Saturday, 2 August 2025

Connectivity, Resettlement, and Memory: Chagos, SIROP, and the Fiber Optic Truth

The first submarine fiber optic cable to connect Seychelles internationally was the Seychelles East Africa System (SEAS), which became operational in 2012. This cable links the main island of Mahé in Seychelles to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where it connects to international networks. The SEAS project was a significant milestone in enhancing Seychelles' international telecommunications infrastructure.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

SEAS Project:
The SEAS project involved laying a 1,917 km submarine cable, connecting Seychelles to Tanzania.
Partners:
The project was a public-private partnership, with the Seychelles government, Cable & Wireless (Seychelles), and Airtel (Seychelles) as shareholders.
Financial Support:
The project received funding from the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank.
Landing Point:
The cable landed on Mahé at Beau Vallon beach, according to the Seychelles Nation.
Significance:
The SEAS cable significantly reduced reliance on satellite-based internet, offering faster and more affordable internet access to the islands, according to the Seychelles Nation.
Subsequent Developments:
Seychelles has since added a second submarine cable, the PEACE cable system, further enhancing its international connectivity.

Seychelles East Africa Submarine Cable

Seychelles communications to be transformed following EIB support for first international fibre-optic link

https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2011-025-seychelles-communications-to-be-transformed-following-eib-support-for-first-international-fibre-optic-link

Submarine cable another pillar of New Seychelles, says President |28 May 2012

https://nation.sc/archive/234686/submarine-cable-another-pillar-of-new-seychelles-says-president

📡 Connectivity, Resettlement, and Memory: Chagos, SIROP, and the Fiber Optic Truth

1 August 2025 – Reflection and Technical Insight
By: The SIROP SCT Project

This first week following the release of the Chagos Resettlement Plan has sparked a series of urgent technical questions, among them:

How will Chagos be connected to the World Wide Web?

In today’s world, connectivity is not a luxury — it is infrastructure. Without access to the internet, mobile banking, public administration, healthcare, and even education will be crippled before resettlement begins.

🔍 Options Considered:

The PACE cable network, connecting parts of the Indian Ocean region — but requiring major undersea infrastructure and sovereign access agreements.
Satellite systems, such as Starlink or military-grade systems — requiring masts, dishes, and regulatory clearance due to military and intelligence sensitivities in the Chagos region.

But this conversation also opens the door to historic truths long omitted from public records.

📜 Seychelles Before 1986: Satellites and Silence

Until 1986, Seychelles’ connection to the wider world was shaped by US military satellite systems. The Cold War-era arrangement — overseen by the US Air Force, in tandem with President France-Albert René's government — linked Seychelles into a discreet web of global military telecommunication.

In parallel, Iran’s early satellite launch programs (prior to the 1979 revolution) had also been connected to regional conversations on satellite access in the Indian Ocean.

The early pre-Internet systems like SPACE, INTELSAT, and isolated local exchanges provided the bare minimum — but left the Seychelles digitally isolated and strategically exposed.

🌍 The SIROP 1986 Program: Driving Digital Sovereignty and Fiber Optic Integration

When the SIROP program was launched in 1986, it was not simply about political repatriation or economic reintegration — it was an engine of systemic transformation. The plan foresaw:

Market liberalization
Infrastructure upgrades
Telecommunications reform
Sovereignty over digital space

To achieve that, the SIROP team and networks quietly leveraged partnerships, including with Alcatel France, to create the strategic case for fiber optic connectivity. It was not coincidence that as the SIROP plan gained traction in Europe and among global institutions, conversations shifted from military satellite dependency to civilian high-speed cable deployment.

🧭 The Blair Years and Africa's Digital Superhighway

In 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour government entered office, just as SIROP’s influence was quietly shaping several African telecom and economic zones. One of Blair’s big initiatives — often referred to as the Africa Digital Superhighway — was not born in a vacuum.

