Stealing a Nation
Directed by John Pilger and Christopher Martin
Produced by Granada Television
REVIEW BY MELANIE BARNES
If anyone is in any doubt about the illusion of democracy in Western nations, John Pilger's latest documentary Stealing a Nation will surely challenge that belief.
This is an extraordinary expose of the fate of 2000 people who, up until the 1960s, lived an idyllic life on the tiny Chagos islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a position regarded as strategically significant by powerful governments. Cruelly, these people were forced from their home by their British rulers, and the land then handed to the US.
The largest of these islands, Diego Garcia, immediately had a large military base established on it, from where aircraft were recently launched to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pilger reveals the total disregard for the lives of the Chagossian people. His film includes historical footage taken as they were shipped to slums in Mauritius and left to live in squalor. Thirty years later, Pilger seeks out these same people and finds that little has changed for them.
The most compelling aspect of this film is the way official records from the Public Record Office in London as well as the National Archives in Washington are pieced together to reveal the conspiracy between successive British and US governments to secretly force the Chagossians from their land, and the collaboration of lies to cover it up. Such lies include reclassifying the Chagossians as descendants of itinerant workers who have no right to live on the land where they were born.
Pilger employs his talent for interviewing senior officials and through uncomfortable questions, drawing out the absurdity in their position. One such official insists the danger of global warming prevents anyone from living on these islands, forgetting they currently sustain thousands of military personnel. Another official wonders aloud at the relevance of this case today; this disregard is contrasted with personal memories of the Chagossians for their place of birth and it is the immense struggle to return home that is the focus of the film. Recently this battle triumphed in a British High Court decision to allow them to go home, but was again obstructed by an "order in council", or what amounts to a decree by the Queen, that overturned the High Court ruling to prevent anyone from returning to any of the Chagos islands.
Pilger himself describes this account as a "crime that tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie". This is undoubtedly Pilger's most accomplished film so far and it will do much to bring attention to the lives of the Chagossian people.
From Green Left Weekly, June 22, 2005.
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