Many have never heard of the Chagos islands, yet it is the scene of what David Snoxell, former British high commissioner to Mauritius, calls “one of the worst violations of fundamental human rights perpetrated by the U.K. in the 20th century.”

In a 3-to-2 decision, the British High Court recently ruled that the islanders who were evicted from their homes on the small group of islands in the Indian Ocean did not have a right of return.

The largest of the islands is Diego Garcia, the site of an important U.S. military base that serves to project power in the region, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Despite official United States and United Kingdom denials, Diego Garcia was confirmed by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey and others as home to one of the CIA’s many so-called “black-sites,” where ghost prisoners that the U.S. has seized have been “rendered.”

Diego Garcia was officially “leased” for 50 years to the United States in the late 1960s.

But as a Washington Post exposé revealed, the British were secretly “compensated” with $14 million off of the price of the Polaris nuclear weapons system. This was illegal as it was unknown to Congress at the time, veteran journalist John Pilger wrote in his book Freedom Next Time.

A 2005 Freedom of Information Act revealed Washington wanted the entire population of the Diego Garcia gone, leaving the islands “swept” and “sanitized” in “a neat, sensible package.”

“To get us out of our homes, they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs,” Lizette Talatte told Pilger in the New Statesman. The Chagossians have an inseparable bond with the dogs.

Sir Bruce Greatbatch, governor of the Seychelles, then gave the order for all the islanders’ dogs to be killed. Roughly 900 were rounded up in American military vehicles where they were gassed with exhaust fumes, then later burned, reported CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Pilger, who spoke to the man who carried out the grim task.

Many islanders felt that they would suffer the same fate as their dogs if they offered resistance to the depopulation, the islanders’ Mauritian lawyer said.

“Nothing was the same after that,” Talatte said.

Within months of Talatte and her family arriving in the slums of Mauritius, two of her children died.

“They died of sadness,” she told Pilger. “The eight-year-old had seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs.”

For the more than 2,000 Chagossians evicted from their homes, the latest court ruling represents another setback in their struggle to return home.

The majority of the surviving islanders, many of whom can trace their ancestry back five generations, now live in poverty more than 1,000 miles away in Mauritius.

Since 2000, a total of nine British judges have called the United Kingdom’s actions “illegal,” “outrageous” and “repugnant.”

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee also said “there is a strong moral case for the U.K. permitting and supporting a return to the British Indian Ocean Territory for the Chagossians.”

The Chagossians’ next appeal will be to the European Court of Human Rights.

Reach columnist Aditya Ganapathiraju at news@dailyuw.com.