Diego Garcia: Stranded mum’s three-year ordeal on military island

It’s morning in a makeshift camp on the distant British island of Diego Garcia, and Shanthi’s husband has simply awoken to seek out their younger youngsters staring by means of a safety fence.

As the kids watch an officer and guard canine patrol the secretive island, house to a strategic UK-US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, they make a stark comment: “Even the dogs have more freedom than us.”

“When I heard that I felt heartbroken,” he says.

It was a scene that captured their household’s predicament – they had been stranded on a mysterious military fortress by chance, but had a son and daughter, aged 5 and 9, to lift.

In an effort to seek out normality within the tiny camp they had been housed in beneath fixed surveillance, the household discovered methods to entertain themselves, to check, develop meals and have a good time particular events.

Shanthi, not her actual identify, says they’d paid $5,000 (£3,900) in financial savings and given all of her gold jewelry to smugglers for an formidable journey to Canada, greater than 12,000 km away, with dozens of different Sri Lankan Tamils.

They all mentioned they had been fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka and India, some due to hyperlinks with the previous Tamil Tiger rebels who had been defeated within the civil conflict that led to 2009.

The fishing boat they had been in leaked in tough seas, prompting their rescue by the Royal Navy who took them in October 2021 to Diego Garcia – they usually had been positioned within the fenced-off migrant camp. Shanthi remembers her son asking if they’d arrived in Canada.

Her younger youngsters obtained no formal training on the island for the primary six months there so, as a skilled instructor, Shanthi started giving English classes to the kids within the camp.

“We started with the basics – the alphabet, nouns, verbs, present continuous,” she says.

Shanthi’s husband later constructed a writing desk out of wood pallets so the kids may do homework within the tent.

The youngsters quickly started to complain of boredom within the evenings so Shanthi – who had skilled in Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance – started giving dance classes, too, enjoying music downloaded from her cellphone.

Three years after the household first arrived within the camp, they had been lastly despatched to the UK this week in what the federal government described as a “one off” case in the interests of their welfare.

“It’s like an open prison – we were not allowed to go outside, we were just living in a fence and in a tent,” Shanthi, aged in her early 30s, says in an interview on the outskirts of London.

“Every day our life was the same.”

It was like residing “in a cage,” she provides.

While guards watched and army jets often roared overhead, Shanthi and the opposite Tamils approached British forces on the island with a letter asking to be despatched to a protected nation. It marked the primary time that asylum claims had ever been filed within the territory.

This sparked a lengthy legal battle 6,000 miles away in the UK, and whereas that took its course, Shanthi and the others caught there, took issues into her personal arms.

While the Tamils weren’t allowed to prepare dinner their very own meals, the camp was filled with coconut timber, and Shanthi and others used the husks to line planters during which they grew their very own greens – chilli, garlic and cucumber.

“They would sometimes give us red chilis so we dried them in the sun and collected the seeds and then grew them. In the salad sometimes we’d get cucumber so we collected the seeds and kept them in the sunlight and after they dried they would grow,” she says.

Every day, they might make sambol – a well-liked Sri Lankan aspect dish – by mashing the coconut and chilli.

They struggled to eat the American meals served to them from the bottom, and would put the greens in scorching water with garlic and chilli to attempt to make curries.

With restricted entry to clothes, significantly for the 16 youngsters within the camp, Shanthi and different girls stitched clothes from mattress sheets. Come Christmas time, they turned paper napkins into flowers, and minimize moon and star shapes out of meals containers to brighten a tree.

Relations with the guards that watched over them had been usually tense, however at Diwali, Shanthi says an “officer with a good heart brought us a biryani”. On one other event, a guard introduced a cake for her son, who had been counting down the times to his birthday.

But as time went on, Shanthi says, the sentiments of helplessness grew.

Life within the camp was to exist in a bubble – information of main wars breaking out in Ukraine and the Middle East trickled by means of from the guards watching over the migrants, however they had been refrained from the bottom and consumed by their very own lives.

Access to the island, a part of the Chagos Archipelago, is closely restricted. It has formally had no resident inhabitants because the early Seventies when the UK evicted all of the folks residing there so it may develop the strategic base.

“From day one until we left, every day we were living with rats,” Shanthi says. “Sometimes the rats would bite our children – their legs, fingers and hands. They stole our food. At nights sometimes they would crawl over our blankets and our heads.”

Giant coconut crabs and tropical fireplace ants would additionally crawl into the camp.

During storms, rain water would pour in by means of holes within the tents, which had beforehand been used for Covid sufferers within the pandemic.

When United Nations investigators visited the camp late final yr, the kids instructed them they dreamed of going for a picnic, using a motorcycle or consuming an ice cream.

At one level earlier this yr, a medical official described the camp as being in “complete crisis”, with mass self-harming and incidents of tried suicide.

“My daughter was watching everything that happened. She’d say ‘mum they’ve cut themselves. Should I cut myself?’ So I’d say ‘no, no. You can’t do anything. I’ll protect you. Come and listen to some music, come and take some paper and just draw,'” she recollects by means of tears.

Both she and her husband sob as they speak in regards to the two instances their daughter self-harmed.

“Both times I felt really bad and couldn’t process it. When she did this, she told me she did it because she hoped if she died her parents and her brother would go to a safe third country,” Shanthi says.

There had been additionally circumstances and allegations of sexual assault and harassment inside the camp by different migrants, together with towards youngsters.

“Over three years we suffered so much. I don’t know how we survived,” Shanthi says.

Throughout the Tamils’ time on the island, British authorities acknowledged that it was not an appropriate place for them, and mentioned they had been on the lookout for long-term options. The authorities mentioned the group’s wellbeing and security was the “top priority”.

Shanthi says the happiest second within the camp got here not too long ago when officers introduced that they might be delivered to the UK, the place they might be given the precise to stay for six months. Shanthi says nobody within the camp slept that evening.

Upon arriving within the UK, Shanthi says she was struck by “the cold” – and it felt like waking from a coma. She had forgotten the best way to obtain apps, ship WhatsApp messages or pay in outlets.

Her youngsters speak of beginning college, making associates and using a double-decker bus.

But the household’s long-term future stays unsure. They have now filed asylum claims within the UK in hopes of remaining. If unsuccessful, they’ll doubtless be returned to Sri Lanka.

The UK agreed earlier this yr handy over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic transfer. Under the deal, which has nonetheless to be signed, Diego Garcia would proceed to function as a UK-US army base however Mauritius would take accountability for any future migrant arrivals.

Shanthi introduced a shell along with her from Diego Garcia to recollect her time there. One day, she plans to place it on a series and put on it round her neck.

Additional reporting by Swaminathan Natarajan.