Headly Lamar, “ There may be a legal precedent here... ( Lamar grabs a law book)
Land snatching, land snatching.... Oh here it is ...Land Snatching ...see snatch.
Interesting. The deportations started under LBJ... but it is unclear from the article how long the Chagos islanders have lived there, it only says they were brought to the islands to work on coconut plantations and originally came from India and Africa...brought by the French. Those brought by the French would predate 1814 but for how many years? There is no mention of any people who may or may not have been there before the Arrival of these imported workers. And being imported to do work does not necessarily imply the workers were ever given or ever did purchase the land upon which they lived while they worked; for all anyone can tell by the lack of info in the article, they may have leased, or squatted, or most likely lived in company quarters.
Of more interest then is exactly when the lawsuit was filed, because this will shed more light on the real reason the lawsuit was filed so late....
The timing to me seems more like it was filed in the interest of Iran and not in the interest of former coconut plantation workers.
Does not seem compatible with:
Chagossians - who are descended from 18th century African and Indian labourers on French coconut plantations
The article doesn't say they were slaves, so the implication is they were people who voluntarily left "the place where they belonged" to work for pay in a strange place under French rule in the 1700s up to 1814 when the Brits acquired the islands. They never established an independent country to which they would gain a sense of nationhood, and apparently didn't have enough sense of belonging to go back home to India or Africa or even leave with the French. Mainly the way this is written they are the descendents of migrant workers and eventually the jobs their ancestors originally came for dried up. Not that much unlike Okie sharecroppers who rented land from the Chickasaw.