kilometers from the nearest continental landmass, lies the humble island of Diego Garcia. A modest, ring-shaped atoll of just over thirty kilometers squared in total land area, Diego Garcia snakes through the water like any one of the hundreds of similar islands scattered around the world. View it from thirty thousand feet, and it might seem so tiny, so utterly inconsequential that it only exists at all because no wave has yet come by and swept it away.

But the story of Diego Garcia is not just the story of any old island. From its early settlement by France, and then by the British East India Company, to the expulsion of a community who had made the atoll their home for generations, to the immense geopolitical relevance of Diego Garcia in the modern world, the island has been a lightning rod for controversy for the better part of three centuries. This story winds through indentured servitude, forced exile, military occupation, WikiLeaks, environmental conservation, and even an alleged CIA black site, all in service to the island of Diego Garcia.

<!-- aeo:section end="introduction" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="where-in-the-world-is-diego-garcia" -->
## Where in the World is Diego Garcia?

The voyage to Diego Garcia is an arduous one, no matter which way you slice it. Embark on a journey to the island from the Tanzanian coastline, and you'll have to sail a ship over 3,500 kilometers of nearly entirely open ocean. Set sail from Australia, and the journey's even longer, just short of five thousand kilometers. Your best bet is to leave from the city of Kanniyakumari, India, but even then, you'll sail a line nearly directly south for eighteen hundred kilometers before you can finally set foot on dry land.

Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, situated on the southernmost tip of a massive underwater mountain range. Along that range, you'll find the Maldives, the Indian island chain of Lakshadweep, and the Chagos Archipelago, of which Diego Garcia is the largest among some sixty individual islands. On the scale of global atolls—a type of ring-shaped, coral-rimmed island encircling a lagoon—Diego Garcia is the largest in the world. However, that certainly doesn't mean that it's big; although it occupies about 174 square kilometers in total, just a small portion of that, 27 square kilometers or ten square miles, are actually dry land. Circling around a large central lagoon in a shape that, if you squint a bit, looks almost like a bent version of Greenland, Diego Garcia is no more than a couple of hundred meters wide in some parts. The atoll, plus a few scattered islands in the immediate vicinity, sit barely above the surface of the sea, enduring frequent earthquakes that, at times, can measure at a 4 or higher on the Richter scale.

Perhaps the most pleasant way to imagine Diego Garcia is to see it almost as a vacation spot. Its equatorial climate is warm all day and night, hitting around thirty degrees Celsius, eighty-six Fahrenheit, on the warmest days of the year, and despite its humidity, the island is washed in a constant westerly breeze that rarely ventures above ten knots. It's got a clear wet season and dry season; thunderstorms typically sweep through the area on summer evenings, and as far as extreme weather goes, it's at almost no risk of cyclones compared to most of the Indian Ocean. There are no mountains or cliff faces to navigate, either; the highest point on the atoll is all of 22 feet, seven meters, above sea level. Rainwater can be easily collected in cisterns or taken from a few natural depressions, and what little inland area exists on Diego Garcia is largely overtaken by tropical wetlands, with the occasional marsh or scrubland. The outer-facing and lagoon-facing edges, of course, feature enough sandy beaches to make a sunbather weep with joy.

The story of Diego Garcia is the story of an island that has been fundamentally altered by the presence of humans, but in order to really understand that story in full, we've got to first take a look at what the island would have been like before people showed up. Diego Garcia was completely uninhabited before its discovery by Portuguese explorer Pedro Mascarenhas, although it may have been host to the occasional stranded prehistoric fisherman or have been visited by Austronesian or Arab voyagers. As we've just described, the atoll is teeming with plant life, but like many of the islands of this area, there are no mammal, land reptile, or amphibian species native to Diego Garcia. Instead, it's a critical breeding ground for seabirds and both hawksbill and green turtles, while its beaches are ruled by the surprisingly hefty coconut crab and the warrior crab. It's one small part of a sprawling oceanic ecosystem, one that likely existed without much change for millennia before humans arrived.

