Britain’s recent darkest hour: the betrayal of the Chagos Islands

Philippe Sands’s compelling new book opens in 2018 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Liseby Elysé – ‘a distinctive lady dressed in black’, who can neither read nor write – is making a video statement before 14 judges. In Creole, she describes how, in 1973, she and the last of her 1,500 fellow islanders from Peros Banhos (part of the Chagos archipelago, south of the Maldives) were forcibly deported to Mauritius. They were herded in the dark onto a boat for a four-day passage, with neither notice nor explanation given, restricted to one wooden trunk of possessions apiece, homes abandoned and all their pets rounded up and gassed. The boat’s captain said he had ‘never transported people in such terrible conditions’. Mme Elysé was four months pregnant, and later lost her child.

The author, a distinguished academic and barrister, then took to the podium, acting for the Mauritian government, and argued that this removal was illegal, as was the original British severance of the islands to set up a new colony in 1965, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which is the subject of this succinct, impressive work. And it’s not some retrofitted anticolonial story, either: the matter is very much current, and unresolved.

For most of us, if we’ve heard of the Chagos at all it will be because of its militarised atoll of Diego Garcia, which became the site of a US base in 1971, nicely named Camp Justice. The first aircraft to land carried Bob Hope and a troupe of fellow entertainers. Later (after half a billion dollars had been spent developing it), the island apparently became a CIA ‘black site’ and part of the post-9/11 rendition system. Then, in 2003, it was the launch base for initial air strikes against Iraq.