Okay, this is going to be controversial, but I have no problem whatsoever with moving people around like this, as long as: 1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss, and 2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living.
The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right.
This applies at every scale from a single building demolished to make way for a highway, to an entire country's worth of refugees.
So the big problem is not that Britain evicted the Chagossians and is refusing to let them back. That was just a case of eminent domain. The problem is that Britain and Mauritius never properly compensated them and didn't ensure that they could make a living in their new home.
If redistributing the profits from .io to these people would make goddess of justice smile, fine, let's do it. But enough with the "it's my ancestral home!" bullshit.
As the article mentions, the Chagossians weren't even the "native" or "original" population of the islands. The French had enslaved them and brought them there by force, and the rest were migrant workers from India. None of them had any right to claim those islands as their home, except that they happened to live there at the time when Britain decided to vacate the islands.
In fact, none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land, for the sake of convenience and economic efficiency. But morally, it's all arbitrary. Why does it matter whether someone has lived on a piece of land for three generations or three hundred? What about nomadic peoples who claim a large swath of land but only use parts of it sporadically? Besides, virtually all habitable land on Earth has been conquered multiple times by different groups of people, all of whom might have some sort of claim on that land.
Whenever we hear about some group of people who complain that their house, village, country, etc. was taken from them, the location in question rarely has anything more than sentimental value for the oldest members of that group. What really matters are human rights (e.g. right to participate in the governance of whatever territory they happen to live in) and the ability to make a stable living. Without those, returning the land to them won't make their circumstances any better. Nostalgia doesn't put food on your table. On the other hand, once you have rights and a stable occupation, over time you learn to stop fussing about your location.
The idea that some people have some sort of god-given right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates has caused so much bloodshed, unnecessary grief, and opportunity for ideologues to take advantage of innocent people throughout human history. Can't we just stop doing that already?
I think these are valuable points; thanks. But I disagree for a few reasons:
1) Eminent domain seems valid if it's exercised by the victims' legitimate government, which they elect and over which they have a say, and under which they have rights and the ability to legally protect themselves. My impression[1] is that none of that applies to the Chagossians. The UK appears[1] to have taken advantage of their helplessness. For example, imagine if the UK took your land (assuming you are not in the UK) and you had no appeal.
> none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land. But morally, it's all arbitrary.
2) That is one point of view but it's a radical one. Our society places great moral store in property rights; many leading philosophers think it is the foundation of all other rights and of democracy. Certainly few react well to someone else taking away their home; people fight wars over that.
3) One aspect of human rights is that it's up to Chagossians to decide what they want and what is good for them. It's not up to you or anyone else to dictate that something is or is not in their interests.
4) I suspect it is much harder for what I'm guessing[1] are members of a small, isolated community that has only existed on an island to move than for the wordly high-tech entrepreneurs reading this thread. Where should they move? Sri Lanka? Delhi? Kenya? An apartment in the Mission? Another island where the locals already control it and the newcomers may not be welcome? Where the fish and everything else are different?
[1] I say "my impression' and 'it appears' because I don't know the facts well enough to be sure.
1) I'm not disputing that it was wrong for UK to evict the Chagossians. I'm only disputing that the Chagossians have some sort of fundamental human right to return all these years later, just because their grandfathers used to live there.
2) Yes, many leading philosophers of previous centuries used to think very highly of property rights, but this trend has greatly diminished in the last 50 years or so, especially in Anglo-American political philosophy.
In any case, I'm pretty sure that if I offered a significant premium over the prevailing market price, most people will be happy to sell their home and move elsewhere. Especially if I also offered to cover their cost of moving and lost wages while they look for a new job. (That's roughly what I think every government should offer when they need to relocate people.)
3) I totally agree. It was wrong for the UK to move them without their consent. But what is done is done, and now it's time to ask what to do about it.
If I break your phone, property rights mean that you have the right to make me compensate for your material losses. It doesn't mean that you have the right to make me restore your broken phone to its original condition, no matter how much sentimental value it might have had for you.
4) That's a genuine problem. If it is impossible to ensure an equal or greater quality of life for the relocated population, perhaps that's a good reason not to relocate them in the first place. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a country like UK would be unable to arrange a fantastic life (at least materially) for a few hundred islanders no matter where in the world they were. They were simply unwilling to do it, just as they were unwilling to consult the locals before deciding to lease Chagos to the Americans.
tl;dr: Something very bad happened. But making it right is not simply a matter of resetting HEAD to a previous commit.
Hold on. You can't talk about your theories of how it's OK to displace people as long as they're compensated, then turn around and say "what's done is done" when presented with counterarguments.
"What's done is done," because we can't travel back in time.
