The sorry plight of the people of the Chagos Islands and their "crown" territory, Diego Garcia, is not new to New African readers. What is new are the intricate details of the conspiracy by the British and American governments to steal the islands from their African inhabitants, which have now been

uncovered and put on film and in a new book by one of the great journalists of the modern era, John Pilger. On 21 September this year, a weeklong "John Pilger Film Festival" ended at the Barbican in London to much acclaim. Most people who watched the 12 films on show, (the most hard-hitting and inspirational political films made by Pilger), came out shaking their heads at the scandalous nature with which power is exercised by the high and mighty of this world. Among the 12 films, Stealing A Nation, Pilger's work on the appalling story of the Chagos Islands, which had been hidden from the public by successive British and American governments, stood out like a shining beacon.

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The film festival also coincided with the release on DVD by Network (a British-based company) of Pilger's 12 films. Titled, John Pilger--Documentaries that Changed the World, this four-disc package is a must-see by everybody who cares about the future of the world. When you next hear British and American officials thunder about democracy and human rights, show them a copy of Stealing A Nation.

But first, a word about John Pilger. He grew up in Sydney, Australia, and later moved to the UK in the 1960s. A recipient of 19 awards, including the UN Media Peace Prize and most recently the Royal Television Society's award for Best Documentary, Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author of nine books and respected factual filmmaker. He began his career in 1958 in his native Australia, before moving to London. His films draw upon the experiences of eye-witnesses who, he says, are fundamental to "good journalism". A passionate and rare critic of foreign military and economic interventions by Western governments, Pilger received (in 2003) the Sophie Prize for "30 years of exposing deception and improving human rights". He is now the sole political documentary maker of the British television company, ITV.

Now, please sit back, turn the page, and be amazed by the master-investigator, John Pilger. This special report is taken from his new book, Freedom Next Time, a large chunk of which is dedicated to Stealing A Nation.

In long forgotten archives in London and Mauritius is a rare film of a community of contented people. The grainy, flickering images, full of movement of children playing on sandy beaches, and proud young women presenting their newborn for christening, and men setting out to fish, their dogs swimming alongside, are glimpses of a true paradise.

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There are thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a light railway, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty: strings of coral atolls, floating in turquoise, that were once the peaks of a Gondwanaland mountain range known as Limuria, long covered by 21,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean.

Sixty-five of these limestone specks, arranged in groups, make up the Chagos archipelago: the Salomon Islands and the Peros Banhos atoll to the north, the Egmont Islands to the west, and, 200 miles to the south, an atoll the shape of a tiny Italy, 14 miles long and six miles wide. This is Diego Garcia. Free of serious tropical storms and with a large protected natural harbour, Diego Garcia lies almost exactly midway between Africa and Asia.

Some 2,000 people lived on the Chagos archipelago; the majority on Diego Garcia. A gentle, Creole nation, their ancestry went back to the 18th century when the French brought slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar to work a coconut plantation. After Napoleons defeat in 1815, the islands passed from French to British rule; just under 20 years later, slavery was abolished.

Chagossian society continued to grow with the arrival of indentured labourers from India in the 1840s and 1850s. Many stayed and converted to Catholicism, together with the settled population, and by the 20th century they had developed a distinct language that was a lilting variation of French Creole.

There were now three copra factories, supplying the coconut oil that lit street lamps in London, and a coaling station for ships en route to and from Australia. By the 1960s, there were plans for tourism.

In one film, shot by missionaries, a boy plays with a pet duck and a dog dives for fish. As if celebrating a perfect vision of empire in such a place, a [British] Colonial Office film from the 1950s describes the population as "born and brought up ... in conditions most tranquil and benign". The camera pans across a laughing woman hanging out clothes to dry in a coconut grove while her children play around her. This is Charlesia Alexis.

I met Charlesia the other day, 50 years after she was filmed. She was sitting in the shade of her small sparsely furnished house on the edge of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius, over a thousand miles away from home. I asked her for her fondest memories of Diego Garcia.

"Oh, everything!" she replied. "The sense of wellbeing is my fondest souvenir. My family could eat and drink what they liked; we never lacked for anything; we never bought anything, except clothes. Can you imagine that?

