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

Maybe I feel particularly strongly because I’m Scots, with the history of the Clearances, Highland and Lowland, of the suppression of Gaelic and Scots languages

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The British-French lawyer in a previous book, Lawless World, revealed a memo showing former British prime minister Tony Blair had told former US president George Bush he would support US plans to invade Iraq before Bair had sought legal advice about the legality of that invasion. Even though I studied international law both as part of my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I had never come across the story of the Chagos Islands until I read The Teatime Islands by Ben Fogle. In this book, Ben attempts to visit the last remaining colonial island outposts of the British empire. Places such as Tristan de Cunha, Ascension Island and Pitcairn. One of these outposts, the island of Diego Garcia in the British India Ocean Territory, is off limits due to the existence of an American Airforce Base located there, so Ben had to sneak on, and the existence of a secretive island in the Indian Ocean from which civilians were banned piqued my curiosity. I started to try and find out more about Diego Garcia and its history and, the more I read, the more horrifying the information I gathered became. The history of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands as a whole is a story of forced deportation and colonial oppression and the decades long fight of the Chagossians for justice through the international legal system.

The case at the heart of the book is one referred to the court by the UN at the behest of the Mauritian government (with Sands acting in the referral and the case before the court) basically claiming that the Chagos archipelago was illegally partitioned from Mauritius immediately prior to the latter being granted its independence by the UK – and further that the Chagos (which was set up by the British as a new colony – the British Indian Ocean Territory as part of a decision to grant the US a cold war and later war-on-terror base on Diego Garcia) Islanders were illegally deported when in 1973 they were forced to leave the Island and explicitly forbidden to return). L’ultima colonia, tradotto da Elisa Banfi, ha un nucleo centrale rappresentato da una serie di conferenze tenute da Sands all’Accademia Internazionale di Diritto dell’Aja, e una parte “personale” affidata alla storia di Liseby Elysé. E’ un libro più specialistico di La strada verso est, che tradisce le sue origini didattiche, pur avendo una notevole piacevolezza di scrittura. Ma è anche un libro che invita a riflettere su alcuni temi di rilievo internazionale, anche se apparentemente a noi lontani: vedi la cosiddetta “eccezione inglese” che ha permesso al Regno Unito, in piena era di decolonizzazione, di dare nel 1968 l’indipendenza alle Mauritius, ma di tenersi le Chagos con un’operazione di “distacco illecito” dalle Mauritius- e addirittura di svuotarle per concederle agli americani, che da cui avrebbero in seguito lanciato l’attacco all’Iraq.Some two thousand people who had lived on the islands of Chagos for generations, many the direct descendants of enslaved people brought there from Mozambique and Madagascar in the 18th century by the French and British, were deported overnight from their island paradise as the result of a secret decision by the British government to provide the United States with land to construct a military base in the Indian Ocean.