<!-- aeo:section end="where-in-the-world-is-diego-garcia" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="life-before-1967" -->
## Life Before 1967

After Pedro Mascarenhas and his ship arrived at the atoll in 1512, the first order of business was to give the place a name. It wouldn't have been a bad guess when you first started in on this story to assume that the island of Diego Garcia was named after some guy named Diego Garcia—but no such luck. The atoll was first dubbed Dom Garcia in honor of the Portuguese nobleman Garcia de Noronha, the benefactor who had funded Pedro Mascarenhas' voyage. Although the atoll was largely forgotten after Mascarenhas' departure, the "Garcia" name came back in 1544, when another explorer rediscovered it. This guy's name *was* Diego Garcia, specifically Diego Garcia de Moguer, and he named the island after himself, leading to a lot of confusion on the maps of the time. Making matters worse, a prominent map that did depict the atoll featured a misspelled note in the area of the island, which was meant to say "deo gracias," or "thank God," and even though the first English-language map that depicted the island called it Diego Garcia, this was likely a misreading of either "D. Gratia" or "Dio Gratia" on a Portuguese-language map. But by this time, the atoll had already stumbled its way into the name "Diego Garcia," and when that name was picked up by subsequent mapmakers, it became as good as official. All this, to disabuse you of the thought that prior generations of explorers had their shit together.

Regardless of the name it carried, Diego Garcia went uninhabited until the late 1770s. By then, the atoll and the rest of the Chagos Archipelago were under the administration of the French, and a short-lived settlement cropped up there courtesy of one Monsieur Dupuit de la Faye. As best as historians can tell, not much went on in this settlement except for a bit of fishing and coconut-collecting, which, now that we think of it, is not a euphemism but really should be. French surveyors had found the atoll somewhat useless in terms of an expanded settlement; in the words of one Lieutenant La Fontaine, who appraised the island in 1770, "A great number of vessels might anchor there"—meaning in Diego Garcia's lagoon—"but the principle object is wanting: for though it is covered with woods, it is not provided with fresh water." By 1786, Diego Garcia's early settlers were already gone, and so the atoll was abandoned again when, in that year, the British East India Company came calling. Despite their attempt to settle the island, with an initial community of some 275 people, a nearby shipwreck of another East India Company ship all but doomed the settlement when another 250 survivors clambered ashore, desperately in need of food and water. By now, travelers to the area had already learned that shipwrecks were common on the great underwater reefs that surrounded the atoll at this time. The castaways' drain on supplies ended up making the settlement untenable, and the East India Company, too, picked up and left. France had actually sent a naval frigate to try and boot the British off the island, but by the time it arrived, they were already gone. Next, Diego Garcia was a destination used by the French colony of Mauritius, who decided to maroon some lepers there, and a few years later, France moved back in, this time bringing slave labor to the atoll in an effort to start a coconut plantation. Two ships, each carrying some twenty-five men as well as slaves, were able to establish themselves on the island and form a profitable settlement, this one producing sun-dried coconut flesh, or copra, and coconut oil. With their success, more oil manufacturers arrived, and after Mauritius continued to send lepers to the island, it developed several smaller communities, including a leper colony.

By 1814, Diego Garcia passed from French control into British hands for good, courtesy of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded a number of French territories over to the Crown after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. By then, the atoll had already proven its worth as a small plantation colony, and it was split into several plantations across the island: East Point, Minni Minni, and Pointe Marianne, with small pockets of workers scattered in villages across the rest of the island. Unfortunately for the Diego Garcia ecosystem, but predictably, the advent of large-scale plantation farming led much of the island's wetland forests to be razed to the ground, and a number of new plant and animal species were introduced to the island. Although we don't know exactly when each new species was introduced, we know that there are today about 280 terrestrial plant species on the island, compared to 36 that would have been there prior to the introduction of humans, and rats, Sicilian donkeys, horses, dogs, housecats, cane toads, and chickens formed their own version of the Diego Garcia ecosystem, grafted on top of the one that had existed there before.

With the arrival of the British came the British policy of abolition of the slave trade, but with so many former slaves now out of work and without other means to support themselves or leave, they were kept on as indentured servants working the same plantations as before. The island was surveyed and developed further, and with its high potential to generate coconut oil, compared to the relatively few resources it demanded, Diego Garcia became more and more profitable. Judging by the available data on just how much coconut oil was being produced at this time, it's likely that nearly the entire island was overtaken by growing operations, and it was able to ship out several times more of its product than comparably sized islands in the area. By 1883, the three plantations on the island had been united under the command of a single manager, a man named James Spurs, who instituted strict policies on liquor consumption, sent quota expectations through the roof, and was apparently able to keep the island in check anyhow, mostly owing to what period sources describe as his competency and benevolence toward the island's workers.

