On a secret military island, a mother tries to raise her children normally
BBCIt’s morning in a makeshift camp on the remote British island of Diego Garcia, and Shanti’s husband has just woken up to find their young children staring across the security fence.
As children watch an officer and a guard dog patrol a strategically located secret island UK-US military base in the middle of the Indian OceanHe makes a stern comment: “Even dogs have more freedom than us.”
“When I heard that, it broke my heart,” he says.
It was a scene that reflected the plight of his family – they were Stranded on a mysterious military fort Incidentally, they still had a son and daughter aged five and nine to support.
In an effort to find normalcy in the small camp where they were kept under constant surveillance, the family found ways to entertain themselves, studying, growing food, and celebrating special occasions.
Shanthi, not her real name, says she had come up with $5,000 (£3,900) in savings and all her gold jewelery to make the ambitious trip to Canada, more than 12,000km away, with dozens of other Sri Lankan Tamils. Gave it to smugglers.
All of them said they were fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka and India, some due to links with former Tamil Tiger rebels who were defeated in the civil war that ended in 2009.
The fishing boat they were on leaked in rough seas, prompting them to be rescued by the Royal Navy, who took them to Diego Garcia in October 2021 – and kept them in a fenced-off migrant camp. Shanti remembers her son asking if they had come to Canada.
Their young children received no formal education for the first six months on the island, so as a trained teacher, Shanti began teaching English to the children in the camp.
“We started with the basics – the alphabet, nouns, verbs, present continuous,” she says.
Shanthi’s husband later built a writing desk from wooden pallets so that the children could do homework in the tent.
The children soon began complaining of boredom in the evenings, so Shanthi – who had trained in the Indian classical dance Bharatanatyam – started giving dance lessons while playing music downloaded from her phone.
Three years after the family first arrived at the camp, they were finally deported to the UK this week by the government It has been described as a “single” case in the interest of his welfare.
“It’s like an open prison – we weren’t allowed to go out, we were just living behind a fence and in a tent,” says Shanti, 30, in an interview on the outskirts of London.
“Every day our lives were the same.”
She adds, it was like living “in a cage”.
While guards watched and military jets occasionally roared overhead, Shanti and other Tamils approached the British forces on the island with a letter and requested to be sent to a safe country. This is the first time that asylum claims have been filed in this area.
it ignited a spark Prolonged legal battle in Britain, 6,000 miles awayAnd while it was doing its work, Shanti and others stayed behind, taking matters into their own hands.
While the Tamils were not allowed to cook their own food, the camp was filled with coconut trees, and Shanthi and others used the husks to line gardens in which they grew their own vegetables – peppers, garlic and cucumbers.
“They would give us red chillies sometimes so we would dry them in the sun and collect the seeds and then grow them. Sometimes we would get cucumbers in the salad so we collected the seeds and kept them in the sunlight And after they dry, they grow,” she says.
Every day, they would mash coconut and chilli to make sambol – a popular Sri Lankan side dish.
He struggled to eat the American food served from the base, and would put vegetables in hot water with garlic and chili to try to make curries.
With limited access to clothing, especially for the 16 children in the camp, Shanti and other women sewed clothes from bed sheets. At Christmas time, he turned paper napkins into flowers, and cut out moon and star shapes from food containers to decorate a tree.
Relations with the guards keeping an eye on them were often strained, but on Diwali, says Shanti, “an officer with a good heart brought biryani for us”. On another occasion, a guard brought a cake to her son, who was counting down the days to his birthday.
But as time passed, the feelings of helplessness increased, says Shanti.
Life in the camp existed in a bubble – news of major wars breaking out in Ukraine and the Middle East was coming from guards keeping an eye on the migrants, but they were kept away from the base and took their own lives.
Part of the Chagos Archipelago, access to the island is highly restricted. It has officially had no resident population since the early 1970s, when Britain evicted all the people living there so it could develop a strategic base.
“From the first day till we left, every day we were living with rats,” says Shanti. “Sometimes rats would bite our children – their feet, fingers and hands. They would steal our food. Sometimes at night they would crawl on our blankets and on our heads.”
Giant coconut crabs and tropical fire ants also crawled around the camp.
During the storm, rainwater seeped in through holes in the tent, which was used to house Covid patients earlier in the pandemic.
When UN investigators visited the camp late last year, children told them they were dreaming of going on a picnic, riding a bike or eating ice cream.
At one point earlier this year, a medical officer described the camp as being in “complete crisis”, with incidents of mass suicide and attempted suicide.
“My daughter was watching all this happen. She was like, ‘Mom, he’s cut himself. Should I cut myself?’ So I would say ‘No, no. You can’t do anything. I’ll protect you and listen to some music, come and get some paper and just draw,'” she recalls with tears.
Both she and her husband are crying as they talk about their daughter harming herself twice.
“Both times I felt very bad and couldn’t process it,” says Shanti. When she did it, she told me she did it because she hoped that if she died, her parents and her Brother will go to a third country safely.”
There were also cases and allegations of sexual assault and harassment by other migrants, including children, within the camp.
“We endured a lot in three years,” says Shanti. “I don’t know how we survived.”
During the Tamils’ stay on the island, British officials acknowledged that it was not a suitable place for them, and said they were looking for a long-term solution. The government said that the group’s well-being and safety were the “top priority”.
Shanti says the happiest moment in the camp came recently when officials announced they would be brought to the UK, where they would be given the right to stay for six months. Shanti says no one slept in the camp that night.
Upon arriving in Britain, Shanti says she was hit with “chills” – and felt as if she was waking up from a coma. She had forgotten to download apps, send WhatsApp messages or pay in stores.
Her children talk about starting school, making friends, and riding a double-decker bus.
But the family’s long-term future remains uncertain. He has now filed an asylum claim in Britain in the hope of surviving. Failing that, they will likely be returned to Sri Lanka.
Britain earlier this year agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move. Under the agreement, which has still to be signed, Diego Garcia will continue to serve as a UK-US military base but Mauritius will take responsibility for any future migrant arrivals.
Shanti brought a conch shell with her from Diego Garcia to remember her time there. One day, she plans to put it on a chain and wear it around her neck.
Additional reporting by Swaminathan Natarajan.
