You are so cool.
What's the situation in Chagos? I have never even heard of this.
[WS:] To make a long story short, Chagos (Diego Garcia) used to be a copra (coconut) plantation under the British rule, which used native quasi-immigrant labor. In the 1970s, the British rulers found a better use of the land, spying facility for the US, so they cleared the land of the natives in a rather brutal way to make room for the US monitoring base (in exchange fo some hi-tech military eqiupment they got from the US.) The Chagossians were forcibly relocated to the Seychelles and Mauritius, and now they and their descendants are suing the Crown for damages and human rights violations. They scored some victories in British courts, but my knowledge of this aspect is limited. My role in the project was limited to help working out a model to measure and valuate damages (social and economic) sustained by the Chagossians due to the explusion.
cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------