She had to leave, the British man told her. Now. The ship was leaving in just a few hours – and she had no choice, he said. It's a scene she still clearly remembers. How she frantically crammed clothes and a few belongings into a wooden chest, including a tool called a larappe that she had used for years to scrape out thousands of coconuts. And she remembers standing on the deck of the Nordvaer late that afternoon with friends, relatives and neighbors, some holding jars full of white sand in their hands. Then, they set off to the west, towards the setting sun. It was May 25, 1973.

It was the last time she ever laid eyes on her homeland.

Fifty years later, Raymonde Désiré is sitting in the shade of an enormous oak tree in the southern English town of Crawley. How she got there is a story even more moving than the voyage from a tiny island in the Indian Ocean to faraway Europe.

Désiré doesn’t much like talking about how things used to be. She mumbles quietly, her interpreter having to repeatedly bend towards her to hear the Creole words as they cross her lips. Her past, she says, is an "open wound."

Cold War under the Palm Trees

Désiré is from Chagos, a group of 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, of which only one is inhabited today. Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Mauritius and 1,700 kilometers south of India, the Chagos Archipelago is a place of sand and palms that was so inconsequential for so long that the Portuguese, the first Europeans to sail through the area, didn’t even make the effort of occupying them – though they did give names to the larger islands: Salomon, Peros Banhos, Diego Garcia. They christened the entire archipelago Bassas de Chagas, the wounds of Christ.

Taken together, the islands make up an area of land roughly the size of New York’s Manhattan Island. And there isn’t much there. The main attractions of Chagos include a gigantic coral reef and the coconut crab, the world's largest terrestrial crustacean.

Yet despite this seeming inconsequence, the place found itself right in the middle of global geopolitics in the last century. With the construction of a British-American military base, the Cold War and the "war on terror" arrived in Chagos. The West is also preparing here for a potential confrontation with China over control of the Pacific. And even the war in Ukraine has made itself felt under the palms of this tiny speck of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Given all that, the people who used to actually live on the island over the course of several generations, surviving on fishing and coconut gathering, have been granted very little consideration over the past several decades. They were driven away, lied to and forgotten. In doing so, the United Kingdom and the United States bent the law until it broke – as several courts, including the International Court of Justice in The Hague, have found.

But because Raymonde Désiré and the other Chagossians never forgot and even began seeking redress at some point, their story could finally, after all these years, find a happy ending.

The saga began back in the 1960s when the United States, seeking to cement its global military supremacy, started looking for remote islands where it could establish strategic bases. During that search, they stumbled across the largest atoll in the Chagos Archipelago, Diego Garcia – a horseshoe-shaped bit of land conveniently located between East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India and Southeast Asia.

Even better for the Americans, the islands belonged to a close ally. Since 1814, the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the archipelago had been part of the British colony of Mauritius. The early 1960s saw the beginning of secret negotiations between the British and the Americans over the establishment of a "joint communications base" on Diego Garcia.

Creating a New Colony

For the British, it was a rather sensitive affair. London’s empire had been crumbling for quite some time, with India, Burma, Ceylon and Ghana already having regained their independence. In addition to that erosion, the United Nations declaration on ending colonization issued in 1960 had piled on the pressure to give back the rest of its protectorates, including Mauritius.

In an attempt to strike a balance between the desire to help out the Americans and the moral obligation laid out in the UN resolution, the government of Prime Minister Harald Wilson hatched a plan to split off Chagos from Mauritius and only grant independence to the latter entity. In order to extort an agreement from the Mauritians, the planned approach to the island nation’s designated premier Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, as a government paper from the time documents, was as follows: "The object is to frighten him with hope." Hope for independence – and fear of not receiving it if he insisted on holding on to Chagos.

A compensatory offer of 3 million pounds sterling took care of whatever remaining doubts Ramgoolam might have had, and after initial resistance, he agreed.

In 1965, Désiré had just turned 17, London announced that Mauritius would be granted independence – with the exception of Chagos, which would remain part of "British Indian Ocean Territory." Even as other great powers were giving up most of their overseas territories, Britain created a new one – and simply ignored the ensuing international outcry, such as it was.

