All Comes to a Hideous Colonial Head -- Blog no. 76
07.09.2025
All Comes to a Hideous Colonial Head -- Blog no. 76
The UK Parliament is due on Tuesday, in the midst of a total Cabinet reshuffle by Starmer, to ratify the strange and wonderous, truly “magic”, Treaty between the UK and Mauritius. The Bill and Explanatory Memorandum are published. See our Documents Section for copies in the next hours.
Why call this Treaty “magic”? Because it does two things. It guarantees “Mauritian sovereignty” over the whole of the Chagos including Diego Garcia where the US houses its hideous military base. That is at the beginning of the Treaty. And then, it bans any exercise by Mauritius of its sovereignty, thus removing Mauritian sovereignty completely. How else could it do this except by “magic”? In all the rest of the perfidious document and its perfidious “annexes” – annexes specifically stated in the Treaty to be “part” of the Treaty, itself – there are outlined the precise ways and means by which the UK will rule supreme with absolute power and with total control over this sovereignty – not just over Diego Garcia but over the whole of the Chagos archipelago that the USA and UK have illegally occupied for 57 years – for one hundred more years and counting. They even craft into the perfidious draft how the USA will have the right to act as a deus ex machina from behind the scenes. Pure “magic”. Mauritius will have sovereignty. And the UK and USA will have a veto on every single decision about this part of the Republic of Mauritius so dearly fought for by Mauritians including Chagossians, finally won, hands down, at the ICJ and the Un General Assembly. Victory? And this victory now being put into this astounding limbo by our own Government? As for “including Diego Garcia”, the Bill due in the UK Parliament this Tuesday has the following section:
“Continued administration of Diego Garcia
“(1) The law of the British Indian Ocean Territory immediately before commencement continues as the law of Diego Garcia.
“(2) Any legislation or rule of law of any of His Majesty’s dominions that related to the British Indian Ocean Territory immediately before commencement relates in the same way to Diego Garcia.
“(3) It follows, in particular, that His Majesty has under his prerogative the like powers to make laws for Diego Garcia as His Majesty had before commencement for the British Indian Ocean Territory.”
Mauritius will have sovereignty, except it will not.
This kind of thing is surely impossible.
Mauritius cannot have sovereignty and not have sovereignty.
Read the document already signed up to and the Bill and its Explanatory Memorandum, and you will see that impossible it indeed is, and yet it exists.
These times are strange. And yet they are even stranger when they jolt our memory as to how “current” these “strange” things have been for some 500 years. More “magic”?
“Terrorism”
A powerful magician just has to say, “Abracadabra” and everything can change in his hands. The word itself is “magic.”
Craig Mokhiber, the former UN human rights official who bravely resigned in November 2023 in protest over the UN’s weakness in dealing with the Israeli genocide in Palestine, recently called “terrorism” a “magic word”. It, like “abracadabra”, can transform things, in the hands of the powerful, just by them uttering it. Let me explain, and link it to the Treaty due to go through the Parliament at Westminster on Tuesday, even as the Mauritian Government is literally falling apart from general stress on its political incoherence.
So, when Palestinians are simply named “terrorists”, then they are open to extermination: all international law goes overboard. Literally. Even national laws evaporate. The ICC gets sanctions put on it! The rule of law levitates out of existence. Once someone, or some a group of people, are named as “terrorist”, anything goes: wholesale slaughter, pillage and extermination become “legal”, even “moral”. BBC and CNN reporters can report on atrocities as if they were banalities, on wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in the tone of voice of a journalist reporting on a fait divers like a squabble over a few bolts of cloth in a bazaar.
No law will protect you once you are named by the magic word, “terrorist”. Or so it seems.
Whereas, what the Israelis do is not, was not, and will forever not be “terrorists”. Although of course everything they ever did was, is and will, for the near future until we stop them, still be “terrorist”. And many people do name it as such. But the magic doesn’t work for us.
Whatever the Israelis do is never terrorist to Starmer, Biden or Trump, Mertz or Scholz before him, Macron or Ms Van de Leyen, and therefore never terrorist to the CNN or BBC or Deutsche Welle or France 24. The Israelis can assassinate the whole population of a block of flats’ worth of Palestinians with one 2,000 pound American bomb, and this is not “terrorist”. The so-called IDF can massacre whole extended families, decapitate children, shoot journalists, shell hospital workers, even bomb the injured and the ill, the distressed and the maimed in hospital, and they are not “terrorists”. Snipers can “take out” first responders and blow up their ambulances, and this, too, escapes being defined as “terrorism”.
