Open Letter to the Bishop of Port Louis, Mgr Jean-Michaël Durhône from LALIT

Dear Sir,

It is with concern that we have learnt that there are Catholic Church organizations that have been granting a platform to members of the USA military forces, in particular that part of the US Navy propaganda machinery that uses music as a propaganda instrument in countries the USA needs to control. We are sure that this is happening despite the general tendency of the Church towards more enlightened ways of behavior in relation to colonization, war and military occupation. 

1. The USA military forces, including its Navy, as you know, occupy part of our country, and occupy it illegally. We are under their military occupation. This is a fact. But, there is perhaps a slim possibility that you did not notice? Or did not see the military occupation for what it is? It is the same fact that led to the cruel and inhuman displacement of the entire Mauritian population living on Chagos, including Diego Garcia, as you know. But now, everyone in the world has noticed, and has to accept this fact. Because of the USA’s military base, Chagossians were forcibly removed. Now, because of the USA’s military base, they cannot return. Just as because of the military base, our country remains fractured. 

In particular we note that these USA military employees were present at the “Ecole Sega Tipik” run by the Church organization Caritas in Grand Gaube and at College St Mary’s in Petite Riviére. The Church ought to be wary of participating in this type of instrumentalization of culture and education as part of military propaganda, in particular propaganda of a military force that is an occupier of part of our country. This, during Lent, of all times. The “US Naval Forces Europe and Africa Band” and its musicians are being used by the US military for the propaganda purposes of the very State that is our military occupier. The USA wishes to continue its illegal occupation of Chagos, including Diego Garcia, despite the decisions of all the top legal and political bodies in the world, and is shamelessly using your religious organizations for this shady purpose. 

It is now 56 years exactly on 12 March this year since Independence, and Chagos, including Diego Garcia are still occupied by the UK-USA alliance. It is already five years since the UN International Court of Justice at The Hague informed the UN General Assembly that the continued colonial presence of the UK in Chagos including Diego Garcia is illegal, has always been since it began, and must stop. It continues. The USA is an illegal tenant of this illegal occupier, and we must keep a distance from its State (the US Embassy) and its armed forces, like the Navy. Since the ICJ judgment, the Tribunal on the Rights of the Sea has given binding force to the ICJ decision, which is, as you know, advisory. Since then, too, the entire UN General Assembly has voted against the US and UK – with three miserable exceptions (once Maldives withdrew its initial vote): Israel, Hungary and Australia (the last country was then under its previous right-wing government). The UN maps now published have made clear the illegality of the UK-USA presence. Even the UN Universal Postal union has banned the stamps of the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is the UK colonizer’s name for the part of Mauritius that the UK and USA still colonize. Yet the Catholic Church falls prey to the propaganda strategy of the occupying power. 

We realize that the Catholic Church in Mauritius has a difficult past, one of being on the wrong side of history: on ending slavery, on introducing universal suffrage, on Independence itself, on the continued colonization by the UK-USA of Chagos and forcible removal of the people of Chagos, on ending Apartheid in South Africa, and now in failing to recognize that the USA armed forces are part of an occupying force and should not be invited into the fabric of our society. It is time for the Church to make up for its past history of colonial complicity. Please do consider putting an end to this complicity with the occupying power. In particular, we are shocked that minor children are exposed by the Church to the illegal military occupiers’ military presence and propaganda in their places of learning.

2. Equally of concern, is that these USA military people are right now involved in what this same UN International Court of Justice has recently declared to be “plausible” genocide, i.e. the Israeli State’s killing, maiming and injuring of Palestinian men, women and children, the sick and the injured alike, as they rain down bombs upon them, bombs supplied by the USA from airplanes supplied by this same USA. Perhaps the Church should consider taking the lead in calling for the USA to stop providing these arms-for-genocide, instead of frequenting the very military of the USA in its propaganda mission, this way, giving the impression of a generous and benign US military. The silence of the Mauritian Catholic Church in the face of this genocide is deafening. It is a poor lesson in morality for the children in the care of the Church institutions that they are exposed, instead of to calls for an end to the genocide, to the music supplied by the suppliers of arms-for-genocide, as if to drown out the sound of the cries of Palestinian children as they die under the rubble, and from intentionally provoked starvation. The stark horror becomes clearer once the ICJ has called for an end to the Israeli killing and maiming, and once it has warned other States, like the USA, of the danger of their being in complicity with Israel in this genocide, and yet the killing and the maiming continue apace. The duty is on us to prevent genocide, not to be lulled by the music sent by the perpetrators and their accomplices.

We hope you will consider the issue raised by this Open Letter.

Yours sincerely,

Alain Ah Vee (5 932 9002)

Cindy Clelie

Lindsey Collen

for LALIT, 153 Main Road, GRNW, Port Louis.  13 March, 2024.

cc. Caritas, St Mary’s Petite Rivière, SeDEC