The push to connect African states via submarine fiber optic cables was directly synergized by SIROP mechanisms:

Cable & Wireless (Seychelles), then British-owned, was financially and politically leveraged.
The first Seychelles cable, which faced massive political hurdles, was finally realized thanks to these sustained backchannel efforts.
The so-called "second cable debacle" likewise saw deep resistance from dishonest political actors in Mauritius and Seychelles — yet was implemented due to external pressure and sustained regional networking, again rooted in SIROP’s foundational architecture.

🏗️ Mauritius, Ebene Tower, and Regional Opportunism

It must also be stated for the record:
The building of the Ebene Cybercity in Mauritius, and the rise of Orange Telecom and Mtel, were not just Mauritian government genius. They were:

Strategically benchmarked using SIROP program tools
Activated through diplomatic and economic leverage behind closed doors in Europe
And intended to mirror a regional tech hub model that Seychelles was initially too politically insecure to claim

🔮 Chagos 2025: The Next Digital Battlefront

As resettlement begins, the question is no longer whether Chagos will be connected — but who will own, govern, and profit from that connection.

Will it be:

Mauritian-aligned operators with opaque motives?
Satellite providers working through Western military clearances?
Or an open regional consortium, learning from SIROP’s hidden successes and mistakes?

🧠 Final Thought

From fax machines in exile offices to fiber optics on the ocean floor —
From military satellites in Seychelles to NFTs in blockchain governance —
The story of Chagos and Seychelles is also the story of digital sovereignty born from historical injustice.

The SIROP program’s unseen fingerprints are everywhere — even if they never appear in a press release.

Tuesday, 29 July 2025

The Chagos Resettlement Plan: A Future Built on Forgotten History

🇬🇧 The Chagos Resettlement Plan: A Future Built on Forgotten History

As Britain reopens the chapter on Chagossian return, it does so with a narrow lens, omitting decades of deeper politics that shaped — and in many ways compromised — the region. What is being marketed today as a humanitarian rectification lacks the historical accountability and systemic depth that any honest process demands.

Among the most glaring omissions is the role of the SIROP 1986 program and the broader geopolitical architecture it helped reveal and influence.

🧭 BIOT, East Africa, and the Politics of Displacement

The creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) was never just about Diego Garcia and military basing. It was a response to the failures of East African decolonization — a scramble by Britain and the U.S. to retain geopolitical leverage after the collapse of the Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1964, the fall of regional monarchies, and rising Soviet and Chinese influence east of Aden.

The Chagossian displacement was not an isolated tragedy. It was part of a pattern of strategic removals, refugee marginalization, and region-wide political recalibration.

🧱 SIROP 1986: The Missing Framework

The SIROP program, developed in 1986, quietly sought to bridge the ruptures caused by BIOT and similar Cold War legacies. It introduced — with the knowledge of former colonial officers, African Union diplomats, and European states — a proposal that:

Recognized the failed East Africa post-colonial integration;
Addressed the exiled royal houses and diaspora, including the Sultanate of Zanzibar and Oman-linked communities;
Integrated the complex legacy of Seychelles, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, and Ethiopia’s refugees and political return;
Positioned Chagos and the Indian Ocean as a zone of peaceful return and neutral refuge, potentially under a UN humanitarian flag.

Some of this was quietly acknowledged by key actors. Much of it was ignored — and none of it is reflected in the current Chagos discourse.

The passing in 2024 of the Omani-Zanzibari Sultan — with whom SIROP coordinated aspects of return — marks the silent end of a chapter that was never properly told.

🗺️ Selective Memory, Dirty Politics

What we are witnessing is a deliberate fragmentation of history. SIROP’s history is reduced. The reconstruction of Zanzibar’s political diaspora is excluded. The UK’s use of antisocial methods — rave, rage, and aggressive marginalization — remains unaddressed, just as it was used to suppress SIROP’s progress, delay the Northern Ireland peace timeline, and fragment legitimate African resettlement claims.

These are not footnotes. They are foundations. Without them, the Chagos resettlement process risks becoming another symbolic gesture, shaped by optics rather than reconciliation.