Nothing the Israeli armed forces do is “terrorism”, no matter what it is they do. No law can make them bow down. So far ....
What I have just written is impossible.
Totally impossible. Re-read it carefully. It is not possible. Grammatically, it does not hold.
The only thing that makes it “possible” for both stories to be true is colonial relations. “Colonial relations” are that special type of social relations where a small group of powerful people in one polity have garnered the wherewithal to dominate a group of powerless people, big or small, in another polity. It is a question of the balance of forces. No more, no less.
So, the fight we are fighting is against colonial domination. That is why it is so hard to get Israel and the USA to obey international law. They think, they say, and they act upon the “fact” that international law does not apply to them. It only applies to us – in the colonized world.
So the IDF can detonate carefully placed Israeli explosives so as to annihilate a girl’s elementary school in Gaza, where the IDF had just closed down their temporary use of the Palestinian school as an Israeli military base headquartered there, while they were annihilating what was left of Beit Hanoun. Wantonly annihilate the girls’ elementary school. As if proof of genocide were lacking. Turning the school to dust. Like the rest of the moonscape.
The souls of the 60,000 dead Palestinians – those counted and named – and the souls of those that left their bodies unnamed under the rubble – will forever haunt the West. Just as the souls of the dead First Nations in the USA and Canada haunt the “West” until today. As do the souls of the dead Xhosa, the San and the Zulus in South Africa, the dead Kenyans, Ghanaians, Congolese, Algerians, Sudanese, and in New Zealand, the dead Maoris, the million dead Indonesians on the CIA lists, and the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Libyans, and the dead Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians recently assassinated in cold blood. The Chileans slaughtered by the US-backed junta. The Herero and Nama peoples that the Germans committed genocide against just over 100 years ago. And this is how it comes to pass that Trump can show a video clip of the USA assassinating, or purporting to assassinate, 11 unnamed men on a speedboat in international waters near Venezuela. The USA just blows up the little speedboat and kills the 11 men, while drowning any proof of any offense at the bottom of the Caribbean ocean.
Genocide is part of colonialism. And the same old colonialism is on Tuesday due to be given a “prolongation” in the UK Parliament, purporting to allow the UK, together with its dratted twin the USA, eternal control over that part of Mauritius that we, the people, had finally won back over a half century of struggle. And at the same time, the USA has spent Rs 14 billion on a huge new base at Bagatelle in Moka, for its “Embassy”, to replace the dilapidated, shoddy couple of stories they rented for 50 years in a private Mauritian oligarch’s building.
The UK will on Tuesday ratify the perfidious Treaty mouthing the sound of “Mauritian sovereignty” at the outset, while all the annexes enforce the total control over not just Diego Garcia but the whole of Chagos by the UK-USA.
So, it is not “magic”, but brute power. We are up against it. But, we keep opposing it. And we, the people, will win. The Empire has been weakening for decades now. It has imploded in internecine warfare in Europe twice in the past century, and may do so again soon. Or it will attack other parts of its ex-empire, as the oppressed organize and rise up against the colonial “reality” being forced upon us.
And as this Empire collapses, inexorably, with the orange-haired Ahab at the helm hastening its collapse, it will be dangerous. We must prepare for the worst. Trump is participating in the genocide of the Palestinians, he is preparing to allow his own right-hand called “Israel” to drag him into war with Iran, even as he backs European leaders, so many chickens without heads, and also to persist in surrounding Russia militarily, and all this in preparation for a planned war of aggression against China. The threats are huge. Climate disaster looms. Nuclear war looms.
But, the signs are also good. People all over the world still rise up in vast numbers against Israel and the USA, and stand with the Palestinians. China, India and Russia come together to oppose the USA dictates. And so, we must continue to oppose the military base on Diego Garcia, get it closed down. This way it cannot be used against the Palestinians, the Iranians, the Yemenites, or anyone else. We must get this Treaty about to be ratified, rescinded before its ratification.
This way, we in LALIT, will continue as ever to be together with the people all over the world who are fighting to close military bases on their land.
This way Chagossians will all get a genuine right to return to the main island they lived on, and all Mauritians will have true sovereign and democratic rights over Chagos including Diego Garcia.
And, at the same time, urgently, we must save the people of Palestine.
Lindsey Collen for LALIT