Around this same time, portions of the island were set aside as coal depots for ships making the long journey across the Indian Ocean, with some 180 ships a year being fueled within a couple years of the operation's start. So as not to infringe on the work of the plantations there, visiting ships were prohibited from allowing their crews and passengers to set foot on the island other than to refuel, but these guidelines were quickly and frequently violated by large ships filled with migrants, whose crews had trouble keeping everyone hemmed in when land was in sight. The rise in unlawful entries led to the establishment of a police force, which in turn exacerbated the labor disputes already ongoing between the plantations and their workers. In the words of one G. C. Bourne, who visited the island in 1886, speaking about a friend who had visited previously: "Mr. Leconte told me that on his arrival on the island three years ago, he found the Negroes in a most insubordinate condition, and that within a month of his landing, his verandah was besieged by a body of thirty men, armed with knives and bludgeons, who declared that they would not leave the place until they had taken his life. Luckily for him they were as cowardly as they were insolent, and he was able to keep them at bay presenting a revolver, until he had succeeded in reducing them to a more reasonable state of mind." We can only imagine, in retrospect, what the context behind such an act may have been, and what the actual objective of thirty armed, organized plantation workers may have been.

It wasn't long after this point that coaling operations on Diego Garcia were shut down. Not only had they led to turmoil on the island, but the whole endeavor had been unprofitable too, and before long, the atoll was strictly dedicated to providing coconut products again. A chapel was built on Diego Garcia, then a church, then a jetty and light railway, and then a center of commerce at East Point, in a sign of the growing economic stability—or even economic power—of this little island. New technologies made the Diego Garcia plantations favor production of copra instead of coconut oil, and by this time, it's believed that production was reaching its eventual maximum, some 5.3 million coconuts yielded per year—just about half the coconut production of the entire British Indian Ocean Territory.

But coconuts weren't the only reason that Diego Garcia mattered at the turn of the twentieth century; with global war on the horizon, its spacious lagoon, located way out in the middle of nowhere, was a perfect oceanic anchorage for any one of the world's major powers to, say, park a battleship or two in advance of major hostilities. In 1899, the atoll hosted the German warships *Bismarck* and *Marie*, and the British warship *Hampshire*, and after war broke out in 1914, a German ship, the *Emden*, stopped over at Diego Garcia to refuel and clean while it was being chased by English warships. Although Diego Garcia was very much a British protectorate at that time, and thus on the other side of the war, word hadn't yet reached the island that there was a war at all, so the *Emden*'s damage was explained away as having come from storms, and its officers were wined and dined before departing just in advance of their British pursuers. By and large, World War I avoided the Indian Ocean, and Diego Garcia was not otherwise involved in the conflict, but in World War II, it was used to support naval craft, refuel flying boats like the Catalina, and otherwise keep British operations going in the area.

<!-- aeo:section end="life-before-1967" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="forcible-expulsion-and-militarization" -->
## Forcible Expulsion and Militarization

Up until this point, Diego Garcia had been a quiet, stable settlement that was, if not frozen in time, then at the very least resistant to change. Increased productivity had raised the overall quality of life on the atoll, the occasional visitors by sea had added to island life in both positive and negative ways, but all told, the status quo on Diego Garcia hadn't substantively changed in well over a hundred years. Through modernization, through abolition, through the Great Depression and two World Wars, Diego Garcia carried on as it always had.

But it was the arrival of the Cold War that would change everything on Diego Garcia, not in those first few desperate years of factional alignment and nuclear development, but in the years that immediately followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1965, the British government detached Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Archipelago from the oversight of Mauritius, and instead incorporated it into the British Indian Ocean Territory, just in time for it to be subject to an agreement made with the United States. According to this pact, both nations would share free, unrestricted use of the British Indian Ocean Territory for military purposes, for a period of at least fifty years.

As we'd mentioned before, Diego Garcia has had the potential to be militarily significant since it was first charted. If, say, fuel could be stored there, or supplies, it could be a valuable depot way out in the ocean, and its large lagoon ensured that numerous ships could potentially stay over, but in an era of ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and ships with ranges of up to thousands of kilometers before refueling, plus the arrival of the first nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, an island like this was a massive strategic asset for whomever controlled it. Similar to how Soviet ties to the island of Cuba made it a regional player in the affairs of Central and South America, a US/UK-controlled naval base at Diego Garcia could allow both nations to extend their influence all up and down East Africa, South Asia, the Philippines, and Australia. Not only that, but it could serve as a valuable home base in American efforts to interdict Russian oil moving out of the Persian Gulf. With the Vietnam War still very much an active conflict, plus a whole range of other unfriendly nations in the area, the value of a militarized Diego Garcia was apparently too great to ignore.