🔍 What Needs to Be Said — Clearly

Chagos cannot be addressed in isolation from the wider Indian Ocean and East African displacement politics.
The British and American orchestration of BIOT was a direct reaction to failed regional diplomacy and the loss of control over post-colonial transitions.
The SIROP program, while buried, holds valuable documentation and precedents that deserve attention in current resettlement frameworks.
The Mauritian, Chagossian, and British dialogues today lack the long-range cultural, spiritual, and diasporic memory needed to ensure justice.

📌 Final Thought

What we forget, we risk repeating. And what we ignore, others will distort.

There are those still alive who built and preserved the frameworks of return, from Seychelles to Zanzibar. If we fail to include their insights — and programs like SIROP — we will continue rebuilding peace on broken foundations.

Monday, 28 July 2025

🕊️ SIROP 1986 and the Chagos Resettlement: A Legacy of Return, Resistance, and Renewal

https://www.chagos-islands.com/resettlement

🕊️ SIROP 1986 and the Chagos Resettlement: A Legacy of Return, Resistance, and Renewal

In a season where international policy circles are debating resettlement, sovereignty, and digital governance, the long shadow of a program launched nearly 40 years ago—SIROP (1986)—continues to reveal its global influence.

Over the past week, the UK government published its Chagos resettlement outline, reigniting painful memories of exile and the contested promise of return. Yet this moment is not just about the Chagossians. It intersects with a far older and broader architecture of peacebuilding, refugee diplomacy, and global restructuring—one initiated by the SIROP program at the height of Cold War tensions.

🧭 The Global Reach of SIROP
Originally framed as a nonviolent return initiative for exiled Seychellois communities, SIROP (Seychellois International Refugee and Onward Program) became something vastly more complex.

It quietly helped redefine exile, sovereignty, and reconciliation in a bipolar world teetering on nuclear collapse. With strategic support from leaders like Mitterrand, Andreotti, Schmidt, Kohl, and Gorbachev, the program linked the massive military drawdown of the late 1980s to a redistribution of resources toward rebuilding societies—from post-communist Europe to the Global South.

SIROP leveraged this shift to help synergize dozens of global complexities:

The Jewish return from Russia and Ethiopia to Israel

Northern Ireland’s peace process

The Vietnamese, Afghan, and Latin American diasporas

The Kurdish push for autonomy

The Balkan and Eastern Bloc returnees after the fall of the Iron Curtain

Long-forgotten or abandoned refugee communities across North, West, and Southern Africa

In each case, SIROP offered a prototype for return—not through force or conditional aid, but via sovereignty restoration, economic transition, spiritual diplomacy, and regional coordination. Many attempts succeeded. Some failed. Others were hijacked. But the architectural vision held: exile must end in dignity, and return must be built, not begged.

🇬🇧 Chagos, Again: The Safe Haven That Might Have Been
In the 1980s, as the SIROP network expanded, discussions were held with UK officials under the Thatcher government to consider Chagos as a regional refuge or safe haven. Under UN protection, and funded with an estimated £200 million peace dividend, it could have become a model for coordinated, voluntary, and sustainable return—for displaced communities not just in the Indian Ocean, but across the region.

That vision was shelved. Political calculations won. Military imperatives silenced humanitarian foresight.

Now, in 2025, the British government has proposed a new Chagos resettlement outline, following international legal pressure. But again, the question arises: Who designs return? Who owns it? Is this restoration or tokenism?

📉 Theory vs. Reality: Lessons Unlearned
The failures of modern resettlement are not technical—they are political, ethical, and institutional. From Rwanda’s proposed refugee deals to fragmented UNHCR practices across Africa, the gap between theory and lived experience remains stark.

Those who were there during the foundation of SIROP know this well. The program wasn’t built in offices. It came from diaspora pain, post-colonial injustice, spiritual vision, and real-world diplomacy across broken borders. It was built by people who understood that return is not just a right—it’s a restoration of identity, economy, and dignity.