"Why did you leave?"

"I left in 1967. My husband was very ill and I decided to take him to Port Louis to get the special treatment he needed. When we were ready to return, we went to Rogers and Company--they ran the boats--and asked for our tickets. They said they had instructions not to let us go back. They said Diego had been sold."

"Sold?'"

"Yes, that's what they said. We were tricked. Looking back, the day before we left, the administrator told us to take a lot of fruit with us. They tricked us in so many ways, and when this game had run its course, they deported everyone, just like that. I was the fourth generation. Diego was my bird in the sky that was taken from me. I was sent to live in a slum, in rooms previously inhabited by goats and pigs. That's how they saw us."

Something similar happened to Rita Bancoult. In 1968, one of her six children fell seriously ill, and Rita and her husband had to take her and the rest of their family to Mauritius. When the sick child died, they, like Charlesia, went to the shipping agent in Port Louis harbour to collect their tickets home and were also told they could never return.

"I'm very sorry for you, Rita," said the agent, "but your island has been sold." At that, her husband, who was sitting beside her, suffered a stroke; his arms and mouth were paralysed, and he died a few days later.

Like all the Chagossian women I met in exile in Mauritius, Charlesia Alexis and Rita Bancoult are remarkable simply for having endured; for what happened in the Chagos Islands was so searing, it may seem barely credible.

Indeed La Lutte, as the Chagossians call their struggle for justice and freedom, arose from a crime that allows us to glimpse how great power works behind its respectable, democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful, and how governments justify their actions with lies.

During the 1960s and 1970s, British governments, both Labour and Tory, tricked and expelled the entire population of the Chagos, a British dependency, so that their homeland could be given to a foreign power, the United States, as the site for a military base.

The "act of mass kidnapping" was carried out in high secrecy, along with the conspiracy that preceded it. For almost a decade, neither [the British] Parliament nor the US Congress knew anything about it, and no journalist revealed it.

When the base had been established, a group of "defence" correspondents were flown out by the [British] Ministry of Defence and reported as expected, as if no one had ever lived there; BBC newsreaders still refer to US aircraft flying out to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq from the "uninhabited" island of Diego Garcia.

The Chagossians were treated like Australia's Aborigines in the 19th century: they were deemed not to exist. Not only was their homeland stolen from them, they were taken out of history. Until recently, the [British] Foreign Office website denied their very existence. Only a handful of MPs have referred to them in parliamentary debates on Britain's remaining "overseas territories". Not a single politician whose policy-making had brutal consequences for the islanders has ever referred to them in his or her memoirs. I know of no work of scholarship on British foreign policy that describes what happened to them, with one admirable exception: the books of Mark Curtis, who has called them "unpeople".

Having abandoned them, seven British governments watched their vulnerable, faraway citizens live a nightmare in shanties in the Seychelles and, mainly, Mauritius, where they had been discarded, while ministers and their officials in London mounted a campaign of deception that went all the way up to the prime minister.

This scandal continues today--even after the High Court in London ruled in 2000 [and also in May 2006] that the islanders' "wholesale removal" was an "abject legal failure", "irrational", "unlawful", and "repugnant.

How it all started

The year was 1961. Two men strode up the jetty on Diego Garcia, filmed by missionaries unaware of the significance of their visitors. One of them was Rear Admiral Grantham of the US Navy, the leader of an American advance survey team whose objective was to find an island suitable for a military base that would allow Washington to dominate the Indian Ocean and beyond.

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For the next three years, British and American planners and engineers inspected the Chagos group. Finally, they selected the nearby island of Aldabra. Their secret decision leaked out to the scientists of the Royal Society London, who were horrified. Aldabra has a unique population of Giant Land Tortoises, nesting seabirds and the last surviving flightless bird in the Indian Ocean: it is a treasure store of wildlife.

Together with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Royal Society, this formidable establishment body, mounted a campaign that saw off the Ministry of Defence and Admiral Grantham. The Giant Land Tortoise and the last flightless bird were safe. The second choice, however, was not. This was Diego Garcia which, although rich in terrestrial and marine life, was not unique enough to excite the indignation of naturalists.