But after they signed their compact with the Americans, the British military didn't stay for long. By 1968, Britain had made public its intent to withdraw from all military holdings east of the Suez Canal, including not just Malaysia and Singapore, but Diego Garcia as well. Although this decision was ultimately an unavoidable one for the waning British Empire, beset as they were by a stark economic decline and forced to recalibrate toward Europe, it had the collateral effect of raising questions about what an Indian Ocean without Britain's influence would look like. This so-called "Vacuum in the Indian Ocean" didn't last for long, of course; after all, the United States and the Soviet Union both had something of a reflexive reaction to send military assets to any corner of the world that didn't seem sufficiently involved in their global standoff. Predictably, this turned into yet another small arms race in a war of many arms races, and by the time Britain left the area, the Americans and the Soviets had more than filled in the gaps.

Diego Garcia was a particularly thorny issue during this time, on both sides of the divide. American logic at the time held that the Soviets would try anything to keep America from establishing a large-scale naval presence, for which Diego Garcia was something of an ideal center if it could be consistently resupplied, while the Soviets were particularly concerned about the US turning the atoll into a communications base. If that were to happen, the Soviets believed, then it would be because Diego Garcia had become a command-and-control center to coordinate the operations of ballistic-missile submarines in the Indian Ocean, submarines whose missiles would, of course, be pointed at the Soviet Union. America never acknowledged whether or not these submarines were present, Russia began dispatching its own warships to the Indian Ocean much more frequently, and the "Vacuum in the Indian Ocean" quickly became the least of anyone's concerns.

Now, even with all this upheaval in the region, Diego Garcia's plantations had been able to survive, harvesting coconuts and churning out copra oil at an average of four million nuts a year. But all that changed on January 23, 1971, when a nine-man team from the US Navy arrived to survey potential locations for a beach landing. Within two months, those nine men would swell to over two hundred, clearing beaches, installing navigational aids for incoming ships, and mapping the underwater areas under both the lagoon and the seas surrounding Diego Garcia. By March 24, 1971, the Navy broke ground on its so-called US Naval Communication Facility Diego Garcia, along with a nearby runway—first an interim version, and later, a fully functional, permanent military airstrip.

Then, full construction began, and any Diego Garcia inhabitants who might have thought this would only be a minor change to their way of life were quickly disabused of their optimism. Transmitter buildings, receiver buildings, a full military encampment, and the atoll's permanent runway were all under construction by the end of the year, and on Christmas Day, 1971, the Bob Hope Christmas Troupe arrived aboard a C-141J cargo transport, breaking in the runway for a good bit of caroling.

But as the US Navy's Seabees were enjoying their hot cocoa, the people of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago were suffering a very different fate. By the time Bob Hope's singers landed, most Chagossian inhabitants of Diego Garcia were already gone, with their entire population of about 1,500 islanders picked up and taken elsewhere. And we absolutely must be clear that this was not a willful or even a compensated departure for the islanders, but a forced expulsion.

Starting in 1965, the Diego Garcia islanders had been systematically rounded up, processed, and directed to leave the island. First, Britain and the US declared that all Chagossians who were not on Diego Garcia at the time of their arrival would not be able to return regardless of the reason they had left. Not only that, but those remaining on the island were informed that they could not seek employment with the incoming naval base in order to stay. Then, a regime of import restrictions was used to create scarcity all up and down the atoll, taking away not just frivolous goods but fundamental ones. Then, the threats began; the islanders' beloved pet dogs were rounded up and killed, with a mix of poison, gas, burning, and bullets, and their homes were demolished, as ordered by the British commissioner of the Indian Ocean Territory, and carried out with the direct assistance of the US Navy. Finally, 1971's Immigration Ordinance No. 1 was passed, prohibiting all Chagossians from entering or remaining on the islands.

When the time for evictions finally came, the Chagossians were mostly transported in the cargo holds of rusted-out ships, with some accounts of the islanders being forced to sleep on bird fertilizer. It should go without saying that this alone, done by British administrators to a mostly-black population whose ancestors had come to Diego Garcia as slaves, was already reminiscent of a long history of slavery and forced expulsion. Taken to the Seychelles, they were detained for a time until the British government decided what was to be done with them, and once a decision was made, they were loaded up again and shipped to Mauritius. There, instead of the homes and jobs they were promised, they found broken-down, dilapidated housing, formerly used by dock workers, with no access to clean water or electricity. Interviews with those who have survived, done by journalist John Pilger for Al Jazeera, describe the death of no fewer than twenty-six of Diego Garcia's families in those conditions, at least nine suicides, and several instances of girls being forced into prostitution on Mauritius in order to feed their families.

