Intro
In 2023, my blogposts concentrated on British political and constitutional issues and controversies.
The first six months of 2024 have seen Tory politicians (and their supporting ‘think tanks’ and donors) plumb such new depths of dishonesty, misinformation, and mindless self-harm that it has become almost impossible to treat them to serious analysis. The current Prime Minister (Sunak), his incredibly low-grade Cabinet, and his clutch of baby-faced ‘bottom of the class’ advisers, have lurched from one unconvincing position to another contradictory one, sometimes on the same day. In the face of adverse election results, and opinion polling that suggests imminent electoral disaster, Sunak and his acolytes kept producing ever more provocative policy proposals, flailing around in the desperate hope that they would by chance hit on something to resonate with a dismayed and increasingly restless electorate. This is a government that has left reason and logic far behind, and has fallen into an abyss of authoritarianism, incompetence, social brutality, and anarchic political infighting, a combination that bids fair to destroy the Conservative party as a serious player in our now bruised and battered political institutions. As Tacitus is said to have recorded of the Roman Empire some two thousand years ago, ‘they create a desert and call it peace..’
Since we seem to have reached a point where the looming general election (another utterly inept political decision by Sunak) has shaped and distorted all political discourse, I thought I would change my own discourse somewhat until things resolve and settle down again (this may take some time). Reading groups are extremely popular now, so I propose to write a short series of book reviews, based both in my own recent reading and on the links this reading has to events in my own life (recorded, as many of my readers will know, in a family memoir: Shifting Classes in Twentieth Century Britain: From Village Street to Downing Street (2020,YouCaxton Publications). I begin here with a particular story of British empire and decolonisation, and in a second part will locate this story within more recent general studies of British and other imperialisms.
Where Do You Come From? Where Are You Going?
Philippe Sands: The Last Colony, a Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy
The particular story I have chosen is that of the decolonisation of Mauritius in the mid to late 1960s, and the subsequent development of that story, right up to the present day, into an international legal and political cause celebre. I choose this for three reasons. First, a gift from my family was ‘The Last Colony’, a recent study by Philippe Sands, a distinguished international lawyer, which examines the history of that decolonisation insofar as it involved, in 1965, the formal detachment from then British colonial Mauritius of Diego Garcia, one of the islands in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. The British would rename these islands British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and subsequently lease the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States to construct and maintain a strategic air base in the Indian Ocean. The most controversial aspect of this story is that it involved the expulsion from these islands of up to 1500 (the precise figures are somewhat uncertain) of the people who lived and worked there, many born there, their very presence initially (and deliberately) denied by the British authorities. In the intervening half century, most of these hapless victims have ended up living unstable, uncertain existences either in Mauritius, or the Seychelles, or in the UK, anywhere but in the place many regarded as their home.
My second reason for choosing this unflattering imperialist story is that I was personally involved in it, at least in a walk-on part. In 1965, I had just completed three years as a diplomat in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), working in the Private Offices of successive Secretaries of State, first Conservative Duncan Sandys, then after Labour’s victory in October 1964, Arthur Bottomley. This had given me considerable interest and practical involvement in Britain’s decolonisation programme, and in 1965 I was asked to help with the organisation of what became known as the Lancaster House Conference. I had participated in other decolonisation meetings, but few would become so mired in international controversy as the contested road to Mauritian independence and geopolitical integrity. To my faint surprise, I would find myself meeting the conference participants again in the 1970s when I spent two years in Mauritius helping to set up their new University.
I will come back to that 1965 Conference. But first let’s follow Sands as he traces (and is in its later stages a key legal player in) the many international legal inquiries, and legal judgements, centred on the Diego Garcia/Chagos dispute. International law is a complex and often opaque field of both theory and practice, and we are fortunate to have Sands’ expert guidance through it. But it is also, in this particular case, a tortuous, more than five decades long process.
The limits of international justice
One of the culprits in this story is the system of international law itself, which as Sands admits and demonstrates moves at a snail-like pace at the best of times. Characteristically, it may take several years to identify ‘colonial’ wrongs and clarify how and by whom these judgements may be translated into remedies and the relief of damages. Basically there are two routes to the international resolution of international territorial disputes. The most direct route is through diplomatic negotiations between contending countries or groups of people: good luck with that, as we see from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute right now. A second route is through the framework of international institutions, which normally will mean action through the United Nations and/or other international bodies. This international route is usually followed when direct negotiations between countries or groups have failed to produce solutions acceptable to both contending parties. Failure in the first route invariably leads to a lengthy and winding path along the second.