As for the presence of a flourishing human population, this was "not an insurmountable problem", advised the [British] Foreign Office, for people could be "removed" and the "outside world [presented] with a scenario in which there were no permanent inhabitants on the archipelago".

This was essential, "because to recognise that there are permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights will have to be safeguarded". Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984 could not have put it better.

In February 1964, a secret Anglo-American conference was held in London, at which the final decision was taken. Again, Parliament was not informed. The following April, Anthony Greenwood, the colonial secretary in Harold Wilson's Labour government, flew to Mauritius, then a British colony that included the Chagos Islands.

Greenwood spelled out the terms for granting independence to Mauritius. Despite UN Resolution 1514, which held that all colonial peoples had an inalienable right to independence without conditions, Greenwood offered it with strings. Mauritius could be free as long as Britain could keep the Chagos archipelago. The bribe was a mere [pounds sterling]3m, together with a promise to support Mauritian sugar preferences.

Thus Charlesia's and Rita's homeland was "sold". On 8 November 1965, in the twilight of its colonial era, Britain created a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), whose principal territory was the Chagos Islands. It was a ruse of which perhaps only Britain's ancient regime was capable; for the new colony was a fake, an entity created for the sole purpose of handing it over for the use of the American military.

This was made possible by using the archaic powers of the royal prerogative, a throwback to the divine right of kings. The British Indian Ocean Territory was brought into being by an order-in-council, a decision approved not by Parliament but by the monarch, acting on the advice--in effect, the instructions--of a secretive, unaccountable group known as the Privy Council.

The members of this body, the Privy Councillors, include present and former government ministers. They appear before the Queen in Buckingham Palace, standing in a semi-circle around her, heads slightly bowed, like Druids; they never sit down. Items for the Queen's rubber-stamping--the "orders-in-council"--are read out by title only. There is no discussion; the Queen simply says "Agreed".

This is government by fiat: the use of a royal decree by politicians who want to get away with something undemocratically. Most British people have never heard of it. British prime ministers use it to take the nation into unpopular wars, such as the invasions of Egypt in 1956 and Iraq in 2003.

Dictators do the same, but without the quaint ritual. The Harold Wilson government used it to deport the entire population of the Chagos Islands so as to hand their country to the Americans. Almost 40 years later, Tony Blair's government used it to thwart the High Court's attempt to allow them back.

Although barely reported in the press, word of the manoeuvre reached the UN in New York, spurring the General Assembly to pass Resolution 2066, calling on the British government "to take no action which would dismember the territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity". This was ignored.

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In December 1966, Lord Chalfont, a Foreign Office minister, signed a contract in Washington giving the Pentagon a 50-year "lease" on Diego Garcia with an automatic extension of 20 years.

Declassified State Department documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act in 2005 reveal that Washington wanted the entire population expelled; as one official put it, the islands were to be "swept" and "sanitised". This was described in a secret file as "a neat, sensible package".

Robin Cook, who in 1966 had not yet begun his parliamentary career, told me in 2004 that the scandal was not raised in the House of Commons for almost a decade because MPs "knew nothing about it; the keeping of that secret was amazing". It was indeed.

In December 1974--the year Cook was first elected as an MP--a joint UK-US question and answer primer for officials and embassies around the world asked: "Is there any native population on the islands?" The reply was: "No".

A Ministry of Defence spokesman denied this was a lie, in the process uttering perhaps the most amazing lie of all. "There is nothing in our files," he said, "about inhabitants or about an evacuation." It was not until 1975, following an expose in The Washington Post, that the US Senate revealed that the British government had been secretly "compensated" for the Chagos with a discount of $14m off the price of a Polaris nuclear submarine.

This itself was illegal, as it was never submitted to Congress for approval; and the document Chalfont signed stated falsely that the US would pay no rent for acquiring "base rights". There was no mention of a population.

Lizette Talate is also in the Colonial Office film [made on Diego Garcia]. She was 14 years old at the time and remembers the producer saying to her and her friends: "Keep smiling, girls!" Sitting in her kitchen in Port Louis, she said: "We didn't need to be told. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in Diego. My great-grandmother was born on Diego, my grandmother was born there, my mother was born there, I was born there, and I made six children there.

