The human rights lawyer Philippe Sands first encountered Liseby Elysé at the great hall of the international court of justice in The Hague in September 2018. Elysé, a diminutive figure, dressed in mourning black, clutching her handbag, was then 65 and the story of her life is also the story of this book. Elysé had been called to the court by Sands to represent the people of the Chagos Islands, the Indian Ocean archipelago from which, in 1973, the entire population was forcibly removed by the British colonial administration in order that a US military base could be established on one of the islands, Diego Garcia. Elysé spoke to the 14 international judges of the court about that history for just under four minutes. No one present would forget her statement.
First, she recalled, the British shut down the islands’ plantations and cut off food supplies to the remembered paradise of her childhood. The hundreds of Chagossian families were told that they had no option but to leave by ship by 27 April 1973 or slowly starve. “We were like animals in that slave ship,” she remembered of her 20-year-old self. “People were dying of sadness.” Elysé was four months pregnant. Her child was subsequently stillborn.