Sands explains how a significant part of the Diego Garcia story is the structure and membership of the courts or legal commissions reviewing claims and disputes about the Diego Garcia question. He shows that it can be a highly political process, often shaped by the preconceptions and prejudices of the judges and lawyers who are the main players, appointments often owing more to ‘Buggins turn’ than to merit or appropriateness. Judgements that may be favourable to the victims, turn out to have only ‘advisory’ effect, so can all too readily be ignored. Moreover, as his account demonstrates, there are severe limits on the political clout of key players in the international justice system, so that legal judgements and recommendations are frequently set aside by powerful national states.
Sands is well placed to guide us through this particular case, because later in the story he himself was one of the principal lawyers involved in presenting the Mauritian and Ilois cases. He has a long-standing interest in the development since 1945 of the leading institutions of international justice, and their relationship to, and impact upon, significant international conflicts. He is at pains to demonstrate the unresolved tensions within and between the major institutions: the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court, all with their own bureaucratic complexities and judicial imperfections. He highlights the divisive thread running through their deliberations: is their primary function to judge and punish crimes against individuals, what we would label as ‘war crimes’? Or should they be pursuing crimes against specific, clearly identifiable groups of people, targeted in such a way that we would describe these as as ‘genocide’? In an earlier study, East West Street: a Song of Good and Evil, Sands has given us a compelling account of how these threads were shaped by warfare and violent conflicts, largely between states, but also often enough by the violent and murderous treatment meted out by states to their own citizens or subjects. He focuses on the Nazi extermination of Jews and others to flesh out the development of the ideas of war crimes, and genocide, and the role of the Nuremburg trials in shaping legal responses to such practices, and to the creation of new international institutions.
In doing so he hits upon a most productive literary method, part biographical, part personal family memoir, using particular personal histories not only of lawyers but of those being judged and prosecuted by them. This story-telling approach gives life, vigour and intensity to what might otherwise be rather dry and legalistic conceptions; as Antony Beevor has commented ‘No novel could possibly match such an important work of truth’.
In The Last Colony Sands deploys this approach again, repeatedly concentrating on the specific case of one of the people evicted from one of the Chagos islands, Peros Banhos (though not from Diego Garcia itself). This woman, Liseby Elyse, was born and married there. Evicted forcibly by the British in 1973, along with other inhabitants, she and her family lived for 14 years in the most basic conditions in a refugee-camp-like settlement in Mauritius. Married with children, her family are now scattered between Mauritius, the UK and France. Her personal testimony of her deep feelings of loss and displacement strikes an emotional chord and gives a clear sense, many decades later, of the uncaring and brutal way in which the Ilois were treated in this period.
In his account of a crucial legal hearing some 30 years later, before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in 2018, (you see how long this sort of thing takes), Sands gives a central place to Liseby’s personal witness statement, doubtless designed to persuade a set of generally unemotional jurists of the real personal damage occasioned to the Ilois, but also to wring the more tender heartstrings of his readers. (Though to my mind, the most telling effects in the book are achieved by the wonderfully dark and suggestive illustrations by the gifted Guardian cartoonist, Martin Rowson: an extensive ‘rogues gallery’ of Western political leaders during this whole period, from Lyndon Johnson to Boris Johnson, looms threateningly over the hapless but staunch little Liseby.) The British properly stand guilty as charged of shameful behaviour, and have more than once admitted as much.
But there is a persistent blank space in this account, involving either unawareness or misunderstanding of the place of Mauritian ethnic politics in this long story. (Perhaps I’m a bit unduly critical here: after all, lawyers want to win their cases, and authors to grab their readers, and Sands is pretty good in both respects.)
The communal politics of Mauritius
Back in the 1960s, Mauritius was a very diverse and divided society, with a large Hindu Indian majority of about two thirds, and minorities of Franco-Mauritians (white French in origin), Muslims, a substantial Creole (mixed race) group, and a small Chinese community. Elections to the colonial Legislative Council in 1963 produced a majority for the Hindu dominated Mauritius Labour Party (MLP), led by Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam. Smaller parties represented minority interests: the Parti Mauricien (PMSD) broadly represented the Franco-Mauritian interest and some elements of the Creole population, Muslims had the Committee for Muslim Action (CAM) and an interesting Indo-Mauritian Hindu splinter group, the Independent Forward Bloc, initially supported the ‘class’ interests of poor Indian labourers. Relations between the main communities were fractious and bitter, frequently spilling over into inter-communal riots and violence, which marred the formal moves to independence between 1965 and 1968.
There was a clear political dividing line in the 1965 Lancaster House Conference: the Indo-Mauritian-based political leaders were strongly set on independence, while most of the other parties, fearing a dominant Indo-Mauritian majority in an independent state, rejected independence in favour of a form of continued and dependent association with the UK. The British camp, anxious in these ‘wind of change’ days to divest itself of smaller colonial possessions, was ready to concede independence to a majority Indo-Mauritian leadership.
