The Last Colony by Philippe Sands
To begin at the end: the poet and politician Aimé Césaire says, ‘a civilisation that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilisation.’ Césaire’s words come at the very end of The Last Colony, a final coda to a book of mounting rage. Author Philippe Sands, a barrister and specialist in international law, details the struggle of the people of the Chagos Archipelago against the United Kingdom, who, in 1967, forced the Chagossians off their homeland and into permanent exile so that the United Kingdom (and America) could build the ironically named military base Camp Justice on the island of Diego Garcia. The case was finally brought to the International Court of Justice at the United Nations in 2019.
Sands acted as one of the lawyers for the peoples of Chagos, and to explain the complexity of prosecuting the case, he charts the passage of decolonisation in the wake of the Second World War, the systems at the U.N. that express the illegality of empire, and how decades of legal challenges from all over the world helped in aiding Sands and the Chagossians.
Interwoven with the tides of international politics and law is the story of one woman: Madame Liseby Elysé, who was expelled with the rest of her family from her home on the Peros Banhos atoll. It is these sections with Madame Elysé that give the rest of The Last Colony its weight; that what is being challenged is not just lines drawn on a map but the injustice that is inflicted on people.
As the United Kingdom isolates itself from the world, tormented by a corrupted political system, poisoned by nostalgia for imperial power, I would like to return to the Césaire quote above. History attests to the misery that the United Kingdom has inflicted upon its colonies, the criminal actions that the British government has undertaken to keep them, and the injustice that continues to this day.