The Government Cover-up Continues

An Unredacted Version is discovered

So what do these sensitive parts of the Ministerial Brief contain?

The answer can be found in a copy of the document from other files released to the National Archives which accidentally has escaped Foreign Office censorship which now allows us to read what has been hidden from our view.

The BIOT Commissioner advises his Minister that:

"We cannot afford to come clean about the motives for removing the inhabitants of the Chagos. In fact, there were three broad considerations involved. First and crucially, they posed a potential political problem: once BIOT had been constituted, and so long as the Ilois, irrespective of their precise legal status, remained there, the UK could have had some difficulty in denying its Charter obligation to report annually on their progress towards self-government, with consequent opportunities for intervention and mischief-making by member states of the UN. .................... Third, ,there was the belief that the United States would prefer to have the Islands uninhabited."

Then he goes on to point out that the deception about the migratory contract worker status of the Chagossians which was used to mislead the United Nations was entirely false, telling the Minister that:

"It is true that the Ilois were brought to and remained on the Islands purely on the basis of their contracts with the plantation owners. Nevertheless, this line has a snag in that its factual basis is weak. A study of earlier papers suggests that this categorisation resulted from the presence of quite a high proportion of temporary workers from the Seychelles and a belief, which later proved to be unfounded, that not more than 100 of the 1000 odd inhabitants of the Chagos in the mid 1960s were second generation. Further investigation showed the number of non-migrants to be 432: Diego Garcia was their homeland with all that entails."

Addressing the issue of self-determination and why the Falkland Islanders human rights were recognised whilst that of the Chagossians ignored, Mr Wenban-Smith first presents his argument on how the two populations could be distinguished. but then acknowledges that:

" The main weakness of this distinction is that it is circumstantial and bears only to a limited extent on the issue of consultation of the Islanders' wishes".

After presenting alternative justifications, he then admits that "But all these arguments are politically controversial; and [the argument that defence security has a higher priority over human rights] is difficult to use in the absence of any consultation with the local inhabitants."

Click here to see the unredacted document (the redactions have been highlighted to aid comparison with the redacted version above): THE UNREDACTED DOCUMENT