Foreign Office shaken by tsunami aftershock

Whitehall 'in a state of shock'

by Stowbury

It's been a dreadful fortnight at the Foreign Office as senior officials struggled in vain to deal with the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami in which nobody on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia died. A spokesman for the Global Disasters Emergency Committee has confirmed that many parts of Whitehall are "in a state of shock" as the sheer scale of the non-event that swept across the sun-kissed atoll, proudly trumpeted for years as "the Commonwealth's most notorious death-trap", sunk in.

A team of paramedics called to the scene battled their way through a tide of shredded reports highlighting the mortal dangers that lie in wait for the unsuspecting tourist or former resident intending to visit Diego Garcia, the "fatal accident capital" of the cursed Chagos Archipelago, a deceptively placid marine paradise that was renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory in 1968 in a well-meaning but failed effort to cover up its grim association with death.

For six desperate hours the rescue team fought to clear a path through an apocalyptic paper trail that led them deep into the bowels of an institution hitherto closed off from the outside world, to the epicentre of the bombshell, the devastated offices of Mr Bill Rammell, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs who in a diplomatic tour de force in June 2004 sneaked up behind Her Majesty the Queen and tickled her ribs until she pleaded for mercy and signed the sacred Order in Council declaring Diego Garcia and its environs "off-limits" to all but the most battle-hardened American action heroes capable of withstanding the life-threatening horrors that pervade the island (plus their visiting families and essential back-up personnel comprising cooks, cleaners, cocktail waiters and recreational support staff — appoximately five thousand tough, combat-ready individuals in all).

Reaching the end of their gruelling quest the paramedics broke down the heavy oak door to reveal a scene of hopeless disarray unparalleled in government offices since the height of the Suez crisis in 1956. The prostrate, blubbery form of the almost human Mr Rammell lay groaning amid the wreckage of his latest and best feasibility study into the prospects for repatriation of a long-banished tribe of islanders entitled "A Snowball's Chance in Hell".

Fearless reporters following close behind posted searing eye-witness accounts of the unfolding tragedy as dazed civil servants picked themselves off the floor mumbling "How on earth did we get it so wrong?" Well might they ask. The down-to-earth US residents of Diego Garcia had known the truth ever since they took over the island almost forty years ago. The previous tenants expelled to make way for them had always known it. Now the whole world would know — yes, even here in this remote niche of the Foreign Office they were beginning, painfully, to digest the extraordinary revelation that Diego Garcia was safe. More than just safe, a uniquely protected haven, the only place of human habitation within range of the tsunami where not a single victim was swept away to a watery grave.

Local emergency services were stretched to breaking point as they fought to stem the flow of classified documents continuing to spill unabated from the filing cabinets. "The floor was strewn with the scattered debris of spurious reports, bogus surveys and discredited bilge of all kinds," breathed one awestruck foreign correspondent into the videophone, "I waded through the heaving swell of official papers reeking with the unbearable stench of rotting tripe, in search of a poignant symbol with which to encapsulate the prevailing mood of despair. There amid the detritus I found it — a tuft of greying hair, pulled from the head of a top-ranking aide unable to cope with the awful truth."

The United Nations swung into action, co-ordinating generous offers of assistance from around the world. Planeloads of contract cleaners were flown in from South-East Asia to do the sweeping up, and by the end of the week some semblance of normality was restored. But the shock waves would reverberate around Whitehall for months to come. "Our biggest concern now is the psychological fall-out," warned humanitarian expert Dr Dina Deli of the disaster relief committee. "We've managed to allocate an initial sum of Ł15m to our team of post-traumatic stress counsellors, who will be working with Mr Rammell 24/7 in an effort to bring him round. But with a shock to the system like this you can never be sure," she cautioned. "With any luck he may never recover."

The origins of the catastrophe date back to May 1961 and a surprise visit to the sun-kissed ocean hideaway by Rear-Admiral Jack Grantham of the US Navy and his wife Martha, seeking a charming spot by the sea to park the family battleship and settle down to co-ordinate anti-Soviet operations in the area. However, the "delightful stay" they had been promised by smooth-talking British landlord Harold Macmillan soon turned into a harrowing ordeal. In the words of the then Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Paul Gore-Booth, whose report makes uncomfortable reading even today, the unsuspecting couple were "disconcerted by the ill manners of the natives who failed to give the proper form of salute, relentlessly assaulted by the prevalent odour of free-roaming livestock and kept awake at night by the intermittent barking of dogs, the majority of which were barely house-trained."

The elderly Mrs Grantham, widowed in 1983, shudders as she recalls the horrors of their traumatic exploratory visit which haunted her husband for years afterwards and drove him to an early grave. "Most every morning after that he woke in a cold sweat," she recounts, "grabbing hold of me and yelling 'Goddammit, Martha, those goddam dogs are barking again, where the hell's my twelve-bore?'"

