The One To Watch

Those of you living in the UK may be interested in a documentary by John Pilger which will be shown at 11pm, Wednesday evening on ITV1. Entitled "Stealing A Nation" it will recount the little-known story of the Chagossians, forced from their home to make way for a US military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The blurb on Pilger's website explains,

This is a shocking, almost incredible story, largely hidden from history, of the secret expulsion of the entire population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, by the British Government, so that the main island, Diego Garcia, could be given to America as a military base. More than 2,000 people were dumped a thousand miles away, in the slums of Mauritius, and received little in compensation. Their fortunes changed in the 1990s with the discovery of a bundle of official files, which reveal a conspiracy between the Foreign Office in London and officials in Washington. This remarkable story has further twists, as John Pilger reveals.

Regular readers will be familiar with this story as I have written about it on various occasions. That the story is not a national scandal is, as Alex Doherty has commented, testament to the subservience to power of the British media and while Pilger's documentary is unlikely to have much effect in that, it should at least raise awareness about the issue, which can only be a good thing.