The moving, inspiring David-and-Goliath true story of freedom and
justice involving one tiny nation in the Indian Ocean off the coast of
Africa, and the extraordinary woman, a descendant of slaves, who dared
to take on the Crown and the United Kingdom--and win a historic
victory
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.