No proper redress could be exacted for the Diego Garcians' wretched display of inhospitality until 1965 when the Labour administration of Harold Wilson, vowing to "bend over backwards to preserve the special relationship", dug into the terms of the islanders' tenancy agreement and discovered that the keeping of farmyard animals and pets was expressly prohibited. A court order swiftly followed, with an agreed timetable for the offending animals to be mercifully put down, their owners, with remarkable clemency, to be whisked away on the holiday of a lifetime to the bustling pleasure paradise of Mauritius in the southern seas, and the vacated real estate to be thoroughly fumigated in preparation for its long overdue occupation by the American peacekeepers.

The debonair Whitehall wit Baron JH Greenhill noted in a handwritten memo that "the Tarzans and Men Fridays now enjoying unlimited leisure on the docks of Port Louis" (the Mauritian capital) "signally failed to profit from their god-given opportunity, spending their days gazing morosely out to sea and whispering darkly, apparently plotting to hijack a cargo ship and sail forth to reclaim their forfeited homeland." They seemed unable to comprehend that they had only themselves to blame, earning their just deserts for a catalogue of offences committed over the years — from the running of an unlicensed menagerie to the persistent use of pidgin French.

The 18th century administrative error which had granted their ancestors privileged status as British subjects was annulled and they were barred from showing their faces in the archipelago for 999 years, when the lease of the main island to the Pentagon would be up for review. To this day New Labour intellectuals at the cutting edge of social re-engineering hark back to this landmark judgement in tones of hushed reverence, citing it as "the mother of all ASBOs".

Moody protests by the exiled Chagos islanders continued for some years until the famous goodwill gesture of 1971, when the Foreign Office offered to foot the bill for translating the relevant documents into a language they could understand. With all misunderstandings now cleared up and their doubts laid to rest the "floating population" of no fixed abode, least of all Diego Garcia, gradually drifted away from the dockside to fulfill their potential in the purpose-built shanty complex on the edge of town.

All was quiet for twenty-three years, until an evangelist rabble-rouser in a white suit arrived in mysterious circumstances in the mid 1990s and began stirring up trouble, poking the islanders with a stick and getting them all fired up about their imagined ordeal. Events spiralled quickly downhill, leading to a showdown at the British High Court in London in November 2000, when in a moment of madness the Lord Chief Justice presiding over the case, in defiance of all known precedent, issued the nightmare verdict that the "wholesale removal" of the islanders in the 1960s was an "abject legal failure" and that they should be allowed to return forthwith.

Exhibiting extraordinary composure in trying circumstances the Foreign Office promised to implement the ruling immediately, as soon as a suitable dockyard could be located in which to re-establish the British shipbuilding industry and construct an ocean-going vessel of sufficient dimensions to undertake the daunting voyage of repatriation. In the meantime Mr Rammell's department, concerned to ensure an eventual safe and prosperous resettlement, embarked on the now legendary series of feasibility studies into the habitability of the region with a view to identifying potential sites for occupation.

A team of researchers set up base camp in the visitors' annexe on the US-occupied main island and endured three successive winters away from home, overcoming frequent downpours as they carried out their ground-breaking survey, discovering one danger after another and becoming ever more convinced that "it simply wasn't on".

Their first report contained a gruesome appendix, listing more than a dozen fatal hazards, most of them related more or less directly to the "killer fact" discovered quite early on in the investigations that the prospective terrain on which the Chagossians were expecting to be rehoused was "completely surrounded by water, some of it quite deep".

In the follow-up report of 2002 the Under-Secretary added his own compelling observations, pointing out that "in the mid-afternoon sun the sand reaches a peak temperature of 57oC, hot enough to scald the unprotected soles of the feet" and in the fully revised and updated 2004 edition he waxed lyrical on "the well-documented inability of class 'D' ethnic types to hold their drink." This would have tragic consequences, he noted, given the "geographical realities discussed in Chapter 3". Stumbling homeward through the undergrowth, the intoxicated islander who took a wrong turning would inevitably end up tottering helpless into the sea, and be discovered face down and full of water by his grief-stricken family the next morning.

It was in early December that the magnificently flawed final version of the authoritative report was published. The man in the white suit had just finished reading it and mopped his brow, all but ready to call Mr Rammell and concede defeat, finally convinced that it would indeed be a dereliction of duty to allow the vulnerable Chagossian exiles within a hundred miles of the dread archipelago, when the tsunami thunderbolt struck. The Under-Secretary stood transfixed in mounting horror as the bulletins from Diego Garcia came through. A critical injury turned out to be only a scratch. He sunk to his knees, praying for the death toll to open its account. A single fatality was all it would take to restore confidence in the department and validate his life's work, but it was not to be. The body count remained resolutely stuck at nil and the monumental scale of long-running institutional deception at the heart of government was finally exposed.

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Foreign Office shaken by tsunami aftershock

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