"Maybe only the English can make a film that showed we were an established community, then deny their own evidence and invent the lie that we were transient workers. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out."

"How did they terrify you?"

"They tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, and everything was scarce. There was no milk, no dairy products, no oil, no sugar, no salt. When they couldn't starve us out of our homes, they spread rumours that we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

The Chagossians love their dogs; they are inseparable. A Chagossian home is a profusion of steps-and-stairs, children, and fawn-coloured, tail-wagging mongrels and pups. The plan to kill all the dogs on the island came from Sir Bruce Greatbach, KCVO, CMG, MBE, then Her Majesty's governor of the Seychelles, who was responsible for the "new" colony of the BIOT.

"At first, they tried poisoned fish balls," said Lizette. "That killed a few and left many in terrible agony. Then they paid a man to walk around with a big stick, beating them to death, or trying to.

"This was Spring 1971. It was very hot. American soldiers had already begun to arrive to build the base. They backed several of their big vehicles against the brick shed where the coconuts were prepared; hundreds of dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through a tube from the trucks exhaust. You could hear them crying."

The bodies of the dogs, many still alive, were thrown on to a shelf that usually held the flesh of coconuts as it was cooked above husks burning below. This was their pyre. Children listened to the howls of their pets being burned to death and watched a few trying to escape on to the beach, and being driven back into the flames by whippers-in. It took more than a ton of husks to complete the slaughter.

"The children cherished their dogs," said Lizette. "Nothing was the same after that. We were covered in sadness."

Robin Mardemootoo, the islanders' Mauritian lawyer, told me: "The relationship with your pets ought to be the same whether you are Chagossian or British. They were absolutely destroyed by the fate reserved for the dogs, and many of them told me that it was clear to them that if they offered any objection to the depopulation, they would suffer the same fate.

"And as if this was not enough, American military helicopters and planes flew very low over the island and people were told the whole place would be bombed very soon. I have listened to women crying, remembering how they ran from the noise when all of a sudden they would see a helicopter, and they would take their children in their arms, terrified." Those who refused to leave were summoned to the administrator's office and told they had no choice because their "removal" was "legal" under the rules of the new colony. This was a big lie. A senior judge, Lord Justice Sedley, noted 30 years later that "legal powers designed for the governance of the islands [were misused] for the illicit purpose of de-populating them". The assembled people were told they would be loaded on to ships and deported. There is a photograph of this meeting. A white man wearing shorts and long socks is standing on the steps, addressing the crowd; children are looking up at the adults, who look stunned. Several appear to have dropped down with shock; others seem stricken with grief.

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"Magistrate Todd delivered the news," said Lizette. "There was a sort of hint that what they did to our dogs, they were going to do to us. They were without pity."

Along with 180 others, Lizette and her family were forced on to the vessel Nordvaer, which had plied between the Chagos and Mauritius and the Seychelles, transporting copra and taking supplies back to the islands.

The uneventful coming and going of this ship had helped give the Chagossians their best-known name, Ilois, meaning "islanders". As a means of transporting this number of passengers across 2,500 miles, it was hopelessly inadequate.

They were allowed to take with them only minimal personal possessions; they had to leave behind their furniture, which they had bought with savings from their work in the plantations, and their precious chickens and ducks, donkeys and goats. The descendants of goats and donkeys that were not shot now run wild in the vegetable gardens and graveyards long claimed by bush.

Sir Bruce Greatbatch's military-style commands were sent by satellite from the Seychelles. "Destroy the dogs and save the horses," he had ordered Marcel Moulinie, the plantation manager. He now insisted that the horses took pride of place on deck of the Nordvaer.

For five days, the horses were fed and the people were not. The men were herded onto the bridge and had to stand or crouch in very rough weather; the women and children were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser--bird shit. People vomited and suffered diarrhoea; two women miscarried.

"Even water was scarce," said Lizette. "What I can't forget is the fear and uncertainty for myself and my family. When we got to the Seychelles, the police were waiting for us. They marched us up the hill to a prison, where we were kept in cells until the boat was ready to take us on to Mauritius.

