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Nation State Case Study |
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For those happy souls who still entertain illusions about the appropriate nature of the nation-state for the present-day world, the saga of Diego Garcia is timely. A GUARDIAN heading summed it up: "Thirty years of lies, deceit and trickery that robbed a people of their island home." Coming on top of a domestic scandal of the cattle disease B.S.E. and its horrifying sequel of the human variant CJ disease with the chaos resulting from a financial give-away in the privatisation of British railways British government has been exposed once more as an official racket viewing for notoriety with any criminal mafia.
The position of Robin Cook, is interesting. In opposition he had championed the cause of the islanders: once appointed as British Foreign Secretary, he maintained the governmental opposition to them. Thus, even a politician intent on righting a human wrong, succumbs promptly to the exigency of nation-state requiements on getting into office. Now, at least, he has accepted the court's decision and said that the government will not appeal. But the pattern of nation-state precedence over human rights is universal: Britain and the U.S. are merely more vulnerable to criticism than Russia or China, where the tradition of secrecy is still stronger. The British signed a treaty with the U.S. which deprived the islanders of the rights to their homes and land. Thereafter they denied the truth about the people they had wronged. The Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence routinely issued misleading information to the press and detailed guidance showed that this was entirely intentional. As the Americans had paid (a bribe of ?) £5million for the lease the British government was compelled to deny this also.. But altogether, the recital of the lies, evasions and trickery displayed by the British civil service and their political puppets should be studied by anyone still nourishing fond illusions about the democratic nation-state as the protector of the rights of citizens (or others). These people were displaced at a time when, apart from the protestations of the Empire offering protection the British obligation, as members of the United Nations, was to uphold the rights of colonial subjects. All of this counted for nothing when 'realpolitik' ruled. For years the British government maintained for years that the islanders were not permanent residents, "even though they knew it was untrue" and one of their documents was headed "Maintaining the fiction." The British government will probably have to pay out very large sums of compensation but will escape much well-deserved obloquy because so many people accept that their own nation-states have the right to behave in such a way. As the GUARDIAN report put it: "The episode shows the ease with which politicians in Britain and the US lied". Yet this is merely one more example. Nation-state junkies believe that when "national interest" is pleaded anything goes: morality takes a back-seat - lies, deceit, trickery, even murder when spying is involved - are all liable to be accepted. It is high time to assert the priority of world citizenship, which prefers humanity as the basis of its ideology.
Source of Article |
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In the early sixties the American government stepped up its Cold War
preparations by building a huge air base on the beautiful Indian Ocean
island of Diego Garcia. For this it was necessary to evict the 4000
islanders, some the second generation of its inhabitants. They were turfed
out by a British government, in the teeth of bitter opposition, because the
needs of the military took precedence over the rights of people to their
homes, their livelihoods and their own choice of where to live. The
British state did this because it was - as it has been almost totally since
1945 - unwilling to oppose any firm U.S. foreign policy decision.
The islanders were dumped in Mauritius, with inadequate provision for
the displaced community, which proved unable to adapt to a quite different
sort of life. One of them, a four-year old boy, grew up determined to
return to his home. Finally, after a long campaign for the legal right to
return to his homeland and with the help of a new Human Rights Act which
was a consequence of British law having to bow to the supremacy of the
European Court of Human Rights, he was able to
succeed. In court the judge ruled that a British government order of 1971
used to evict the islanders had been "an abject legal failure" and that
there was a consistent refusal to admit the truth about what had been done.
The story revealed details of the lying to Parliament (and to Congress) as
secret documents were disclosed to the court.