As with most decolonisation conferences in the 1960s, temperatures and tempers ran high; there were several walk-outs and much late night bargaining as we sought to reach an agreed conclusion within (as I recall) a three week deadline. Agreement seemed extremely elusive. Then suddenly and unexpectedly Anthony Greenwood, the Colonial Secretary, drew the Conference to a close with the declaration that independence would be granted in due course, after elections under a new electoral system framed to protect minority groups. Seeming almost an afterthought, the decision to detach Diego Garcia, and recategorise it as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) was also announced, with a £3m compensation payment.
Given subsequent and much disputed versions of this outcome, and taking into account what we now know of then confidential records, it is clear that the UK government got all it wanted, with none of the main political parties opposing this (while the opposition PMSD walked out, they did so because they could not accept the decision to move to independence). Sands claims here that Mauritian leaders were ‘frightened’ into acceptance, but the evidence for this is extremely scanty, while the stronger evidence is that the main Hindu leader Ramgoolam was determined to become the dominant force in an independent Mauritius, and was happy to be bought off by the British.
What had been kept under very close wraps was the British government’s intention from earlier in the 1960s to lease Diego Garcia to the US as an Indian Ocean strategic air base, an intention pursued by the Conservative administration under PM Douglas Home, and thereafter confirmed by the incoming Labour administration under Harold Wilson. We know the rest of the story from various iterations of it over all the years since then. After I had left the FCO (in 1966) and several years later, I was able to look at Cabinet documents (in the National Archives) that appeared to give reassurance that there were no inhabitants on Diego Garcia. We now know that this was false. The results for the Chagos islanders, the Ilois, were dire. Many years later, in the 1980s, I saw for myself, on a return visit to Mauritius, the slums in which they had been dumped, in return for another bribe by the British to the Mauritian government. A research report by a leading international human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch (Feb 2023), records that “agreements reached by the UK and Mauritius provided Chagossians with inadequate compensation. Mauritian authorities initially took several years to hand over the compensation to the Chagossians after demonstrations and hunger-strikes led by Chagossian women.”
Mauritian politics after independence: all for one and one for all
Ramgoolam’s strategy bore fruit in the pre-independence election of 1967 in which the three Indo-Mauritian parties formed a coalition that defeated the main opposition Creole party, the PMSD, by 43 seats to 27. (Note here that one of these parties was the Independent Forward Block, a leading member and Minister in the new coalition being one Anerood Jugnauth, who later will have a prominent place in Sands’ account.) There was indeed trouble on the streets, with Creole groups the principal source of disturbance, and as Ramgoolam expected as part of his bargain, British boots on the street in his support, at formal independence in 1968. A fairly chaotic period ensued, with high levels of unemployment, overpopulation, and outward migration (to which we owe one of our most anti-immigrant of Home Secretaries, Suella Braverman, whose Indo-Mauritian mother migrated to the UK under an NHS recruitment scheme, and met and married a Kenyan Asian migrant: irony is off the scale here). This period also saw the rise of a new radical party, the Mouvement Militant de Maurice (MMM), and significant labour strikes, to which Ramgoolam promptly responded by declaring a state of emergency, and postponing elections until 1976.
The rather unsavoury story thereafter would be one in which the interacting elites shared a musical chairs approach to political office, a process dominated and orchestrated by Anerood Jugnauth, who was Prime Minister six times, and occupied the Presidency of Mauritius when not in Prime Ministerial office. Several dubious deals ensure that political office is distributed at one time or another between all the political interests. The Indo-Mauritian class remain dominant. With one brief exception, over the whole half century stretching from 1967 to the present day, the position of Prime Minister belongs to only two Indo-Mauritian families: the Ramgoolam family and the Jugnauth family. Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam is succeeded by his son Navin Ramgoolam; later, Sir Anerood Jugnauth is succeeded by his son Pravind Jugnauth. At one point, the man who led the PMSD opposition to the 1965 Conference decisions, Gaetan Duval, becomes a coalition Foreign Secretary. We see over a very long period a cosy political oligarchy working together to maintain a hold on political office and its rewards.
