By John Pilger

February 26, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   The International Court of Justice in The Hague has handed down a momentous judgement that says Britain's colonial authority over the Chagos Islands is no longer legal. John Pilger, whose 2004 film, Stealing a Nation, alerted much of the world to the plight of the islanders, tells their story here.

You can watch Stealing a Nation here.

There are times when one tragedy tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic façade and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify their actions with lies.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British Government of Harold Wilson expelled the entire population of the Chagos Islands, a British crown colony in the Indian Ocean, to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island. In high secrecy, the Americans offered a discounted Polaris nuclear submarine as payment for use of the islands.

The truth of this conspiracy did not emerge for another 20 years when secret official files were unearthed at the Public Record Office, in London, by lawyers acting for the former inhabitants of the coral archipelago. Historian Mark Curtis described the enforced depopulation in Web of Deceit, his 2003 book about Britain's post-war foreign policy. The British media all but ignored it; the Washington Post called it a 'mass kidnapping'.

I first heard of the plight of the Chagossians in 1982, during the Falklands War. Britain had sent a fleet to the aid of 2,000 Falkland Islanders at the other end of the world while another 2,000 British citizens from islands in the Indian Ocean had been expelled by British governments and hardly anyone knew.

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