"I suppose we took some hope in the promise that in Mauritius we would be granted a house, a piece of land, animals and a sum of money. We got nothing. When the ship got to Mauritius, the only kind person was the captain who let us stay on his ship until he had to go."

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The former president of Mauritius, Cassam Uteem, who has championed the Chagossians' rights, told me: "You can't imagine how bewildered and terrified they were. Some of them camped on the docks, waiting for the next ship to take them back home. No British official was there to ease their way, even though the British had done this to them and they were British citizens.

"They needed help to integrate themselves into Mauritian society, which is very different from the society they were used to. For them, life had been simple; they had a house of their own, they grew their own food, they fished from the sea and they worked on a plantation. They were close to nature, whereas in Mauritius, it's a sophisticated life by comparison. You go out and look for a job; and there is unemployment. What happens to someone who doesn't have any skills besides those of fishermen?

"These were a people who would sing their way through life; and here they were, weeping their way through life, and they are still weeping. I know of one lady who lost two children within two or three months, and she wasn't able even to perform their funerals because she didn't have any money. The children were taken from the hospital straight to the cemetery. That lady is still weeping."

Lizette is that lady. She lost Jollice, aged eight, and Regis, aged 10 months. Her husband died soon afterwards. She is a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who wears a mask of grief and determination.

"When the ship docked, Mauritian officials didn't know what to do with us," she said. "They eventually took us to an abandoned housing estate called Beau Marchand. Mauritians we met told us this place was not habitable, and we could see why. Goats from Rodriguez Island had been put in the houses, which had no electricity and water. Rubbish and filth were everywhere. It is accurate to say we were treated like animals. That was November--I've forgotten the year; I hope I have!--I was so sick I was in hospital and both my children were, too. They died in January, within eight days of each other."

"What did they die of?," I asked.

"They died of sadness. When I received the news, I knew the youngest had my milk, which was the milk of sadness. The eight-year-old had heard all the talk, and he had seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. He knew he was leaving his home."

"What did the doctor say about him?"

"The doctor said he could not treat sadness."

'They've caused us too much suffering'

Waving away her pups, Rita Bancoult welcomed me into her home in the Cassis district of Port Louis, where most exiled Chagossians live. Born on the island of Peros Banhos in 1925, she says her "will never to forget" her previous life has sustained her since her family was tipped onto the dock with "a bunch of clothes tied in a pillowcase and a straw mattress".

Among family photos she showed me was a picture of the [British] royal family, from around the 1970s. I asked her why she kept this.

"That's the what?," she asked.

"That's the Queen and the Duke. Didn't you know?"

"I didn't think about it. It's one of the pictures my husband's mother kept."

"What are you doing with it, Rita?"

"I'm putting it in the toilet! They have caused us too much suffering. I'm tearing it into pieces and putting it down the toilet."

And so she did.

Four of Rita's children died in Mauritius: first, the baby they had brought over with a gangerous wound to be treated; then, in the years of exile, Reno, Alec and Eddie.

"What did they die from?," I asked.

"Sorrow."

I had brought an official British document to show Rita. It was written in 1968 by one Anthony Ivall Aust, then a high-flying legal adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, aged 26. Headed "Maintaining the Fiction", it advised the Wilson government to "argue" the "fiction" that the Chagossians were "only a floating population" because "this would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population".

When it was translated into Creole for Rita, she dropped her head in her hands. "But that's not true!," she cried out. "All our generations are buried on Diego. How could he write that?"

I did not read her Aust's piece de resistance. "We are able to make up rules as we go along," he wrote, "and treat the inhabitants of BIOT as not 'belonging' to it in any sense." Aust was subsequently awarded the CMG in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

By 1975, the Chagossians in exile began to die from their imposed poverty. Most were unemployed and penniless and either sharing a slum or sleeping rough. A survey by the Comite Ilois Organisation Fraternelle in Port Louis told of 26 families forced into prostitution merely to pay for food. The following is an extract from the report:

* Eliane and Michele Mouza: mother and child, committed suicide.

