"Diego Garcia In Time of Globalization", a collection of essays, on this website

02.01.2004

Just go to www.lalitmauritius.com, click on the image of a T-shirt with "Diego Garcia in Times of Globalization" to get into the contents.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act and the use of the US military base on Diego Garcia for bombing civilians are not two isolated phenomena, as this remarkable collection of essays shows. The Republic of Mauritius is still haunted by the history of Diego Garcia, the island whose spirit roams around this enormous Republic's collective consciousness - across the seas and islands and space. B-52's criss-cross en route from there to bombard a family celebrating a marriage in Afghanistan or to kill a child in Iraq. This book is the first ever full exposure of the collusion of the Mauritian State in the crimes. Britain stole the islands. The USA received stolen goods. Together they tortured the inhabitants. Then they horse-traded sugar and T-shirts while Mauritians of Chagossian origin suffered a veritable genocide.
The noble struggles when women of Chagos and Mauritius took their destiny into their own hands, is uncontested. For the UK Courts have exposed in its full horror the conspiracy to depopulate the islands, to make way for the base.
This book brings to the foreground the memory of all that really happened. And gives us an archetype of present day capitalist globalization.

The book, written by Lalit members, and published by Ledikasyon Pu Travayer, includes essays in English on how Diego Garcia was depopulated and Stolen, the struggle to reclaim Diego Garcia, what Diego Garcia looks like under US occupation, false assertions about the "impossibility" of getting the Diego Garcia base closed, Constitutional and International History, The US Damages case in US Federal Court, AGOA and Diego Garcia, US Hegemony and Unilateralism, and a Brief Chronology. Kreol articles shows the collusion between the Mauritian capitalist class and their different governments in the continued occupation of Diego Garcia by US-UK.
It came out just as the Mauritian government was hosting a US imperialist Forum, the AGOA Forum in January 2003. The contents also contains recent photos of a demonstration of Chagossians with the support of Lalit members held on the 10th of December outside the UK Embassy in Mauritius.