With that, one of the hurdles on the path to the creation of an Indian Ocean military base had been removed. But another one remained: Chagos was still home to 1,500 people, most of them descendants of slaves from Madagascar, Mozambique and other regions of southern Africa who had been brought to the archipelago in the 18th century to perform forced labor on the coconut plantations.

Because of the archipelago’s remote location, an independent culture had long since developed, with its own music and creole language. Photos from the mid-20th century show people standing in front of simple white buildings, train tracks, children before a school, a Catholic church, a small hospital and a pier with a flagpole flying the Union Jack.

A mini-Britannia at the end of the earth, just that the residents were Black and still worked on the archipelago’s plantations. Though by now, they were being paid for their labor.

Inconvenient Chagossians

Désiré says she scraped out several hundred coconuts each day. "It was hard work." But she says she was happy on the Salomon Islands, an atoll that is part of Chagos. To fish, she says, all you had to do was wade knee-deep into the water with a net. Everyone knew each other, everybody helped each other out. "We didn’t have much, but it was enough."

As one folk song, called "Diboute bor lamer," would have it: "Frigate birds fly in the sky, turtles lay their eggs at low tide." But those from afar who had now taken an interest in the islands didn’t care much about the fauna on Chagos.

The deal between the Americans and the British foresaw the removal of the archipelago’s population. But how? By the 1960s, the world had come a long way from World War II, and a number of international agreements had been hammered out, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The United Kingdom was a signatory to both agreements.

But that didn’t change the fact that the inconvenient Chagossians were standing in the way of progress. Or, as a British official from the time would tellingly have it, a "few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure."

Foregoing an Indian Ocean military base on their account was simply out of the question. So the British claimed to the rest of the world that there were "no permanent inhabitants" on Chagos, merely a few "contract laborers." As an old British document notes, it was a "fiction," but one that must be maintained at all costs.

At the single stroke of a pen, 1,500 people were written out of existence.

From that point on, the islands were depopulated with absolutely no regard for those living there. Starting at the end of the 1960s, Chagossians who traveled to Mauritius or the Seychelles for medical treatment or to visit family were no longer allowed to return. The islands, they were told, were "closed," and ships no longer sailed there.

Things had to move especially quickly on Diego Garcia, where the final residents disappeared in 1971. In March 1973, the long-coveted military base began operations, with the lease running until 2016, with an option for extension. Part of the facility was initially named Camp Justice. Whose justice, it wasn’t clear.

The Killing of the Dogs

Around 200 kilometers to the north, on Peros Banhos and the Solomon Islands, the Chagossians were allowed to remain for a bit longer. But ultimately, they had to go as well. In spring 1973, the Nordvaer sailed off for the last time, carrying 47 children, eight men and nine women, with each of them allowed to bring along one trunk or one suitcase.

Prior to boarding the ship, the residents had to watch as their dogs were killed, either shot to death or herded into factory halls where coconut oil was once extracted from copra. Once inside, they were poisoned to death using car exhaust.

The British governor deemed that only the horses were allowed to come along, which were accommodated on deck, while the people were housed down below. Raymonde Désiré was in the late stages of pregnancy when she boarded and gave birth a week later to her son, Georges Désiré, with no doctor or midwife present. His birth certificate lists his place of birth as "Nordvaer.” "It wasn’t easy,” says Désiré, and she’s not just talking about her delivery.

Not much value was attached to the people on board the ship, nor was much consideration given as to where they should end up. For more than 200 of them, the voyage ended in exile on the Seychelles, which was still a British colony at the time. But nobody there was particularly interested in welcoming the newcomers with open arms. Instead, the islanders would yell "anarah!" at them, meaning "simpleton" or "uncivilized."

The vast majority of the archipelago’s population, though, were deposited on Mauritius, which had recently received its independence and wasn’t particularly pleased about "Les Îlois," the foreign islanders, who found makeshift lodging in abandoned barracks next to garbage dumps on the outskirts of the capital of Port Louis. There they sat, despised by the locals, jobless and without hope of ever seeing their homeland again.

