The world war on democracy – John Pilger
with such foresight encapsulates how our world is being shaped by
corporations, corrupted political systems, globalisation and war. This
piece was written originally January 2012 and is just as applicable
today, if not more so.
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely
intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a
presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on
democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about
the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa
and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving
villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural
beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her
teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I
didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots
were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born
there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw
us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force
us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped
arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned
on our dogs.”
In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly
agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a
British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so
that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego
Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lizette,
“When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their
big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts;
hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they
gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear
them crying.”
