Hacker News Reader

Comment by gedy | Hacker News Reader

That article is misleading, calling it ethnic cleansing of "indigenous peoples". These islands were uninhabited prior to European contact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

View on HN

Given that Madagascar was seemingly settled by Polynesians, I'd be amazed if Europeans and their slaves were actually the first ever inhabitants of Chagos, but that aside, if they were, then the Chagossian descendents of those first slaves would be, by definition, the indigenous people of the Chagos Islands.

Edit - and will people stop buying .io domains. They might look cool but it is straight up theft.

https://www.thewebmaster.com/hosting/2016/feb/27/io-tld-top-...

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-ac...

Not true at all. Diego Garcia is just one island among these Archipelago and it was always inhabited by the native creole-speaking "Chagossians".

UK evicted them forcefully in the 70's or 80's I think.

The way I understand what I've found is, the islands were not inhabited before the Europeans arrived there, and "Chagossians" weren't native. They were brought in as slave workers after the settlement. (Then, the population expanded with voluntary migration)

Regardless of their ancestry timeline, the natives have known to have been living there for at least three centuries. Expelling them now is cruel and unwarranted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians

> 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.

What do you mean by "natives"? It's often used for the first people - and as weird as it is in this case, by that definition Europeans were the natives on that island. If we ignore the timeline, then does Dubai become natively Indian?

This does not mean I disagree with the expelling being cruel and unwarranted. I do think it shouldn't belong to the UK, just don't think that "natives" is meaningful here or explains the reasons.

I used to term natives to refer to people who have been living here for centuries and have made it their home.

The equivalent is expelling everyone from Australia because US/UK wants to build military base there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com