Their predicament wouldn't even be minimally addressed until 1982, a full decade or more after most had left Diego Garcia, and in the same year that Britain went to great lengths to protect and transport a roughly equivalent number of white islanders from the Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina. In that year, demonstrations by the Diego Garcia islanders in 1982 earned them compensation of less than 3,000 British pounds each. In exchange for those payments, Chagossians from not just Diego Garcia, but the entire archipelago, were expected to sign or thumbprint documents that gave up their right to return to the archipelago. Those documents, written in English and using legal terms that were never explained to the Chagossians, were apparently more than enough for the British government to feel as if they'd washed their hands of the matter. And even this, for the Chagossians of Mauritius, was better than what waited for those who sought refuge in the Seychelles. They, a population of 232 souls, received nothing.

Returning to the island of Diego Garcia itself, the removal of the Chagossians set off a full militarization of the atoll. Within a couple of years of their departure, the naval base there featured an 8,000-foot runway, plus supply depots, personnel accommodations, and logistical support infrastructure. The lagoon was cleared out of obstructions, including coral reefs, in order to form a ship channel and a turning basin, and the airport was dramatically expanded to store aircraft for the long term. A few years later, the island was designated a Naval Support Facility, and its runway was expanded to 12,000 feet in order to accommodate the largest aircraft of America's military arsenal. Its lagoon, now partially built into a harbor, was expanded and used to dock a permanent fleet of some seventeen ships, all loaded up with enough equipment, ammunition, and other supplies to support a Marine Amphibious Brigade on a moment's notice for crisis response.

In many ways, the size and scale of operations on Diego Garcia were a reflection of the many setbacks the US faced around that time, a long list of which happened within relative proximity to the island. The fall of Saigon, the victory of the Khmer Rouge, Soviet buildup in the region, and more, all clarified to the United States and the United Kingdom that anything less than an island version of a citadel risked a sort of unpreparedness in the region that the US was unwilling to stomach. After the Iranian Revolution and the Iran Hostage Crisis, the US relied on Diego Garcia to host heavy bombers and dozens of ships, including some of the largest naval vessels in the world, plus storage for well over a million barrels of fuel, and when US bases in the Philippines closed in the early 1990s, the base only got bigger.

During the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Diego Garcia was placed optimally to support the global coalition's response, and achieved a level of operational readiness throughout the conflict that went well above and beyond what the military, or the rest of the world, had expected. Diego Garcia was the only naval base to launch offensive operations during Operation Desert Storm, and its personnel were able to handle up to a 2000% increase in their workload during the crisis, without missing a beat. So, too, was it a launchpad for air operations in Afghanistan, with heavy bombers and tankers completing an eight-thousand-mile round trip in order to get it done. Far from being a deterrent, that eight-thousand-mile trip was the one most favored by the US military, and Diego Garcia's coalition aircraft dropped more ordnance on al-Qaeda and the Taliban than any other US military unit during the entire War on Terror. The island even hosted high-tech B-2 Spirit bombers in specialized, climate-controlled shelters, and at times had some of the highest concentration of B-2s in the world.

<!-- aeo:section end="forcible-expulsion-and-militarization" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="enter-the-21st-century" -->
## Enter the 21st Century

Today, Diego Garcia remains under the control of the US military, and under the ownership of the United Kingdom. Amidst rising tensions with China, escalation between India and Pakistan, and innumerable crises in Africa and Asia, the base on Diego Garcia is an increasingly important asset for the United States and its Western partners, one of only a few major bases in that part of the world. Personnel stationed there live without their families present, reliant on back-and-forth flights to Singapore for transit in and out, and expected to hop onto one of those flights to receive things like dental care. The island does have a nine-hole golf course, though, so… there's something, we suppose.

However, the question of "what's being kept on Diego Garcia" has a lot less to do with a golf course, and a lot more to do with nuclear weapons. The United States has a longstanding policy of not confirming or denying whether nuclear weapons are present aboard its aircraft, naval vessels, and ballistic-missile submarines, but with so many nuclear-capable assets stationed there, it seems rather unlikely that not a single warhead would have ever passed across Diego Garcia's sandy shores. The African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty claims to cover Diego Garcia, but neither the US nor the UK agree with that interpretation, and neither government has ever clarified whether nuclear weapons have ever been stored there.

And nukes aren't the only unwelcome visitors on Diego Garcia, either—or at least, not allegedly. In 2015, a former colonel of the US Army, Lawrence Wilkerson, claimed that Diego Garcia had been used by the American Central Intelligence Agency for what he called "nefarious activities." Wilkerson, who had, until recently, served as Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, gave this cryptic quote to Vice News: "What I heard was more along the lines of using it as a transit location when perhaps other places were full or other places were deemed too dangerous or insecure, or unavailable at the moment […] So you might have a case where you simply go in and use a facility at Diego Garcia for a month or two weeks or whatever and you do your nefarious activities there."

