Expelled Indian Ocean islanders find home neglected

PORT LOUIS, Apr 10 (Reuters) Islanders expelled from an Indian Ocean archipelago said today they found their homeland neglected after visiting the Chagos islands, decades after Britain forced them off to make way for a U.S. base.

After longstanding demands by the exiled islanders, Britain permitted 100 former inhabitants to make a brief visit to Chagos, almost 40 years after they were expelled.

Hundreds of people turned up at Mauritius' Port Louis harbour to welcome back the islanders after their 11-day visit, placing white rose garlands on them as they came through.

The returning group said they had cried when they stepped ashore at Chagos and had knelt down and kissed the ground.

''It was a very emotional and sad trip for me,'' said Fernand Mandarin, who left Chagos in the late 1960s at the age of 23.

''I tried to find my house but there was nothing as overgrown trees and bushes now surround the area and I even couldn't find some of the graves of my relatives as they had been destroyed over time,'' he said.

In a move described by some as a shameful moment in the history of British foreign policy, 2,000 Chagossians were forcefully expelled by Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, to pave the way for the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, one of the islands.

They were dumped hundreds of km (miles) away on the shores of Mauritius and Seychelles. For years, they have lived as refugees and treated as outcasts.

Some returnees said the church they used to visit now had towering coconut trees growing amidst its ruins. Others said once pristine white beaches were littered with dead corals and debris washed in by the Indian Ocean.

The ousted Chagossians have persistently demanded to return home, where they eked out a living fishing and coconut farming.

In a series of court battles pitting the islanders and their descendents -- now numbering around 5,000 - against Britain, they have managed to gain some compensation.

But they have been forbidden from returning permanently on the grounds that their presence threatens the security of the air base, which played a strategic role in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2000, the British High Court ruled the removal of the islanders was illegal. But they were blocked by Britain which said repopulating the islands would be ''precarious and costly''.

Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos Refugee Group, said they were again challenging this in the High Court and had also filed a separate case in the United States.

''This is not the end. Our fight will continue -- we have the right to stay on our islands and a right to compensation for all the torture we have suffered,'' he told reporters.

REUTERS SRS VC2307