Tuesday, February 23, 2016

".io - British Indian Ocean Territory"

"The Chagos had a population of some two thousand inhabitants, known as Ilois - French creole for “islanders” - or Chagossians, who had lived on the islands, first as slaves and later as free plantation workers, for generations. Although they knew no other home, they could not be allowed to remain on the islands.

The British attitude to the Chagossians was articulated in a diplomatic cable of 1966 which dismissively referred to them as“some few Tarzans or Men Fridays”, and over the next few years they were forcibly removed from the islands and dumped on the docks of Mauritius and Seychelles, where most of their descendants still live in poverty today. Their history, and that of the secret deal between the US and Britain to remove them, is told in John Pilger’s film Stealing a Nation.

To add insult to injury, in 2010 the Chagos Marine Protected Area, covering the entirety of the BIOT was declared as “the largest marine preserve in the world”. While it was described by the British government at the time as a move to preserve the unique environment of the Chagos, a diplomatic cablesubsequently released by Wikileaks quoted a British minister declaring that the marine preserve was “the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands' former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT.” A small community of Chagossians in the UKcontinues to fight for their return to the islands, which has been repeatedly blocked by the UK government.

The reason the British Government is so keen to keep the Chagos Archipelago free of Chagossians is the same as it was in 1964: to preserve its use as a US military base...

None of this history is visible from .io, which was assigned to Internet Computer Bureau Ltd, a small company based in Bournemouth, UK, in 1997."

http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io

Colonialism.io

FB: “the repetition of national politics in virtual space reminds us that our digital lives take place in the context of history and society, subject to the same powers and pressures as our physical lives."

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