Workers' Liberty

The single-issue campaign to “get the Chagossians of Diego Garcia back to their Islands” has reached the terrible impasse where it finds itself well-nigh colluding with the US military base on Diego Garcia, as well as openly colluding with continued British colonization of this part of Mauritius...

Good news from the Court of Appeal, where Chagos islanders have won an important stage of their legal fight to return to their home.

By Lindsey Collen and Ragini Kistnasamy of LALIT, Mauritius

IN the late 60s thousands of Mauritians living on Diego Garcia island were forced from their homes when all the islands of the Chagos Archipelago were dismembered from Mauritius by the British state to make way for an infamous US military base named, irony of ironies, Camp Justice.

By Lindsey Collen and Ragini Kistnasamy of LALIT, Mauritius

The Queen’s a harmless old bag, isn’t she?

 She may well be, but the monarchy is representative of class rule, inequality and the historic privilege of the aristocracy. A socialist society would have to abolish it and its out-of-date values.

Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, is one of the biggest US military bases outside the USA. To clear space for it, the people of the islands were deported by the British government, the former colonial ruler. 2,000 people and their children were forcibly removed and abandoned on the dockside in Port Louis, on Mauritius main island.

By Pablo Velasco

• Support Egyptian asbestos workers

• Release imprisoned Chinese workers
• British hypocrisy over the Chagos islands

LALIT notes with deep concern that the British government last week announced that it has passed Orders in Council now prohibiting access to all the Islands of Chagos. This effectively bans people from Chagos from visiting their own birthplace. The right to return to Chagos had been won in an important High Court case decided by the Law Lords in the year 2000.

Update on the boat to take Chagossians back to Diego Garcia
From Lalit, Mauritius
Lalit's plan to go to Diego Garcia by boat has caught everyone's imagination. World-wide. The dream seems to be going to be able to come true.

Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, is one of the biggest US military bases outside the USA itself. To clear space from it, the people of the islands were deported by the British government, the former colonial ruler. A group of socialists from Mauritius are now sailing on a ship to Diego Garcia to demand the removal of the base and the people's right to return.
Please ask your trade union branch, student union, Labour or SSP MP, union leader, etc. to send a message of support. Email to: lalitmail@intnet.mu. Read more below.

Lalit - full name Lalit de Klas, French Creole for "class struggle" - is a socialist organisation based on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Broadly Trotskyist in its politics (though interestingly it does not use the word, or much other traditional revolutionary terminology, in its public documents), the group originated in various anti-privatisation and other social struggles in the late 1970s and 1980s. Their book, Diego Garcia in Times of Globalisation, produced by leading activists from Lalit, is an attempt to relate the geo-politics of American military activity in the Indian Ocean to the growth of US investment in Africa under conditions of capitalist globalisation.