What Wilkerson was referring to was the kidnap-and-torture program used by the Central Intelligence Agency in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Essentially, Wilkerson alleged that Diego Garcia is, or was, home to a CIA black site, a location where undisclosed or hidden projects or programs are conducted away from the public eye. According to the United Nations, the CIA is believed to have formed at least twenty black sites around the world since 9/11, and potentially more. At these sites, global observers allege, detainees are tortured brutally in ways that we won't be going into here.

By the time Wilkerson made his statements, enough people around the world had heard of a CIA black site on Diego Garcia that a number of international sources were compelled to speak out. A UN official, Manfred Nowak, added that sometimes, CIA detainees are held and tortured on US ships in the Indian Ocean. One terrorist known as Hambali, who was believed to have been involved in a 2002 bombing in Bali that killed 202 people, is believed to have spent two months on Diego Garcia. Human rights organizations had also dug around on their own and found that at least two aircraft known to be involved with the CIA's rendition program flew in and out of the Diego Garcia airstrip. Most damning of all, US sources testified that a CIA report on its own use of torture, presented to the US Senate Intelligence Committee, referenced its use of Diego Garcia multiple times. As more information came out about the rumored black site, the world learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the so-called "principal architect" of the 9/11 attacks, spent time there while in CIA custody. Whether that site still exists today, we don't know, but when a US Senate intelligence report was released in 2014, detailing the CIA's torture programs, Diego Garcia was never mentioned. We'll leave it to you to assume whether that means the site never existed at all, or whether it was deemed important enough to keep hidden for later use.

Then, there's the continued efforts of the Chagossian population and their backers to return to Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands, efforts that have been consistently rebuffed by the US and the UK. Although Britain's High Court in London ruled their expulsion illegal in 2000, Tony Blair's government avoided repercussions by bypassing the courts with an archaic trick of the monarchy, and when the High Court ruled that Chagossians should be allowed to return to their home, the British Foreign Office successfully appealed the decision. In the words of journalist John Pilger, who we mentioned earlier: "I was in the House of Lords—where the court then sat on the day of the judgment. I have never seen such shame-faced judges in what was clearly a political decision."

As if that weren't enough, the British government then went on to add insult to injury, attempting to insulate themselves further against a Chagossian return by attempting to designate the waters around the archipelago as a nature reserve. This action, along with many others of the time, was revealed via a WikiLeaks dump that published a 2009 cable from a US embassy about the issue. In that cable, the embassy directly stated that the establishment of a marine reserve would be "the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands' former inhabitants or descendants from resettling." These revelations were confirmed with the exposure of another cable, in which the British government wrote, "[…] the establishment of a marine park—the world's largest—would in no way impinge on USG use of the BIOT"—that's the British Indian Ocean Territory—"including Diego Garcia, for military purposes." And later, in the same document: "[…] the BIOT's former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve." This reserve, the Chagos Marine Protected Area, was declared in 2010, although it would be ruled illegal by the Hague in 2015 and dissolved.

In the following years, Mauritius would go to war with Britain over ownership of the Chagos Archipelago, supported by their close ally India in claims that the islands should have already been reverted to Mauritian control. But in terms of its potential impact on the Chagossian islanders-in-exile, Mauritius isn't much better of an alternative. The Mauritian envoy to the United Nations has claimed that if Mauritius did regain sovereignty over the archipelago, Chagossians will be allowed back to some of the islands, but not Diego Garcia itself. Instead, they'd be placed on three islands over a hundred miles away. The archipelago features prominently in Mauritius' own internal squabbles, specifically between two political dynasties who have passed power back and forth in the last few decades. Whoever gets back sovereignty over the islands can lease Diego Garcia back to the Americans and make a whole lot of money, while also opening up fishing routes that are currently closed off.

And even after all this, there's yet more controversy to discuss around Diego Garcia—specifically, a conspiracy theory naming the atoll as the final resting place of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on the eighth of March, 2014 while en route from Malaysia to China. The incident, still unexplained to this day, sparked mass speculation on what might have happened to the flight, and Diego Garcia has played a rather prominent role. In an exploration of the MH370 pilot's personal belongings, investigators discovered that he had programmed the location of Diego Garcia, and its landing strip, into his home flight simulator. The reason why he may have done so is unknown. Other theories range from the digitally vulnerable Boeing 777 having been taken over by hackers, to the flight being shot down by the United States when the pilot, hypothetically, brought it close to the island for his own purposes.