* Leone Rangasamy: drowned herself because she was prevented from going home.

* Terenne Chiatoux: committed suicide, no job, no roof.

* Daisy Volfrin: obtained no food for three days. Died through poverty.

* Josue and Maude Baptiste: no roof no food, committed suicide.

This was merely a snapshot of the suffering inflicted by the British government, whose callousness en passant was expressed in a letter to a member of parliament from a Foreign Office official. "Although we have no information about deaths," he wrote, "some deaths are bound to have occurred in the normal course of events."

That was a lie. The Foreign Office had sent a senior official, A. R. G. Prosser, to investigate; he had sent back a graphically detailed report on the islanders' living conditions and advised that "something needs to be done".

The [British] government's response was to offer a minuscule [pounds sterling]650,000 in compensation to the entire population. Even this did not arrive until 1978, five years after the last islander had been deported; and even this was dispatched grudgingly. A note from the British high commission in Port Louis had emphasised: "We must be satisfied that we could not discharge our obligation ... more cheaply."

On 16 March 1981, several hundred Chagossian women converged on the British high commission in Port Louis, sat down and sang, and demanded proper compensation. Having tried in vain to speak to the high commissioner, they occupied the entrance hall, and eight women began a hunger strike in the gardens opposite.

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One of them was 77 years old. Charlesia Alexis was arrested and beaten; a newspaper photograph of her being dragged into the back of a police van sent an embarrassing ripple to London. When the hunger strike was in its eighth day, the British agreed to "talks"--not with the Chagossians, but with the Mauritian government.

In the first few months of 1982, it appeared that progress was being made on compensation. On 27 March, a group of the most impoverished islanders accepted a "full and final" settlement of [pounds sterling]4m--less than half the estimated minimum they could survive on. Rita Bancoult showed me a strange, pseudo-official document that bore her name and her thumbprint. In exchange for a "settlement" amounting to around [pounds sterling]1,000, and unaware of what she was agreeing to, Rita unwittingly "signed" an agreement to renounce her rights to return to the Chagos.

I can't read or write," she said. "I was told that if I signed this, I would get some welfare assistance in Mauritius. I later realised that it allowed the British government to say they had compensated us. They didn't; they tricked us. The money we got didn't even pay our debts."

Robin Mardemootoo, their lawyer, said: "It was entirely improper, unethical and dictatorial to have the Chagossians put their thumbprint on an English legal document, whereby the Chagossian, who doesn't read or speak any English, is basically made to renounce his rights as a human being."

Such a crude expedient may well have been a product of the Falklands War. In 1982, Britain's treatment of the Chagossians was being contrasted in the United Nations with its expenditure that year of [pounds sterling]2bn defending the rights of the Falkland islanders.

The Falklands and the Chagos each had a population of 2,000 British citizens. One population was white, the other black. While the Argentine invasion of the Falklands was furiously resisted by British forces sent 8,000 miles for the purpose, the American invasion of Diego Garcia was accommodated in every detail by the British government, which even arranged for the inhabitants' expulsion.

In 1982, the Financial Times called the Falklands invasion an "illegal and immoral means to make good territorial claims", as well as an "outrage" that should not be allowed to "pass over the wishes of the Falkland islanders".

Echoing Margaret Thatcher, The Daily Telegraph said that "the wishes of the [Falkland] islanders were paramount", that "these islanders" must not be "betrayed", and "principle dictates" that the British and American governments could not possibly "be indifferent to the imposition of foreign rule on people who have no desire for it".

Such fine indignation applied precisely to the people of the Chagos, but was never expressed. I asked Marcel Moulinie about this. A ruddy, Buddha-shaped man, at ease with a pink gin, a billowing shirt and a tropical sunset, he was the last manager of the plantation on Diego Garcia which his family had owned. He had moved in the pith-helmeted milieu of Sir Bruce Greatbatch, and now he was a troubled man.

"First, let's set the record straight," he said. "Operation Stampede--getting those people off the islands--was a faux pas of Sir Bruce."

"A faux pas?"

"I don't think he meant it. He had some wonderful ideas for developing the islands for tourism. That's why he wanted to get the horses off and try it somewhere else."

