Workers Revolutionary Party - CHAGOSSIANS LOBBY MAURITIAN EMBASSY

The News Line: News Thursday, 25 February 2010 CHAGOSSIANS LOBBY MAURITIAN EMBASSY

Chagossians outside the Mauritian Embassy demanding compensation for their long years of exile and the right to return

OVER 60 Chagossians lobbied the Mauritian Embassy in London yesterday to ask what had happened to all of the compensation paid by the British government to the Mauritian government when they were forced to leave their islands over 40 years ago.

The Chagos Island Community Association had written to both governments and had received a reply from the British government, said Hengride Permal, Chair of CICA, stating that it had given ‘three instalments to Mauritius: £650,000, £4 million and another £1 million for homes for the Chagossians’.

The Chagossian people are demanding to know what happened to most of this money.

Bernadette Dugasse, originally from Diego Garcia and whose family was deported without anything, to live in the Seychelles in bitter poverty, said they had received no compensation at all.

They were forced to live in abject poverty for nearly 40 years and all they want is a decent life.

The Prime Minister of Maur-itius had not replied to any of their letters on this matter and that is why yesterday’s lobby was organised.

Hengride added that ‘As far as the Chagossian people are concerned, we have lived in poverty and hardship for too long, we have suffered enough humiliation and will suffer no more.

‘This picket is just the beginning.’