The suicide rate among the newcomers was high. Those who lived through this period say that many people died of "sagren," meaning distress.

The Next New Beginning

The Chagossians received no help whatsoever for a long time. Only at the end of the 1970s did the exiles on Mauritius receive compensation: the equivalent of 670 pounds per adult and 85 pounds for every child. It wasn’t exactly enough to improve their lives much. Nor did those in the Seychelles see any improvements, especially since they received no compensation at all. All of which led to many of them choosing to start all over yet again many years later when the British government offered its former subjects and their descendants residency and citizenship.

"Here in England, the story repeated itself for us," says Mylene Augustin on a hot June day in 2023 after reciting the Lord’s Prayer together with Raymonde Désiré and other aging women from Chagos. Mylene is the spark of the Chagossian community in Crawley, and on this day, she has arranged for around 30 seniors, all of them women, to be brought to Goffs Park, where they would later be joined by dozens of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a handful of men.

They plop down on folding chairs for a meal of chicken and rice before playing a bit of bingo. One of them has a plastic bag in front of her in the colors of the Union Jack. "We wanted to give them something fun to do," says Mylene, who also helped create a Chagossian choir and an activist group called Chagossian Voices.

Stranded in Gatwick

She is now 54 years old and has been living in England for around 20 years. When she first arrived, she was part of the first group that landed in Gatwick. Mylene had to sell her refrigerator and other belongings to afford the ticket. And she initially left her children behind.

"When we arrived at the airport, nobody wanted us," she says. The group slept in the arrivals hall for eight days, she says, before they were finally taken to Crawley, which is located directly behind the Gatwick runway.

Mylene spent her first six months there in the Hotel Europa and started working at the airport as a cleaner. After a year and a half, she had managed to save up enough money to bring her children over as well, and several years after that, her parents followed. Today, around 3,000 Chagossians live in the non-descript town in West Sussex.

"It was a long fight. It still is," says Mylene. "They have destroyed our families, our culture, our lives. And here, they have nothing for us either." Once, she applied for a grant from the community center, but was rejected. On another occasion, she asked for a small piece of property to establish a cemetery, so that the aging Chagossians, who were now beginning to reach the ends of their lives far away from their homeland, could at least be buried together. That application, too, was rejected.

40 Million – For What?

The British government claimed in 2016 to have made 40 million pounds available over the course of 10 years to improve the lives of the Chagossians. But just a tiny fraction of that money ever made it to Crawley, says Mylene. "We are still somehow slaves, only without the chains."

When her father was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, he asked that he be cremated and his ashes spread in the sea so that he might finally find his way back to Chagos by that route. His family bid farewell to him from a pier in Brighton.

Almost all of the elderly Chagossians here dream of returning to a place that has long since become a paradise in their memories. "Tomorrow, or right away!" says Raymonde Désiré, now 75, smiling for the first and only time during our conversation. "I need to die on my island," says Lorna Mend. "If they let me, I will go now," says Lucie Tiatous.

But nobody is allowed to go. The British have been implacably refusing all requests for more than 50 years. Which hasn’t prevented the displaced population from repeatedly insisting on their rights.

Signing Away Rights

As early as the 1970s, the Chagossian Michel Vencatassen, who was born on the island of Diego Garcia, sued the British state for wrongful deprivation of personal liberty and other allegations. To ensure that Vencatassen v. The Crown did not stir up too much unwanted attention, London elected to pursue an out-of-court settlement and held out the prospect of compensation to all former archipelago residents – in exchange for their renouncement of all further claims against the UK.

This renunciation took the form of a contract drawn up only in English and signed in most cases with a thumbprint, since many of the signatories had never learned to read or write – and most of them didn’t know any English.

Olivier Bancoult, an electrician from Mauritius and spokesman for the Chagos Refugee Group, then followed in Vencatassen’s footsteps: He has sued the UK a total of six times up to the present day. And on one occasion, it even looked as though he might be successful.