🧬 What Now? A Digital Legacy for the Future
Today, the SIROP initiative continues under its modern evolution—SIROP SCT, a blockchain-powered platform designed to preserve archives, fund global cooperation, and promote governance models rooted in the original 1986 vision. It is being reformulated under MiCAR regulations, with AI oversight and community voting tools—but its DNA remains unchanged.

It is not enough to publish policies. We must remember the wisdom of what came before, and the sacrifices made in silence. SIROP was—and is—one of the most ambitious peaceful return programs ever created. The Chagos case must learn from it, not repeat the failures it already tried to prevent.

📌 Final Thought
History does not always repeat—but it echoes.

Let those echoes now inform our decisions, reawaken our integrity, and rebuild what exile never fully destroyed.

Sunday, 1 June 2025

Between BIOT and SIROP: - Reclaiming the Real History of the Indian Ocean

United Seychelles celebrates party’s origin through exhibition |05 June 2024

GRAN REPORTAZ: CHAGOSYEN SESELWA 52AN APRE - 29-05-2025

As the world approaches the solemn anniversary of the June 5th 1977 coup d'état in Seychelles, we are reminded how much of our collective regional history has been shaped in silence, exile, and selective memory. A recent video, Through the Mists of History, offers some reflection on Seychelles' past, but like so many narratives, it bypasses critical chapters—notably, the fate of the Chagossians in Seychelles and the deeper implications of the SIROP program.

While the documentary mentions Mr. Félix Houreau and his role during and after the 1977 upheavals, it omits the broader, painful truth: the Chagossians who were exiled to Seychelles, many of whom were housed in facilities like Union Vale with little support or recognition. It ignores the experience of those who landed with no home or shelter, and those who would later be incarcerated amid post-coup tensions.

In 1979, I personally met Mr. Houreau in Swansea, where he served as a Councillor. He was deeply knowledgeable on the Chagos dossier and the historical connections to the Moulinier family. At that time, we discussed the industrial research undertaken by UNIDO and the World Bank for a potential Indian Ocean Industrial Investment Promotion Centre, as well as the conceptual origins of the Indian Ocean Commission (COI). Mr. Houreau also chaired the SEA, a UK-registered charity committed to these causes. After his death, efforts were made to rebuild this entity.

When people today speak boldly of Chagos and Mauritius' sovereignty claims, they often forget the lived reality of exile. The trauma experienced by those who were displaced, who lost land, livelihoods, and identity, is still not adequately addressed. Many never returned home. Many still live in silence.

This is why the SIROP program matters. It was not just a political strategy. It was a civil society-driven plan for peaceful regime change and reconciliation. It brought together European support to counter the spread of communism in the region—an effort that BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territory) was initially meant to enforce by military means. Yet it was the soft power and multilateral diplomacy behind SIROP that truly reshaped regional dynamics.

Sadly, the TRNUC (Truth, Reconciliation and National Unity Commission) failed to incorporate SIROP into its findings. This omission is not just a bureaucratic oversight; it reflects a deeper reluctance to reckon with alternative histories—those written not by governments or armies, but by displaced people, thinkers, and political exiles.

Mauritius today may celebrate diplomatic victories and legal claims, but it is essential to acknowledge that neither Britain nor the United States alone removed communism from the Indian Ocean. That shift came through mechanisms like SIROP, supported by European networks, and shaped by forces in Africa, the Gulf, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

The current geopolitical climate calls for clarity. With AI and digital platforms allowing the public to revisit suppressed or forgotten narratives, there is now space to reflect honestly on the past. We call on the Seychelles exile community to step forward, to share what they know about SIROP, Chagos, and the political experiments that shaped modern Indian Ocean history.

As history often reminds us, destiny is shaped not just by treaties and territorial disputes, but by the courage to tell the truth. Between BIOT and SIROP lies a fuller, more honest story of our region—one that we must now reclaim, before it is lost again.