Thursday 19 January 2012
by: John Pilger, Truthout | News Analysis
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely
intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a
presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on
democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about
the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa
and Asia in the Indian Ocean.
The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a
hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette
remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep
smiling girls!"
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I
didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots
were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born
there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw
us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force
us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped
arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned
on our dogs."
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