The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy

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The Chagos Archipelago is not among the world’s best-known places; if it registers at all, it is probably for the US military facility on Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands. Exactly how the US ended with a base in the middle of the Indian Ocean provides the prologue to the story. When Mauritius was negotiating its independence from Britain in the 1960s I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions. Sands relates the wider tragedy of the scandal with nerve and precision . . . A steely and forensic case, laced with human empathy . . . Important and welcome corrective.” —Tim Adams, The Observer

He spoke to The Irish Times in advance of his trip to Dublin on Thursday to deliver the Free Legal Advice Centre’s (Flac) annual justice lecture. o 1998-2004 The British government (Foreign Secretary Robin Cook) announced that the Chagossians would be able to return to all parts of Chagos except Diego Garcia. The judges faced a landmark decision: Would they rule that Britain illegally detached Chagos from Mauritius? Would Liseby Elyse sway the judges and open the door, allowing her and her fellow Chagossians to return home—or would they remain exiled forever?I ask the question: How do Peros Banhos(ans) and Diego Garcians get on? 143 miles separate the two islands. The forced evacuation happened at the same time (between 1968-1973), but only one set of exiles is being boosted by Sands in the hope and belief that they will return to the land of their birth. Few people will know anything about the story of the Chagos Islands and the terrible wrong perpetuated upon its people by the British Government. This is deliberate, because the history of Chagos and how the Chagossians have been treated by Britain is a shameful stain on this country.

When the case finally reached the World Court in the Hague, Sands chose as the star witness the diminutive Liseby Elyse, now sixty-five years old, and instructed her to appear before the court, speaking in Kreol, to tell the fourteen international judges her story of forced exile. The fate of Chagos rested on her testimony. The Last Colony is not his first work to champion investigations of 21st century government law-breaking. It follows others involving the US military prison on Guantánamo Bay; the secret collusion between Bush and Blair over the Iraq War; and the trial of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. Sands, who was leading the Chagossians’ repatriation case against the British government – and the ongoing claims of Mauritius that the islands are part of their nation – uses Elysé’s personal history to explore the wider tragedy and scandal of the place now officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). His case highlights the post-colonial hypocrisy that continues to use UN human rights conventions as a basis for sovereign self-determination of the people of the Falkland Islands, or Gibraltar, but which for decades has wholly disregarded the application of those conventions in the case of the Chagossians.

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Eighty-nine nations voted in favour of Resolution 1514, none voted against and nine abstained, including Britain, France, the US and Australia. The British delegate said it could accept self-determination as a principle, but not a “legal right”, and said nothing about territorial integrity. He believes British justice secretary Dominic Raab’s efforts to bring in a British Bill will fail because many Conservative parliamentarians are “appalled” by his proposals, but says it is “not a time for complacency”. The strand in the right wing of the Conservative party that imagines there is still “this thing called the British empire” has to be “firmly resisted”. This is more the history of the World Court in the Hague and other international law bodies, than a single case study. But structuring it around the, eventually triumphant case of the Chagos Islands lets Sands write a story with a heartwarming ending, which makes it a bit easier to take. The only person I’d ever heard talk about the Chagos Islanders and their expulsion from the home they knew was Jeremy Corbyn - and whatever your opinion of him he was on the side of the angels on this one! In November 2022, Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, announced that “through negotiations, taking into account relevant legal proceedings, it is our intention to secure an agreement on the basis of international law to resolve all outstanding issues, including those relating to the former inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago”— a statement that was interpreted as somewhere between opening a door and throwing in the towel. In February of this year, the U.S. Department of State called the expulsions from Chagos “ regrettable,” implicitly (if coolly) accepting the historical account of American policy laid out in David Vine’s 2011 book, Island of Shame. Both Mauritius and Britain have indicated that, whatever the ultimate outcome, the U.S. base on Diego Garcia will likely remain more or less as it is. Only the landlord will change.

To understand my gripe in Sands’ book :his failure to clearly delineate differences between Peros Banhos, (and Salomon Island) and Diego Garcia, its necessary to look at the geography of the region, and the history of the last sixty years. The Chagossians had been trying to leverage the legal system for decades. One effort was driven by a man named Olivier Bancoult, who was just a boy on Île du Coin when he and his family were forced to leave. Bancoult leads an organization called the Chagos Refugees Group and has argued in British courts that the eviction was illegal and that the victims have a right of return. He actually won his first case, in 2000, but the British government brushed it aside after 9/11—no point aggravating the Americans as they waged a war on terror. (Diego Garcia was reportedly used as a transit point for rendition flights.) The second effort—in the World Court—was driven by Mauritius, for its own purposes. Mauritius, represented by a team that includes Sands, argued that the detachment of Chagos by Britain had been based on blatant falsehoods and that the detachment and the expulsions were illegal. In 2019, the World Court ruled against Britain, a judgment endorsed by the UN General Assembly not long afterward. In February 2022, with those victories in hand, Mauritian officials and a group of Chagossians mounted a trip to the archipelago: Mauritius to assert a claim, the Chagossians to visit the islands of their birth—the first time they had done so without a British military escort. First, she recalled, the British shut down the islands’ plantations and cut off food supplies to the remembered paradise of her childhood. The hundreds of Chagossian families were told that they had no option but to leave by ship by 27 April 1973 or slowly starve. “We were like animals in that slave ship,” she remembered of her 20-year-old self. “People were dying of sadness.” Elysé was four months pregnant. Her child was subsequently stillborn. Mr Jugnauth re-iterated Mauritius’s strong commitment to the continuation of the US military base at Diego Garcia, and the return of the displaced Mauritians to Peros Banhos. Mauritius was willing to negotiate a treaty with the Americans, and if the British wanted a role they could have one.

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The brutal expulsion of the Chagos Islanders wasn’t a wholesale massacre but it was a staged, cruel process which attracted little attention. UK has defied international law -and common humanity. Sands’s book began as a series of lectures delivered to The Hague Academy of International Law, and as a narrative it betrays those discursive origins. While examining the displacement of the island people, many of whom have died in exile, Sands also sketches out the history of the international court of justice in The Hague, and its incremental role in dismantling colonial structures around the world, the inching forward of freedoms. Sands makes a steely and forensic case, laced with human empathy, against successive British foreign ministers There is a but. “The climate change issue is very worrisome indeed, there I don’t know what the law is going to do. The law is dependent on political will, if the political will is not there, the law can’t deliver.”