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The Last Colony
A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage
1 of 1 copy available
In 1973, on the Chagos Islands off the coast of Africa, Liseby Elyse—twenty years old, newly married and four months pregnant—was, rounded up, along with the entire population of Chagos, and ordered to pack her belongings and leave her beloved homeland by ship or slowly starve; the British had cut off all food supplies.
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.
For four decades the government of Mauritius fought for the return of Chagos. Three decades into the battle, Philippe Sands became the lead lawyer in the case, designing its legal strategy and assembling a team of lawyers from Mauritius, Belgium, India, Ukraine, and the U.S.
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 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?
Philippe Sands writes of his own journey into international law and that of the World Court in the Hague, and of the extraordinary decades-long quest of Liseby Elyse, and the people of Chagos, in their fight for justice and a free and fair return to the idyllic land of their birth.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of accompanying maps from the book.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 26, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593787892
- File size: 165177 KB
- Duration: 05:44:07
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 7, 2023
Historian and lawyer Sands (The Ratline) provides a piercing account of the legal battle undertaken by former inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago, a remote chain of islands in the Indian Ocean, to reclaim their homeland. Chagos became a pawn of geopolitical horse-trading in the mid-20th century, when the U.S. asked Britain to provide an uninhabited area for a military base. The result was the “wholesale deportation” of the archipelago’s native inhabitants by Britain in 1973—a “diaspora... for which the British were fully responsible.” (Diego Garcia, where the base was eventually built, is the only island in the chain that is currently inhabited—and only by U.S. military personnel.) Sands, who represents the Chagossians in the ongoing case, meticulously lays out the yearslong legal fight as it has played out in the International Court in The Hague since 2018. Woven throughout is former resident Liseby Elysé’s powerful testimony , which was crucial to the trial and makes clear the huge personal implications of mass deportation and the total loss of a sense of home. Sands efficiently combines history, memoir, and astute legal analysis. The result is a powerful testament to the lasting damage of imperialism.
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