In November 2000, the High Court in London struck down a law that blocked the people of Chagos from returning to their homeland. In response, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair began making preparations for the resettlement of all previously inhabited islands with the exception of Diego Garcia. But it never happened.

Astonishingly Brazen Creativity

There is plenty of merit to the argument that the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States put the kibosh on Chagossian hopes of returning to the archipelago. Diego Garcia – which had long since become a highly militarized base complete with an airstrip, a deepwater port and around 3,000 soldiers and staff – became the focal point of America’s "war on terror."

The air strikes on Afghanistan and, later, the air war against Iraq, were mostly flown from here. And, as a U.S. officer later admitted, terror suspects were "interrogated from time to time" – read, tortured – on Diego Garcia.

Shortly after the Iraq War, the British government no longer wanted to hear anything about a possible return of the Chagossians. Olivier Bancoult had to start all over again. He and his compatriots, he says, are just "more Black lives that haven’t mattered."

From that point on, the British shot down every further attempt to change the status quo on their Indian Ocean territory, relying at times on astonishingly brazen creativity. In 2010, for example, the Foreign Office announced it was planning to establish one of the largest marine reserves in the world because it "takes its international environmental responsibilities seriously."

Brexit as an Opportunity

The fact that the British were also pursuing less honorable goals became clear that same year when WikiLeaks published diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world, including one particularly revealing one from London. That cable notes the British Foreign Office’s belief that "establishing a marine reserve might indeed … be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling" in the archipelago. After all, according to the cable, the Foreign Office felt that the UK’s "environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians’ advocates."

Bancoult and the Chagossians, meanwhile, continued fighting. And they had help. The Mauritius government, successors to the leaders from whom the archipelago had been extorted all those years ago, assembled a team of legal experts.

That team saw an opportunity once the British voted to leave the European Union in 2016. "London suddenly discovered it could no longer rely on the unqualified support of EU members and their networks across the United Nations," says British-French international law specialist Philippe Sands, who is working for the Mauritius government.

The International Court of Justice Weighs In

In September 2016, the tiny African state was able to get Chagos back on the United Nations agenda for the first time in half a century. The following year, the UN General Assembly – over fierce resistance from London – voted to seek an advisory opinion on the issue from the International Court of Justice. The judges, responsible for territorial disagreements, were asked to determine whether the British violated international law when they split Chagos off from Mauritius in the 1960s.

The finding from The Hague came in early 2019, and it couldn’t have more explicit: The United Kingdom, the court found, had "forcibly removed" the population of the Chagos islands. Furthermore, the "process of decolonization of Mauritius (was) not lawfully completed." London, reads the court opinion, must return the archipelago to Mauritius "as rapidly as possible."

The British, though, had no intentions of complying. Even before the court opinion, then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had exhibited no qualms about extending the lease for Diego Garcia to 2036. Now, London ignored the International Court of Justice and, a short time later, disregarded the UN General Assembly, which voted 116 to 6 in a resolution demanding the end of British rule in Chagos. Among European countries, only Hungary sided with the UK.

Finally, London also brushed off a ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, located in Hamburg, which confirmed Mauritius’ sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago in 2021.

"Ongoing Abuses By a Colonial Power"

To the surprise even of the UK’s Western partners, London continued to hold on to its last remaining African colony – with sometimes bizarre consequences. Even as new United Nations maps clearly marked Chagos as belonging to Mauritius, the Royal Mail continued to print stamps depicting the colorful marine life of "British Indian Ocean Territory" – stamps which cannot be used there because they were prohibited by the Universal Postal Association.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch notes that "the forced displacement of the Chagossians and ongoing abuses amount to crimes against humanity committed by a colonial power against an Indigenous people." The violations, says lead author Clive Baldwin, aren’t just based on lies, but also on "systematic racism."

