<B>By Deeapa BHOOKHUN</B>

So British Chagossians have not been allowed to go back to our islands. As relieved as I was to hear the news, I must admit to have felt some sympathy for those people who, as Lindsey Collen put it in an article that was published in Monday?s ?l?express?, have done a great deal to bring the Chagos story to public opinion and expose the under-handed way in which Britain and the US so callously expelled a people from their homeland and stole a whole archipelago from Mauritius, to suit their own vile purposes.

A lot of the sympathy I felt volatilized, however, when I read an interview of Olivier Bancoult published in weekly ?l?Hebdo?, last Sunday.

Bancoult reckons that things would have been different for Chagossians ?had they not been Creoles?. He thinks government would have looked for ways and means to help them had they not been of African origin.

I have never heard a more absurd statement in my entire life and trust me, in my job I get to hear loads of stupid statements!

If Olivier Bancoult really believes what he said to ?l?Hebdo?, then I guess this speaks volume about the guy.

The Chagos issue is not about Bancoult or Mandarin or Ramgoolam or Lassémillante or Jugnauth or Bérenger or whoever else by whatever name and whatever race.

The Chagos issue is bigger than this; it is about sovereignty, it is about our territorial integrity. It is about big superpowers and former colonial masters behaving in a way that defies every principle of common decency. Behaving the way they behaved at the time they still thought that different treatment should be afforded to different people depending on the colour of their skin.

And of course, depending on the economic exigencies of those big countries or the greedy individuals who were powerful enough to make those kinds of decisions.

If Bancoult needs any other proof of this, he needs to look no further than Iraq. Iraqis are not Creoles of African origin. They are Muslims with a commodity that the powers that be in the US are willing to kill for: petrol.

Let?s not even talk about the British Government and their despicable behaviour. Them and the US administration are the ones we need to fight; they are the ones we need to vehemently defy.

And to do that, we cannot accept to play their game by their rules.

This is exactly what Bancoult and his friends tried to do. You play by the rules of people who have absolutely no compunction about changing the rules as they go along ? as they have proved over time ? and you still expect to win?

There is a word for that but I won?t use it.

And then, because you are upset about losing ? understandably so ? you come back to the only country you can call home and you accuse the people and the government of this country of being racists?

Another word comes to mind but I?ll refrain from using it.