Opinion

from Merritt Herald February 24, 2022

EDITORIAL New face in town

IZAIAH REYES

HERALD EDITOR

Allow me to introduce myself.

Hello! I think this is the best word to start our relationship off. My name is Izaiah Louis Reyes, and I am the new editor for the Merritt Herald. You will be meeting me every Thursday when you read the paper so I figured you should get to know me better.

I am 26 years old and a recent journalism graduate from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.

I am a Filipino who loves food and sports. If you ask me what sport, I would say boxing and basketball. If you ask me what food, I would say anything that’s good!

When I moved here in Merritt for the job, I had to leave my mom, dad, and brother back in Calgary. Ironically, I left them only to join a new family of four with the Herald.

This is my second time moving away from home and I knew it would be a tough adjustment, but I know this is what it takes for me to grow and better myself.

Family is an important concept to me and I would love to make Merrittonians a part of mine as I begin this new journey. I want to know more about this town and its people. We all have a story, and I would love to hear and share yours!

I am very thankful that our Publisher, Theresa Arnold, decided that I should be given this role. I know that Jake Courtepatte, my predecessor, has given you great quality work throughout his tenure and I am planning to do the same.

VIEWPOINT

Patience McKigney

Students, parents, and teachers: submit your art to newsroom@merrittherald.com for a chance to be featured each week! Submissions are printed on a first come, first serve basis.

Publisher Theresa Arnold publisher@merrittherald.com 250-378-4241 MERRITT HERALD

Editor Izaiah Reyes newsroom@merrittherald.com 250-378-4241 Reporter Morgan Hampton reporter@merrittherald.com 250-378-4241 Sales Representative Office Administrator Ken Couture kcouture@aberdeenpublishing.com 250-378-4241 Making Advertising Work For You.

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DYER: Chagos – The Fifty-Year-Old Crime

“The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours...There will be no indigenous population except seagulls,” wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the British Foreign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos Islanders from their homes was taking shape in 1966. “We must surely be very tough about this.” They were indeed very tough about it. Six years later the Chagossians ( ‘Ilois,’ as they call themselves) were scooped up, loaded on ships, and dumped on the waterfront of Port Louis in Mauritius, where most of them have lived in abject poverty ever since. But this month a number of them went back to the islands on a Mauritian ship. Not to stay, yet. They were shadowed by a British ‘fisheries protection’ vessel throughout their visit, which comically claimed that it was ‘cooperating in environmental research’. But the balance has now tipped so far in favour of the former residents that the British ship dared not stop the Mauritian vessel. While their own ship’s crew worked to define the territory’s maritime boundaries for the Mauritian government, the Ilois revisited their old homes, now roofless and overrun by vegetation. Afterwards they had to go back to Mauritius – but why were they exiled in the first place? The crime that Gore-Booth was shamelessly discussing in 1966 was committed on behalf of the United States. The Chagos Islands, an archipelago of 62 coral atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean, would make an ideal bomber base from which to dominate most of south Asia and eastern Africa, and the Pentagon wanted it. Britain, in its usual kissup, kick-down mode, was happy to oblige, but there was a problem. The Chagos Islands had been governed as part of the British colony of Mauritius, which was due to get its independence in 1968. The United States wasn’t keen on having a major strategic base in an independent African country, so something had to be done.

The solution, obviously, was to separate the Chagos Islands from Mauritius and declare them the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Easily done: offer the Mauritians £3 million for the islands, and tell them they can’t have independence unless they accept the deal. However, this was happening at the height of decolonisation, when colonial territories all over the ‘Third World’ were claiming the right of self-determination. What if the Ilois do the same? Well, then, we’d better remove all the inhabitants. So that’s what Britain did in 1972, falsely claiming that there was no resident population, only contract workers. The Ilois have not been allowed to return for fifty years, and all the people who were actually born there are getting old, but their children and grandchildren have not forgotten. They actually managed to get a decision in the British courts in 2000 ruling that the expulsion had been unlawful and ordering the British government to let the islanders go home. It might even have been obeyed – except that 2001 brought the 9/11 attacks, and the US base on the Chagos island of Diego Garcia became a key hub in the ‘war on terror’.

American B-52s flying from the Chagos Islands have bombed Afghanistan and Iraq at intervals for twenty years, and Diego Garcia, with no civilian population, became a transit point for prisoners being flown untraceably between American ‘black sites’ around the planet. The islands were on long lease from the UK, and the US didn’t want them given back. Britain still insists it is the sovereign power on the islands (although it is the US that runs them), but since the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that the whole expulsion had been illegal it has been on the defensive. The UN General Assembly, and more recently the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, have backed that ruling. It will take some time, but the United States no longer really needs a base on Diego Garcia since it has access to air bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, all much closer to the action. Moreover, Mauritius says that it doesn’t mind if the base stays so long as it gets its islands back. So the Ilois will be going home one day soon – and meanwhile, here’s a fun fact. The Chagos archipelago is at the bottom of a giant bowl-shaped depression in the ocean almost 100 metres deep. If the sea was actually level – if not for the huge gravitational anomaly that holds that bowl open – the Chagos Islands would all be in very deep water.

LETTERS to the editor Be cautious of lobbyist influence on science

Editor,

As one who has taken three COVID-vaccine injections, as well as the annual influenza shots, I basically believe the science behind the stated safety and benefit of vaccines in general. Still, I feel the term ‘science’ generally gets used a bit too readily/frequently, especially for political purposes. Also, I’m cautious of blindly buying into (what I call) speculative science, in general.

As disturbing as it sounds, due to increasingly common privatized research for corporate profit aims, even science, and perhaps by extension scientific ‘fact’, has become commercialized. Research results, however flawed, can and are known to be publicly amplified if they favor the corporate product, and accurate research results can be suppressed or ignored if they are unfavorable to business interests, even when involving human health.

Health Canada was established to act in Canadian consumers’ best interests, yet it’s susceptible to corporate lobbyist manipulation. For one thing, it allowed novelty-flavored vaping products to be fully marketed — even on corner stores’ candy counters — without conclusive independent scientific proof that the product, as claimed by the tobacco industry, would not seriously harm consumers but rather help nicotine addicts wean themselves off of the more carcinogenic cigarette means of nicotine deliverance.

A few years before that, Health Canada had sat on its own research results that indicated seatbelts would save lives and reduce injury; it wanted even more proof of safety through seatbelts before ordering big bus manufacturers to install them in every bus.

To me, that smells of lobbyist manipulation — something that should not prevail in a government body established primarily, if not solely, to protect consumers’ safety and health rather than big businesses’ monetary concerns.

Frank Sterle, Jr. White Rock, BC

From the Herald archives: February, 2012

POSSIBLE SCHOOL CLOSURES

A decrease in B.C. government funding to Merritt schools is fueling the possible closure of Coquihalla Middle School or a combination of Bench Elementary and Collettville Elementary.

An empty school would remain heated to avoid decay. The building would then be available for possible use for community functions, for example.

Enrolment began dropping in 2006.

LETTERS POLICY

The Merritt Herald welcomes your letters, on any subject, addressed to the editor. Letters must be signed and include the writer’s name and address. Letters may be edited for length, taste and clarity. Please keep letters to 300 words or less. Email letters to: newsroom@ merrittherald. com.