The island has also hosted a group of migrants for nearly two years, after a fishing boat was intercepted near the island in October 2021. Struggling to move under its own power, the boat was stuffed with eighty-nine Sri Lankan Tamils, who claimed they were fleeing persecution at home. According to maps, diary entries, and GPS coordinates found aboard the boat, its passengers had believed that they would be able to make it to Canada and seek asylum, but ran into rough weather and were forced to sail toward the nearest source of light. But after arriving to the island, and being placed into temporary accommodation, these eighty-nine people have basically been swallowed up by the base there. Unsuccessful in lobbying the commander of British forces on Diego Garcia for safe passage elsewhere, they have since lived in makeshift tent encampments, with reports of suicide attempts, sexual assaults, and rampant mental and physical health concerns among the migrants. They've also started to get company, with other boats in similar situations either intentionally or unintentionally ending up seeking help from Diego Garcia in the intervening months. With many of the migrants there claiming fears for their own safety if they were to go back to Sri Lanka, in part due to some of their past affiliations to the Tamil Tigers organization, their situation is in limbo, and hunger strikes, even ones involving the children at their encampment, have not led to any change for the sixty-or-so people who haven't yet been sent elsewhere. Said one migrant, when quoted by the BBC: "We are the parrots; We are in a cage."

As for where things on Diego Garcia stand now, it's worth returning once more to the plight of the Diego Garcia islanders and the other Chagossians who were expelled from their homes, now over fifty years ago. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report detailing their forced removal from their island homes, and the degree to which the Chagossians had been deeply established on the islands prior to removal, with their own language, culture, and music. All this, contrasted with Britain's claims at the time of removal, that no people lived permanently on the Chagos Archipelago. The report brought Chagossian survivors and their families back into public consciousness, and calls for full reparations drew a response from both the US and the UK governments, although neither nation expressed any interest in a more comprehensive redress than what has already been done. This, according to the UK government, includes limited payments, education, community support, and sponsored trips back to the Chagossian Archipelago to visit—not nothing, but not even *slightly* the same thing as an actual plan to address the repercussions of Britain's actions.

With such a painful history, such a complex and shrouded situation in the present day, and so seemingly few points of compromise between the United States, the United Kingdom, Mauritius, India, and the Chagossians themselves, it looks as if the deeply uncomfortable set of compromises and realities around Diego Garcia will remain unchanged in the years to come. With American and British standing in the nations around the Indian Ocean only growing more contentious, it's unlikely that either nation would willfully relinquish their hold on the island, and so long as they keep it, the ancestral home of the Chagossian people will remain permanently out of their reach. It'll take a miracle to change that balance now, and of all the countless things that seem to weigh Diego Garcia down… miracles certainly aren't among them.

<!-- aeo:section end="enter-the-21st-century" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways

- Diego Garcia, a small atoll in the Indian Ocean, has a complex history marked by colonial settlement, forced expulsion, and military use.
- The island was settled by the French and British, with coconut plantations established and later managed by indentured servants.
- In the 1960s, the UK and US agreed to use Diego Garcia for military purposes, leading to the forced expulsion of the Chagossian inhabitants.
- The island has been a strategic military base, particularly during the Cold War, Gulf War, and War on Terror, hosting nuclear-capable assets.
- Despite legal battles and international pressure, the Chagossians have not been allowed to return to Diego Garcia.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### Where is Diego Garcia located?

Diego Garcia is located in the Indian Ocean, nearly two thousand kilometers from the nearest continental landmass. It is situated on the southernmost tip of a massive underwater mountain range and is part of the Chagos Archipelago.

### What is the size of Diego Garcia?

Diego Garcia is a coral atoll with a total land area of just over thirty square kilometers. Only about 27 square kilometers of this area is dry land.

### What is the climate like on Diego Garcia?

Diego Garcia has an equatorial climate with warm temperatures year-round, hitting around thirty degrees Celsius on the warmest days. It has a clear wet season and dry season, with thunderstorms typically occurring on summer evenings. The island is also at almost no risk of cyclones compared to most of the Indian Ocean.

### What is the history of settlement on Diego Garcia?

Diego Garcia was first settled by France in the late 1770s, followed by the British East India Company in 1786. The island has seen various settlements and expulsions, including the forced removal of the Chagossian population in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for a military base.

### What is the significance of Diego Garcia in modern geopolitics?

Diego Garcia is a strategically important military base shared by the United States and the United Kingdom. It has been used for various military operations, including those in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The base is also suspected of housing nuclear weapons and alleged CIA black sites.

### What happened to the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia?

The original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, known as the Chagossians, were forcibly expelled from the island between 1965 and 1973. They were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they faced poor living conditions and limited compensation.