To substantiate such allegations, Baldwin doesn’t just cite the "racist language used by senior British officials" to describe the Chagossians. He also notes the "the way Chargossians have been treated compared with other islanders of European origin living near UK military bases in the Falklands and Cyprus." In the conflict with Argentina over the Falklands, London had consistently cited the right to self-determination of the majority white residents.

It would, of course, be interesting to know from the British themselves what, precisely, motivated them to continue disregarding international law. But the Foreign Office in London provided only a general statement to the Chagos Archipelego query sent by DER SPIEGEL.

Fears of a Domino Effect?

Philippe Sands, the international law expert who wrote a moving book about the Chagos Archipelago called "The Last Colony," believes he knows the answer. "I know that London was deeply concerned that giving in on Chagos could have direct implications for Gibraltar, the Malvinas/Falklands and other British overseas territories."

Either way, time continued to pass despite the embarrassing string of courtroom defeats. Time that the Chagossians don’t have. Until British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, completely out of the blue, announced last November that he was interested in negotiating with Mauritius "to resolve all outstanding issues" pertaining to Chagos.

Almost nobody had that on their 2022 foreign affairs bingo card.

What precisely moved the short-serving, hapless government of Prime Minister Liz Truss to make the move is unclear. But there are some who say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine may have played a role. In the attempt to assemble a broad anti-Russian front, Truss was apparently rebuffed by several African countries. She was allegedly told that the UK’s arguments against the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine would be more credible if it would return its annexed territory in the Indian Ocean to its rightful owners.

Nearing the Finish Line

In its response to DER SPIEGEL, the Foreign Office merely noted that the UK wanted, together with its "close Commonwealth partners with Mauritius," to focus "on matters of shared interest in the region and beyond."

Whatever the real trigger for the UK’s about face may have been, Raymonde Désiré and the other Chagossians are closer to fulfilling their dreams of return than ever before. The government of Mauritius has said on several occasions that "all individuals of Chagossian origin, wherever they live in the world, who wish to resettle in the Chagos Archipelago will be able to do so in accordance with the laws of Mauritius."

Whether that applies to Diego Garcia, though, remains an open question. Mauritius, after all, has also pledged that it will continue to allow the U.S. military to maintain a base on its territory. And that’s not the only issue that must be resolved. There are also questions about reparations and about where the money should come from to make the other islands inhabitable again. Finally, there is the Treaty of Pelindaba, which prohibits the testing, possession, use and production of nuclear weapons in Africa. Mauritius is one of the treaty’s initial signatories. Already, the negotiations have taken far longer than London initially promised.

Doubts about the Deal

Still, there is reason for optimism, says human rights lawyer Sands. "I don’t know when, exactly, but they're going home, they're going home."

Not all of the expellees though welcomed the news of the negotiations with unadulterated enthusiasm. They are simply all too aware that the Chagossians have been sacrificed frequently in the preceding decades to the interests of others.

One of those who doesn’t fully trust the positive turn of events is sitting in her apartment in Thornton Heath, a 30-minute train ride south of London, on a Friday in late June. "Once again," she says, "people are talking about us, and not with us."

Bernadette Dugasse is from Diego Garcia. She was two years old when she and her family were deported to the Seychelles. Her story, too, is full of dislocation and never quite feeling at home where she was.

Large shells the size of a fist sit in front of her television, along with a basket full of sun-parched crab backs. A beer stein sits on the shelf, printed with a fighter jet and the crossed flags of the UK and the U.S. "Diego Garcia – One Island, One Team, One Mission," it reads. She brought it back with her from her homeland, to which she was allowed to travel in 2019 as part of what the British call a "heritage visit."

Dugasse’s memories of that trip aren’t exclusively positive. She still remembers sitting next to U.S. soldiers in the military base’s mess hall and wondering why people from the Philippines were allowed to work there, but not people from Chagos. And she remembers telling a British official: "We're natives, we belong here." To which he responded: "No you don’t."

"For me, the British are criminals, they're inhuman. They are lying in your face," Dugasse says. When she heard about the discussions over the future of her homeland, she found a lawyer in an attempt to guarantee a spot at the negotiating table for the Chagossians.