The last colony : a tale of exile, justice, and courage / Philippe Sands.

"An account of the making of modern international law and one woman's fight for justice"-- Provided by publisher.

In 1973, on the Chagos Islands off the coast of Africa, Liseby Elyse- twenty years old, newly married and four months pregnant- was rounded up, along with the entire population of Chagos, and ordered to pack her belongings and leave her homeland by ship or slowly starve. Some two thousand people who had lived on the islands of Chagos for generations, many the direct descendants of enslaved people brought there from Mozambique and Madagascar in the 18th century by the French and British, were deported overnight from their island paradise as the result of a secret decision by the British government to provide the United States with land to construct a military base in the Indian Ocean. When the case reaches the World Court in the Hague, the star witness was Liseby Elyse, now sixty-five years old, speaking in Kreol to tell the fourteen international judges her story of forced exile. Sands writes of Elyse's decades-long quest-- and his own journey-- to fight for justice and a free and fair return to the land of their birth. -- adapted from jacket