"Yes," I said, "he put them on deck and the women and children in the hold."

"Oh, he did that without really thinking. But it wasn't good; it was terrible actually. In giving the horses priority, we had to put wooden stables on board and, God, as the ship rolled, you had horse dung everywhere; it was disgusting actually."

"What else disgusted you?"

"The invention in London that the Chagossians were mere contract workers who could be sent back to places they had never come from. The man who looked after my cattle on Diego was fifth generation."

"Why did they do that?"

"Let's face it: do any of these boys in the Colonial Office really care about this? Come on ... You had your standard of living and you kept to it ... your pink gin at lunchtime."

"So the people were just 'the natives'?"

"The natives, yes. That was the truth of colonial life, whether you were in Kenya, Uganda, the Seychelles; and who cared about the Chagos? Oh, just bung them on a ship, you know. That was the situation. It was hell. One young fellow jumped overboard to his death. I've read about the slave ships from Africa to America. This was the same. The only difference was the absence of chains. I couldn't get the people out of my mind; I still can't. In their first few years in Mauritius, I went to see them. They had no water and no sanitation, and the children had no clothes; they looked as though they had been rolled in ash and earth."

"You sound full of regret."

"I am."

"What do you regret most?"

"Where does one start? Getting rid of the dogs; I did that for Sir Bruce. It was not fun. We had about 800 dogs on Diego. I'm sorry to say I tried to poison them. I used strychnine, which the Americans used to poison coyotes back home. The moment I saw the poison having an effect, I would shoot them in the head. The Americans helped, but a platoon of us couldn't shoot all the dogs. So I talked to the American medical boys, who suggested carbon monoxide. That did it. Then we burnt them, eight or nine hundred. We didn't do the cats ... couldn't catch them."

"While all this was going on, did anyone express any regret?"

"Well, my uncle, who owned the plantation, was very annoyed about the whole thing."

"Annoyed?"

"He wasn't happy with the price he got for the plantation."

"What do you think of the compensation the people got?"

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"You call that compensation? Now come on, these things should be done properly, not brushed under the carpet."

"Do you remember the Royal Navy going to the rescue of the Falkland islanders?"

"Ha! How many times I've thought of that."

"What was the difference?"

"Can't you hear her, the Queen, in her Christmas and Birthday broadcasts: 'My people', she would say. So you go to the rescue of 2,000 of her people in the Falklands, and you kick out 2,000 of her people in the Chagos."

"What's the difference?"

"I wouldn't like to answer that."

"Why not?"

"I love the British."

"Go on, answer it."

"I think we both know the answer."

Olivier Bancoult is Rita's surviving son. At dawn every morning, he puts on his green overalls and cycles down a stony dirt path past corrugated shacks, from which people greet him warmly. During the day he is an electrician with Port Louis City Council. In the evening, from a small lockup beneath a hand-painted sign, "Chagos Refugee Group", he takes La Lutte to the world.

Of the 4,000 Chagossians on Mauritius, only Olivier speaks fluent English. A paragon of patience and grace, he leads a community dominated by matriarchs who intend to go home before they die.

As you enter the lock-up, there is a 'picture of paradise', as Olivier calls it. It is an incandescent, wall-sized mural, green and lush and dream-like. Above it are photographs of Olivier with Nelson Mandela and Olivier with the late Pope. "We compare our struggle to Mandela's," he said. "It is almost 40 years since they stole our country and imprisoned us here. We are all like Mandela."

The lock-up contains a computer: "My messenger to the world," says Olivier. "We send our press releases out from here."

"Does anyone publish them?"

"Sometimes, but I keep sending them anyway; I keep explaining who we are, and what was done to us. I remember the words of Martin Luther King: 'With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."

"Do you get angry?"

"Yes, I get very angry when I think of the Americans on Diego, with heir bombers coming down a two-mile runway, and their swimming pools and bars and barbecues, and their Miss Diego Garcia contests."

"What upsets you most?"

"The lie that we didn't exist."

(Freedom Next Time. By John Pilger. Published by Bantam Press. 356 pages including index. Very highly recommended by New African)