### What is the current status of the Chagossians' efforts to return to Diego Garcia?

The Chagossians have been fighting for the right to return to Diego Garcia for decades. Despite some legal victories, their efforts have been consistently rebuffed by the US and UK governments, which have cited military and environmental reasons for preventing their return.

### What is the Chagos Marine Protected Area?

The Chagos Marine Protected Area was established in 2010 as a nature reserve around the Chagos Archipelago. It was later ruled illegal by the Hague in 2015 and dissolved. The reserve was seen as a way to prevent the Chagossians from resettling on the islands.

### What is the controversy surrounding Diego Garcia and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

There is a conspiracy theory suggesting that Diego Garcia might be the final resting place of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014. This theory is based on the discovery that the pilot had programmed the location of Diego Garcia into his home flight simulator.

### What is the current use of Diego Garcia by the US military?

Diego Garcia is currently used as a strategic military base by the US and UK. It hosts a variety of military assets, including aircraft, naval vessels, and storage facilities. The base has been involved in numerous military operations and is considered a key asset in the region.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

- [Original Places video: Diego Garcia: The Most Controversial Island in the World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsLmrnuwYM4)
- [https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/34127/ARB_settlement.pdf?sequence=1&amp;isAllowed=y](https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/34127/ARB_settlement.pdf?sequence=1&amp;isAllowed=y)
- [https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/15/human-rights-watch-report-reparation-chagos-diego-garcia/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/15/human-rights-watch-report-reparation-chagos-diego-garcia/)
- [https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636](https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636)
- [https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636](https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-and-uk-worked-together-to-recolonise-the-chagos-islands-and-evict-chagossians-177636)
- [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/psp.1754](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/psp.1754)
- [https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/2/25/how-britain-forcefully-depopulated-a-whole-archipelago](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/2/25/how-britain-forcefully-depopulated-a-whole-archipelago)
- [https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2010/12/british-government-mauritius](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2010/12/british-government-mauritius)
- [https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/seabee/explore/online-reading-room/historic-topics0/diego-garcia.html](https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/seabee/explore/online-reading-room/historic-topics0/diego-garcia.html)
- [https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/projects/dynamo/documents/history.html](https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/projects/dynamo/documents/history.html)
- [https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/About/History/#:~:text=Diego%20Garcia%20was%20discovered%20by,ship's%20captain%20or%20the%20navigator](https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/About/History/#:~:text=Diego%20Garcia%20was%20discovered%20by,ship's%20captain%20or%20the%20navigator)
- [https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/british-indian-ocean-territory/](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/british-indian-ocean-territory/)
- [https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/overcoming-the-diego-garcia-stalemate/](https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/overcoming-the-diego-garcia-stalemate/)
- [https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/mapping-cia-black-sites/](https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/mapping-cia-black-sites/)
- [http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/secretdetentionmap.jpg](http://blog.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/secretdetentionmap.jpg)
- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/cia-interrogation-diego-garcia-lawrence-wilkerson](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/cia-interrogation-diego-garcia-lawrence-wilkerson)
- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/13/diego-garcia-cia-us-torture-rendition](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/13/diego-garcia-cia-us-torture-rendition)
- [https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/09/asia/chagos-islands-feature-intl/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/09/asia/chagos-islands-feature-intl/index.html)
- [https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-diego-garcia-air-base-indian-ocean-2019-8#from-1967-to-1973-the-british-evicted-the-entire-population-of-the-chagos-islands-known-as-the-ilois-to-make-way-for-the-us-air-base-10](https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-diego-garcia-air-base-indian-ocean-2019-8#from-1967-to-1973-the-british-evicted-the-entire-population-of-the-chagos-islands-known-as-the-ilois-to-make-way-for-the-us-air-base-10)
- [https://veteranlife.com/military-history/diego-garcia](https://veteranlife.com/military-history/diego-garcia)
- [https://www.britannica.com/place/Diego-Garcia-island-Indian-Ocean](https://www.britannica.com/place/Diego-Garcia-island-Indian-Ocean)
- [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65777863](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65777863)
- [https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/](https://cnrj.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NSF-Diego-Garcia/)
- [https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/navy-support-facility-diego-garcia](https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/navy-support-facility-diego-garcia)
- [https://inkstickmedia.com/the-us-base-at-diego-garcia-holds-a-dirty-secret/](https://inkstickmedia.com/the-us-base-at-diego-garcia-holds-a-dirty-secret/)
- [https://amti.csis.org/decolonizing-diego-garcia-a-boon-for-india/](https://amti.csis.org/decolonizing-diego-garcia-a-boon-for-india/)
- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Diego_Garcia_Abandoned_Plantation.jpg) by Steve Swayne from Maleny, Australia / openverse, by-sa.

<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->