I never said that what is done is OK, only that it is done. It was most definitely NOT OK for Britain to displace Chagossians the way they did, because adequate compensation did not occur. I think I made this very clear in the parent comment.
But Returning Chagos to the Chagossians now will not fix any of the million things that went wrong. We have plenty of nominally independent but barely subsisting island nations in this world, we seriously don't need another. What is needed is a concrete plan to get the Chagossians (and their descendents) out of those Mauritian slums in which Britain so carelessly dumped them 50 years ago. Returning them to Chagos might or might not be a part of this plan, but if they insist on it at the expense of more urgent material needs, so much the worse for them.
"What's done is done," but we can do more. For example: British passports, British pensions, British health care, British education for their children, a formal apology, and fair political representation. Keep adding to the list until their children can honestly say they're glad that their parents left their former home. That would count as adequate compensation.
> The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right.
What? That's exactly what happened here.
The Chagossians were forcibly removed, because a government(s) claimed "the right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates". If the Chagossians don't have that right, then no one else can come in and force them out.
Governments are not people. They neither have, nor claim, any human rights.
The UK and USA only ever claimed a legal right within the framework of their own laws. Despicable as their actions may be, they never pretended to claim a human right.
The displaced Chagossians, on the other hand, are claiming a human right to occupy the islands. That's different.
Might may not make right, but it certainly helps. Other states may have some moral obligation to step in to defend a human rights violation, but only the government of a state is expected to protect its legal rights.
> The only people who are moved and given (1) or (2) are ones that have a sufficiently good BATNA.
Well said. So the question is: how do we build a world where residents of a small island can develop a sufficiently good BATNA, even against a nuclear superpower?
Fixing problems at the level of the basic architecture can sometimes seem to go against fixing superficial symptoms. If you're too focused on the symptoms, it might even sound heretical. Sufficiently esoteric political philosophy is often indistinguishable from trolling ;)
> the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss
How can you measure (in order to attempt to "adequately compensate" displaced people) the inability to live in one's ancestral homeland? Imagine if we were all shipped to a somewhat earth-like moon somewhere, under "eminent domain".
"As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."
If I crash my car into a house that has a lot of sentimental value to you, and the resulting fire burns the whole place down, how do I measure and compensate for your loss?
In some jurisdictions, the law might award a certain percentage of additional damages for psychological harm, but that's about it. Sentimental value is purely subjective. Brutal as it may sound, impartial assessments cannot and need not account for such things.
Nobody's ancestral homeland is irreplaceable. In fact, the whole concept of ancestral homelands is often a religious or ideological fabrication that serves the interests of some members of a community but not others.
There's generally a reason why ethnic cleansing is considered an evil thing to do.
Forcibly removing people from their land deprives them of the systems that sustain them: political, economic, cultural. It's a kidnapping and theft rolled into one.
The right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates is not a human right.
This applies at every scale from a single building demolished to make way for a highway, to an entire country's worth of refugees.
So the big problem is not that Britain evicted the Chagossians and is refusing to let them back. That was just a case of eminent domain. The problem is that Britain and Mauritius never properly compensated them and didn't ensure that they could make a living in their new home.
If redistributing the profits from .io to these people would make goddess of justice smile, fine, let's do it. But enough with the "it's my ancestral home!" bullshit.
As the article mentions, the Chagossians weren't even the "native" or "original" population of the islands. The French had enslaved them and brought them there by force, and the rest were migrant workers from India. None of them had any right to claim those islands as their home, except that they happened to live there at the time when Britain decided to vacate the islands.
In fact, none of us have any right to claim any piece of real estate as our own. The law, of course, grants certain people certain rights with respect to land, for the sake of convenience and economic efficiency. But morally, it's all arbitrary. Why does it matter whether someone has lived on a piece of land for three generations or three hundred? What about nomadic peoples who claim a large swath of land but only use parts of it sporadically? Besides, virtually all habitable land on Earth has been conquered multiple times by different groups of people, all of whom might have some sort of claim on that land.
Whenever we hear about some group of people who complain that their house, village, country, etc. was taken from them, the location in question rarely has anything more than sentimental value for the oldest members of that group. What really matters are human rights (e.g. right to participate in the governance of whatever territory they happen to live in) and the ability to make a stable living. Without those, returning the land to them won't make their circumstances any better. Nostalgia doesn't put food on your table. On the other hand, once you have rights and a stable occupation, over time you learn to stop fussing about your location.
The idea that some people have some sort of god-given right to occupy some specific geographic coordinates has caused so much bloodshed, unnecessary grief, and opportunity for ideologues to take advantage of innocent people throughout human history. Can't we just stop doing that already?