Passwords. The Franco-British writer and lawyer (“Return to Lemberg”, “The sector”) has no equal in mixing political action, history and literature. “The last colony”, on the Chagos affair, in the Indian Ocean, extends this approach. DOSSIER PIECES.
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One day in 2018, Liseby Elysé appears before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and said: “I came to The Hague to recover my island.” Forty-five years earlier, like all of the 1,500 Inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago, in the Indian Ocean, it was forced to exile by the United Kingdom, which became sovereign, in 1968, on this former Mauritian territory soon emptied of its population to allow the United States to install a military base there. She was 19 years old. She never returned.
With her, in The Hague, where she is preparing to testify, stands the Franco-British lawyer Philippe Sands, tireless human rights defender in the most burning areas on the planet. Engaged by the government of Mauritius, he obtained a historic judgment from the ICC, which recognizes the injustice committed against Liseby and his family and requires the United Kingdom to authorize their return. To date, however, nothing has been done. In Maurice, Seychelles, London, the Chagossians are still waiting. “We have the right to live there, they say to Philippe Sands, we will never give up.”
This is what the simultaneous publication is used, in English and in French – “The Chagossians not speaking English, immediately translating the book in French was a question of respect”, explains the lawyer to ” World of books ” -, from the last colony. Awaken public opinion. Put at the service of the Chagos the literary power that the world of Sands’ previous books, return to Lemberg and the sector (Albin Michel, 2017 and 2020). And because this way of establishing politics and literature, far from any ideological discourse, uniting the powers of both to insert them together in reality, makes its work unique, this book, fascinating synthesis Of all the lives of its author, provides a perfect opportunity to come back to each of them, and to everything they ended up creating.
voice
“Return to Lemberg has completely changed my life”, notes Philippe Sands. Lawyer since 1985, professor of international law at the University of London, author of several university and political essays -not translated -, he had never talked about him, of the history of his family, of the ghosts who haunt him. “In these trades, he says, we do not allow his own voice to express themselves. We hide it. And there, when, in 2010, I am invited to give a conference at the University of Lviv [ Lemberg, at the time of Austrian domination], in Galicia, in the west of Ukraine, from where a part of my family is from, something is triggered. There is a voice that comes out. “
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