Along this way, for many years, we see no real effort by Mauritian leaders to protest about the Diego Garcia detachment, and they freely cooperate in the removal of the Ilois from Chagos to Mauritius, using this primarily as a means to extract more compensation from the British, both at the time and later, eventually adding up to at least £40m not all of which ever reaches the Ilois, or does so only after those street protests by Ilois women. During the many regular elections in Mauritius, Diego Garcia was scarcely ever a significant issue. Sands’ account makes much of Jugnauth’s positive role in taking the Mauritian case forward to international justice forums, but this was not really demonstrated until well into the twentieth century. He appears to have had little interest in making such moves in his long period of Prime Ministerial power from 1983-1995. We cannot blame the author for any of this, especially as he was enlisted, late in the day, as a neutral and highly respected legal adviser to the Ilois cause by Prime Minister Jugnauth. But in apportioning blame and responsibility for the Diego Garcia scandal a more complete analysis must examine the role of Mauritian leaders too. The distinguished author VS Naipaul, after a visit to Mauritius, wrote an excoriating piece about the self-interested and self serving nature of the Mauritian political elites.
We might observe here a very common British imperial practice at work in UK relations with Mauritius: the conferment of British honours. Three leading members of the gathering at Lancaster House in 1965 received Knighthoods: Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, leader of the Mauritius Labour Party; Sir Gaetan Duval, leader of the PMSD and Foreign Secretary in the 1976 Ramgoolam coalition administration; finally, Sir Anerood Jugnauth. The British well knew how to flatter and influence those foreign politicians they wished to keep onside.
Winners and losers?
Clearly, Philippe Sands regards the final outcome as something of a success story. After all, as he shows in detail, there were several legal judgements, both by British courts and by international courts, which found the UK to have acted unlawfully. The International Court of Justice judgement in 2019 declared the UK’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago to be ‘a wrongful act’ which should be brought to an end as rapidly as possible. These findings were supported by an overwhelming majority in the UN General Assembly.
These various judgements, deservedly, have been extremely damaging to the UK’s international reputation. Its most senior political representatives have been forced to make apology after apology for ‘shameful behaviour’. The UK government have also been pushed to make concessions by increasing compensation and support for the Ilois, both in Mauritius and the UK; the latter includes granting citizenship, though it is unclear whether this will be rolled out to later generations in the Ilois ‘diaspora’. The latest response has been announcements in 2022 by both UK and Mauritian governments that they will look to enter into negotiations to resolve all of these issues.
But the British authorities and the US have already agreed and announced an extension to the occupation of the islands as a strategic base until 2036, which rather forecloses any resettlement issues for some considerable time. Moreover, Mauritian representatives have made statements about the possibility of accepting the continuation of an American base in Diego Garcia. Possible imminent changes of political leadership in both the UK and the US seem to cloud these prospects even further.
So the outcome celebrated by Sands, of the emotional return to Peros Banhos (not Diego Garcia) by an official Mauritian group, including Lisbey Elyse and the author himself, may well be as good an outcome as anyone gets for quite some time. This was in itself a purely performative act of justice, with no Ilois return being planned or held out in any realistic sense. Most of the Ilois ‘diaspora’ in southern England, in France, in the Seychelles, in Mauritius itself have begun to form communities, lives, and livelihoods where they now are. Nothing whatever is being offered to them at this point in terms of secure jobs and existences. Realistically, there are no existing community or employment structures to which they could return. But the British and American governments, and indeed Mauritian governments, must be prepared to make proper reparations for the damage they have contrived between them to a quite small group of powerless human victims. If this can be done through a careful resettlement scheme, so be it, but if not (as I suspect is improbable) then they must have properly funded integration wherever they might prefer it, most probably in the UK or in Mauritius itself.
Sands has himself done them a service by setting out their story. I have argued that he has too readily accepted the role of Mauritius as a victim, and that there are more complex factors at work in this long-running ‘story of Empire’. He also misses the opportunity to analyse the relationship between law and political power in the system of international justice. Both British and American governments showed themselves in this case to insist on putting their own political imperatives above challenge, and the fact that they can get away with this in the existing system of international justice is a depressing precedent to consider in terms of the clearest possible war crimes that right now are being daily committed in Gaza by Israel, in the Ukraine by Russia, and against many thousands of people in the Sudan. Given Sands’ legal expertise and experience, and his clearly liberal and humane sympathies, it would have been good to hear his views on how to resolve the tension in the resolution of international disputes between the intended morality of law, and the rejection of that morality by powerful national actors.
Relevant references
Philippe Sands: The Last Colony: a Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022).
V S Naipaul: The Overcrowded Barracoon(Penguin Books 1976)
Human Rights Watch “That’s when the nightmare started”: UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes February 2023 (available at www.hrw.org)
While the British treatment of the Chagos Ilois was reprehensible, and did damage to many hundreds of innocent victims, there are many worse stories to be told about British imperialism, and damage to many thousands of innocent victims. I will turn to this wider picture by way of a review of recent books by Sathnam Sanghera:
Sathnam Sanghera Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Penguin Books 2021)
Sathnam Sanghera Empire world: How British Imperialism Has Shaped The Globe (Penguin Books 2024)
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