Just so no one is misled: "original inhabitants" does not mean "indigenous peoples" with respect to the BIOT. The islands were not populated prior to late-18th Century European colonization. The depopulation was of post-colonial people.
> Just so no one is misled: "original inhabitants" does not mean "indigenous peoples" with respect to the BIOT. ... The depopulation was of post-colonial people.
Oh that's fine then. They only lived there for what 100 years, totally fine to do these things to those 1000 some people:
first tactics were implemented to decrease the population of Diego Garcia. Those who left the island - either for vacation or medical purposes - were not allowed to return, and those who stayed could obtain only restricted food and medical supplies. This tactic was in hope that those that stayed would leave "willingly".[26] One of the tactics used was that of the killings of Chagossian pets. Dogs were carried into sheds where they were gassed in front of their owners.[26]
It isn't anywhere near the worst thing the UK has done (in this case for the US so, I think they share a bit of the blame). The key issue here is that it is ongoing - the UK still isn't allowing them back or properly compensating them. The UK government should recognise that what it did was wrong, establish that the land belongs to the Chagossians and, broker an agreement where the US tries to try to buy the land needed for the base from them. There will be a price that the US government is willing to pay to keep the base there, that the Chagossians will accept, I suspect. If there is not, the base should have to be moved over a period of five years. An alternative might be the construction of an artificial island nearby. It is also possible that the value to the Chagossians, and the cost of building an artificial island, are both greater than the value to the US of having the base, in which case they should just abandon it. This is the only fair solution IMHO.
Why is that an important distinction? Is forcible expulsion and dispropriration more acceptable if the people were brought to the island as slaves and laborers in the mid-1700s?
Are you being deliberately obtuse? It's a pretty important distinction that these were not some native tribesmen with millennia of ancestral history tied up in the lands.
100s of years though, so from the perspective of an individual on the island it's exactly the same -- their entire life was on that island. So, the distinction is pointless and reeks of apologetics IMO.
"Sir Bruce Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1000 pets were gassed with exhaust fumes. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked", Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, "and when their dogs were taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried". Sir Bruce had been given responsibility for what the US called "cleansing" and "sanitising" the islands; and the killing of the pets was taken by the islanders as a warning."
By that logic, ethnic Europeans are the 'original inhabitants' of North America.
I'm also unclear on why you quoted what the British did in your post - how does it relate to whether or not calling those people 'original inhabitants' is misleading? Do you believe that, if the British did something sufficiently wrong to them, that calling them 'original inhabitants' will be less misleading?
Not everything is a contest. It doesn't matter how "original" natives are if they're natives.
The reason "ethnic Europeans" aren't "the original inhabitants of North America" is that European settlers violently displaced (or killed) the previous inhabitants.
Heck, the "original" inhabitants of North America (as far as we know) actually originated in what is now mostly Russia if you go back a few dozen millenia. And if you go back further than that (according to mainstream scientific consensus) we all likely originated in Africa. Defining the term "original inhabitants" as an absolute is blatantly begging the question (specifically it only works if you're a creationist).
People were subjected to physical and psychological violence to be forcibly removed from their home and birthplace. That's bad enough, no matter how many generations lived in the same place before. This isn't about who's had it worse.
They were expelled in 1965. The current year is 2017. If we wait a few more decades this discussion will be pointless either way.
I'm not opposing clarifications. I'm opposing quibbling over the semantics of "original" as if the distinction adds anything to the conversation.
Their parents lived there, they were born there, they were violently expelled and suffered emotional abuse. The number of dead ancestors (or lack thereof) in the ground does not invalidate the suffering these people were forced to endure.
By European standards the US is mostly inhabited by non-natives. So I guess it'd be okay to forcibly expel everyone but the Natives because they don't have millennia of ancestral history?
I'd hope the more important distinction is how people are removed, not how many generations of dead people there were before them.
If a man shows up with a gun to run me off my land, it doesn't matter whether it was my father that bought it or my grandfather or my great-grandfather. What's important is the forcible dispropriation itself.
Cases like this just make a mockery of the Lockean natural rights theory of property.
For a conversation to happen, everyone should be on the same page. Distinction for the sake of clarity should always be welcomed and not confused with endorsing a specific action or behavior.
It doesn't really matter at all. The land didn't come with a .io ccTLD. It's dervived from a name the British chose, so it's not like they stole the domain name from those people, right?
IANA allows delegation of country-code TLDs for all countries and territories represented in the ISO 3166-1 standard.
The thing to bear in mind is this standard is used for a number of different purposes historically that has informed territories and other "non"-countries being added.
For example, it is used by postal services for routing physical mail. A lot of far flung island dependencies are coded individually because their mail wouldn't route through their mother country but through other ports.
The addition of "EU", while not a country, reflected the needs of the "EUR" currency code when the Euro was introduced (the first two letters of ISO 4217 currency codes are derived from the ISO 3166-1 standard).
I think the morally questionable problem is this: I am highly doubtful that the original inhabitants of the islands are receiving any revenue whatsoever from the corporation which runs .IO. At least the small pacific island nation states that have hired third parties to run their ccTLD have contracts and agreements in place for a revenue share.
Why should they get any revenue from .io? The .io is an invention of the government and has nothing to do with the original inhabitants. The "original" people were removed well before .io even existed.
Might as well demand they get paid for any inventions the military makes while testing stuff out there.
And if the British hadn't done this and gave control over to the people living there 50 years ago, they wouldn't get .io either, because they wouldn't call themselves British Indian Ocean Territories. They'd have used something reflecting the name in their language.
So again, this is a "resource" purely created by the British government being there.
Maybe it's terribly unfair and bad what they've done to those peoples, but .io doesn't figure into that at all.
Edit: I suppose if they had their own nation state, they could make some money that they couldn't otherwise. But why stop at domain names (which, again, wouldn't be .io, it'd be .cx or something for Chagossians)? They can't issue passports, a potentially valuable resource, not being a sovereign nation. They can't run "tax haven" schemes, etc. Seems like getting upset over .io itself is pointless compared to all the other stuff they could do with an internationally recognized government.
.SU is actually the only former country with a TLD still delegated, and quite a few have been removed. In recent years .AN, .TP, .YU, .ZR have been phased out representing former countries.
I am similarly outraged that I haven't had any cheques from Nominet come through the post recently and as a UK tax paying citizen I am outraged at this oversight.
Of course, the difference between the Indian Ocean Territory and India, is that people lived in India before. When the French showed up, the atolls were uninhabited.
I'd say that using the land of your own country - owned by people in your country - for military purposes, while sketchy, is definitely more acceptable than taking an island from its indigenous occupants by force. The UK ownership then seems at least to be legitimate.
