Just so no one is misled: "original inhabitants" does not mean "indigenous peoples" with respect to the BIOT. The islands were not populated prior to late-18th Century European colonization. The depopulation was of post-colonial people.
Oh that's fine then. They only lived there for what 100 years, totally fine to do these things to those 1000 some people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia
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first tactics were implemented to decrease the population of Diego Garcia. Those who left the island - either for vacation or medical purposes - were not allowed to return, and those who stayed could obtain only restricted food and medical supplies. This tactic was in hope that those that stayed would leave "willingly".[26] One of the tactics used was that of the killings of Chagossian pets. Dogs were carried into sheds where they were gassed in front of their owners.[26]
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I mean, that doesn't justify the act, but I question the logic of claiming moral superiority or questioning authenticity over this.
That it is a distinction is important to me. Having difficult discussions is made more difficult if we obscure facts or conflate terms.
> more acceptable
I applied no normative judgement.
Why ?
"Sir Bruce Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1000 pets were gassed with exhaust fumes. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked", Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, "and when their dogs were taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried". Sir Bruce had been given responsibility for what the US called "cleansing" and "sanitising" the islands; and the killing of the pets was taken by the islanders as a warning."
I'm also unclear on why you quoted what the British did in your post - how does it relate to whether or not calling those people 'original inhabitants' is misleading? Do you believe that, if the British did something sufficiently wrong to them, that calling them 'original inhabitants' will be less misleading?
Immigrant? No. Settler? Not really after so many years.
As an immigrant, I view them as natives Quebecers.
What would you call them?
The reason "ethnic Europeans" aren't "the original inhabitants of North America" is that European settlers violently displaced (or killed) the previous inhabitants.
Heck, the "original" inhabitants of North America (as far as we know) actually originated in what is now mostly Russia if you go back a few dozen millenia. And if you go back further than that (according to mainstream scientific consensus) we all likely originated in Africa. Defining the term "original inhabitants" as an absolute is blatantly begging the question (specifically it only works if you're a creationist).
People were subjected to physical and psychological violence to be forcibly removed from their home and birthplace. That's bad enough, no matter how many generations lived in the same place before. This isn't about who's had it worse.
I'm not opposing clarifications. I'm opposing quibbling over the semantics of "original" as if the distinction adds anything to the conversation.
Their parents lived there, they were born there, they were violently expelled and suffered emotional abuse. The number of dead ancestors (or lack thereof) in the ground does not invalidate the suffering these people were forced to endure.
You says its important but don't explain why, and empathise that you place no "normative judgement" on it.
Normative judgment doesn't make sense btw, judgement adhering to the norm - eh wat ? I think you meant moral/ethical.
I'd hope the more important distinction is how people are removed, not how many generations of dead people there were before them.
Cases like this just make a mockery of the Lockean natural rights theory of property.
The only two nations that have laid claim to the territory are France and the United Kingdom. (France lost it in the Napoleonic Wars.)
Of course, the difference between the Indian Ocean Territory and India, is that people lived in India before. When the French showed up, the atolls were uninhabited.
Displacing settlers is a different question.
I want my £10!
Might as well demand they get paid for any inventions the military makes while testing stuff out there.
And if the British hadn't done this and gave control over to the people living there 50 years ago, they wouldn't get .io either, because they wouldn't call themselves British Indian Ocean Territories. They'd have used something reflecting the name in their language.
So again, this is a "resource" purely created by the British government being there.
Maybe it's terribly unfair and bad what they've done to those peoples, but .io doesn't figure into that at all.
Edit: I suppose if they had their own nation state, they could make some money that they couldn't otherwise. But why stop at domain names (which, again, wouldn't be .io, it'd be .cx or something for Chagossians)? They can't issue passports, a potentially valuable resource, not being a sovereign nation. They can't run "tax haven" schemes, etc. Seems like getting upset over .io itself is pointless compared to all the other stuff they could do with an internationally recognized government.
The .IO domain would eventually be deleted, and that territory represented under the existing .MU (Mauritius) domain.
Judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mu I don't think the Mauritian people have much benefit from the arrangements for .MU.
The standard provides codes for such places since different law often applies in territories and on islands.
(See also: UM, TW, EH, AQ, SH, SJ, and many others.)
The thing to bear in mind is this standard is used for a number of different purposes historically that has informed territories and other "non"-countries being added.
For example, it is used by postal services for routing physical mail. A lot of far flung island dependencies are coded individually because their mail wouldn't route through their mother country but through other ports.
The addition of "EU", while not a country, reflected the needs of the "EUR" currency code when the Euro was introduced (the first two letters of ISO 4217 currency codes are derived from the ISO 3166-1 standard).