For arrogance, hypocrisy and nastiness, few organizations in the world rival the British Foreign Office. Exhibit A in the case against it, for the past decade, has been its marathon legal struggle to deny the former inhabitants of the Chagos Islands their rights. Last week, it cheated them again.
The Chagos Islands, a group of seven atolls in the Indian Ocean, were settled in the 18th century by slaves who were brought there by the French to work in copra plantations. Britain took the islands from France in 1814, but little changed for the descendants of the original African and South Indian settlers, by now a blended, French-speaking population, until 1967 — when Britain expelled all of them. The islands now have no permanent population.
The islands have many thousands of temporary residents, though, all of them working for the U.S. armed forces except for a few British service personnel. The Chagossians were deported from their homeland to make room for a giant base from which the U.S. Air Force could dominate the entire Indian Ocean, and part of the deal was that there should be no local inhabitants to complicate matters.