In May 2019, the U.N. General Assembly backed a landmark resolution condemning the ongoing British occupation of a cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean.
The Chagos Archipelago consists of 50-odd islands south of the Maldives that were once administered as part of the British colony of Mauritius. In 1965, these islands were severed from Mauritius (which gained independence in 1968) and renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory, and the largest of them, Diego Garcia, was leased to the U.S. for a military base.
By the time construction began on the base, the entire population of the islands, estimated to be around 1,500, had been “cleared off”; the majority were descendants of enslaved Africans still toiling in coconut plantations; most were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles. They were told to pack light, fit a few essential items into a single trunk or a suitcase. The pet dogs they left behind were shot, poisoned, gassed. The carcasses were brutally incinerated.
In The Last Colony, Philippe Sands, a British human-rights lawyer and professor, tracks the turbulent legal battle, stretching over decades, that culminated in the U.N.’s 2019 resolution.
In 2010, Sands became the lead attorney for the government of Mauritius in the Chagos case. Before that, he writes, he had been unaware of his country’s dealings in these islands, dealings which constitute “the story of its last colony in Africa.” As a schoolboy, he’d been taught that the British Empire’s relationship with its colonies was more or less benign, much like that of a “parent and child.”
When the Chagos matter reached the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) in The Hague, in 2018, Sands chose as his star witness one Liseby Elysé, an exiled Chagossian, who can still remember the evening 50 years ago when she and her family were forcibly put on a ship to Mauritius:
We boarded the ship in the dark so that we could not see our island. And when we boarded the ship, conditions in the hull of the ship were bad. We were like animals and slaves in that ship. People were dying of sadness in that ship.
Liseby was 19, newly married, and four months pregnant when she was evicted from her home. Soon after arriving in Port Louis, she lost the baby. “Why did my child die?,” she asked in court four decades later. “For me, it was because I was traumatized on that ship.”
“We boarded the ship in the dark so that we could not see our island.... We were like animals and slaves in that ship.”
Sands dutifully outlines the long fight put up by Chagossians for the right to return to their homes. With the exception of the base in Diego Garcia, the islands have been uninhabited for 50 years now. In 2002, spurred by the efforts of Olivier Bancoult, the president of the Chagos Refugee Group (and Liseby’s nephew), those born on the islands won the right to apply for full British citizenship. A British court even upheld their right to return to the islands around that time, but the Tony Blair regime reinstated the ban in 2004, shortly after joining the war in Iraq. (Later, it would emerge that Diego Garcia had been used as a transit point for detainees during the War on Terror.)
The Mauritian government simultaneously knocked on the doors of international courts to recover their sovereignty of the islands, claiming that the detachment of Chagos was illegal in the first place. Last year, Britain agreed to negotiate with Mauritius about a potential handover, but Chagossians remain excluded from the process. In an article published last April on the OpenDemocracy Web Site, Bancoult lamented that “once again, powerful governments are making decisions about our lives over our heads.”
Philippe Sands dutifully outlines the long fight put up by Chagossians for the right to return to their homes.
Sands doesn’t dwell much on the islanders’ right to self-determination, presumably because of his work with the Mauritian government. The book’s fatal flaw, however, is that the Chagossians’ odyssey is frequently sidelined by the story that Sands actually wants to tell: the postwar history of international law and Sands’s own experiences in that field, both as a student and a litigator.
There are copious bits about Churchill and Roosevelt disagreeing in 1941 on the phrasing of the Atlantic Charter and on the formation of the U.N. after the war, then entire chapters about precedents where the I.C.J. has alternately disgraced and redeemed itself with its rulings over the years. We read about the young Sands waiting for months for a document to arrive from The Hague in the pre-Internet era.
His insights, after a lifetime of practicing international law, might seem obvious to fans of TV-court dramas: “The law offers a framework within which the story is set out, but I have come to understand that how the facts are presented can influence the reaction of an individual judge.” Or this, about the importance of artfully arguing your case: “A court hearing is a moment of theatre.”
The Last Colony is ultimately a paean to incremental gains, to Sands’s belief that but for “three international tribunals and the rulings of a couple of dozen judges on matters of international law,” the U.N. General Assembly might never have voted on the British occupation of the islands. Readers’ enjoyment of the book will depend on their patience for gradual change and their willingness to perceive colonialism mainly as a violation of international law, and a moral abomination perchance on second thought.
Before one hearing, Sands runs into an old acquaintance who wonders aloud if “the world of international law would ever not be populated by a regular British presence.” Despite Sands’s decent intentions, I, too, couldn’t help wishing at intervals for a less British version of this book, one focused more intimately on the lives of displaced Chagossians and less on those who make decisions about their lives inside a courtroom.
Abhrajyoti Chakraborty is a New Delhi–based writer and critic
