PORT LOUIS, Mauritius - Louis Olivier Bancoult is a labourer who grew up with eight siblings in a tin-shack slum in Mauritius, unsophisticated and unknown. But last month, he took on a superpower -- and won.

His historic victory in a British High Court not only landed him on the front pages of London newspapers, it laid bare a pack of government lies, bribes and secret deals that leaves even cynical conspiracy buffs agog.

Louis Olivier Bancoult leaves the British High Court in London in November after winning his battle on behalf of the Ilois, the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands who were forced to leave some 30 years ago to make way for a U.S. military base. (Associated Press)

Mr. Bancoult is a hero among hundreds of forgotten people who have spent the past 30 years here living in poverty, exiles from a land they call "paradise."

Many never understood why they were banished from their homes on the pristine Chagos Islands, tiny specks in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They were dumped on the docks of Mauritius, almost 2,000 kilometres away, without food, shelter, work or official explanation.

But Mr. Bancoult proved his community was a victim of Cold War politics, cleared out in a secret deal that made way for a U.S. air base, used most recently to fly B-52 bombers to the Gulf War.

"Finally, the whole world knows the truth," says Mr. Bancoult's 75-year-old mother, Rita Isou, sitting outside the sweltering one-room shack she shares with children and grandchildren. Tears well in her eyes as she cuddles a chubby toddler.

"Now we can go home," she tells her grandson, "back to our motherland."

The motherland is on the Chagos Islands, a little-known archipelago that appears as a smudge of dots on most world maps. The islands had been occupied by the Ilois people, descendants of African slaves and Indian plantation workers, for more than 200 years.

Mr. Bancoult was just four years old when he left, but his mother remembers well the life they had.

"There was no need for money," she recalls. "Almost everything came from nature, the sea, the plants. We ate fish and crabs and lobsters ... At night, we made fires on the beach and danced and drank our local wines."

It was a simple life, but not entirely primitive. Along with Mauritius, the Chagos Islands formed one of Britain's last colonial outposts. Boats delivered essentials such as milk and rice. There were coconut plantations, a doctor, a church and a school for the children. The Bancoult family lived in a small beach-side shelter, raising pigs and chickens and growing vegetables.

"I remember a good, happy life," says Mrs. Isou.

But the Ilois were unlucky enough to live in an area of strategic importance, near Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

At the height of the Cold War, the eyes of the great powers fell on the island paradise. The United States, fighting in Vietnam and jittery about the Soviet empire, desperately wanted a military base in the Indian Ocean. The first choice was the island of Aldabra, but it was a breeding ground for rare tortoises, an animal whose cause would certainly be championed by noisy environmentalists.

The second choice was Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos group and home to hundreds of Ilois, a people whose cause was championed by no one.

So the United States and Britain cut a secret deal. The Americans would get a five-year lease on Diego Garcia and, in return, cash-strapped Britain would receive a multi-million-dollar discount on the Polaris nuclear submarines it was buying.

The two countries conspired to keep the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament and the United Nations in the dark about the deal.

But it was Britain alone that decided to clear the islands of their inhabitants in a policy of "complete sterilization."

The lies are laid out in hundreds of pages of memos and letters tabled in the British court, almost all of them marked "secret."

"There will be no indigenous population except seagulls," said one memo circulated within the British Foreign Office.

"Unfortunately, along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure," British diplomat Dennis Greenhill wrote in a 1966 letter that reflects typical racist disregard for the Ilois.

"We would not wish it to become general knowledge that some of the inhabitants have lived on Diego Garcia for at least two generations and could, therefore, be regarded as 'belongers,' " said another memo.

The problem for the British was that United Nations' conventions prohibit the removal of such settled populations. So British diplomats and parliamentarians simply denied the existence of the Ilois people. The islanders were arbitrarily classified as temporary "contract workers" and other transients, with no democratic rights.

Privately, British insiders conceded they were telling -- in the words of one diplomat -- a "whopping fib." Memos that dealt with the cover-up were even subtitled "maintaining the fiction."

At first, people were tricked and cajoled into leaving. The delivery boats loaded with rice, flour, sugar and oil simply stopped coming. Residents were offered free boat trips to Mauritius, then refused passage home.

The unsuspecting Bancoult family came to Mauritius in 1968 in a quest to find a hospital for one of their nine children, who had been badly injured in an accident. The baby girl died. But when they returned to the port to take a boat back, they were turned away.

"The officials told me, 'The island has been sold,' " recalls Mrs. Isou. "I couldn't understand. I began crying, right there in the office ... After that, I went to the harbour and watched boats coming in with our people. Everyone was just crying.

"We had left all our belongings behind ... We could not go visit the graves of our grandparents. I became sick from the grief."

Three years later, the British passed an immigration ordinance forbidding the Ilois from ever returning to their home.

Two years later, those who remained on the islands were simply shipped away.

Louis Raphael, a foreman at the coconut plantation, was one of the last to leave Diego Garcia.

"The island administrator called a meeting and said, 'You must go.' I had to get on a boat, with many other people," recalls Mr. Raphael, 70.

The British officers put their horses below deck for the week-long journey, but the Ilois were left outside, in burning sun and pouring rains.

"We were told there would be houses, compensation, a new life for us in Mauritius," says Mr. Raphael, staring out at the sea as he tells his story one recent afternoon.

"But when we got here, there was nothing."

In all, about 3,000 people were removed.

"They might as well have been abandoned on the streets of New York," says Robin Mardemootoo, a young Mauritian lawyer who helped take the case to Britain.

"They did not understand the money economy. They hadn't seen cars and roads and big buildings. They did not have the skills to get jobs. They were just forgotten."

Britain paid Mauritius £3-million to take the Ilois off its hands, but what little compensation the victims eventually received in the 1980s did not ease a life of hardship.

Many landed in the ramshackle quarters of Point-aux-Sable and Cassis, just minutes away from the gleaming shops and high-rise towers of Port Louis.

Today, blue waters lap on the beach just down the gravel road. The jobless sit under the shade of citrus trees, drinking beer, chatting in Creole or listening to music. The corrugated-iron shacks spill over with children, and clothes hang from a string, flapping colourfully in the humid breeze.

Mrs. Isou's tin house shows signs of pride. The walls are painted blue. A little walkway is swept and in the neatly tended garden are rows of vibrant flowers.

But the old lady cries as she talks of the country she left behind and the misery that awaited her family here.

She found work as a domestic servant.

"I raised my children on food that the madam gave me to feed the animals," she says. "They went to school without bread, or sandals or books. My husband died on a day when we could not feed the children. I think he died of a broken heart."

The Ilois were ravaged by other ills they had never known before. Mrs. Isou lost three grown sons -- one overdosed on drugs, another drank himself to death, the third died of disease. Many girls in the community turned to prostitution.

But young Louis was strong. He listened when his mother told stories about their homeland, and he grew up to be a man filled with anger and determination.

Mr. Bancoult eventually took charge of a refugee group formed by the people of Chagos Islands, organizing hunger strikes and holding protests. But their case did not reach court until Mr. Mardemootoo questioned why the British immigration ordinance that banned the Ilois from their home had never been challenged in a court of law.

Soon, British legal aid was onside, along with Sir Sydney Kentridge, the famous lawyer who had once acted for Nelson Mandela in South Africa. More than a dozen research assistants spent hundreds of hours digging up documents, and the court battle eventually came to a head this summer with hearings in the Court of Appeal.

On Nov. 3, Lord Justice Sir John Laws ruled "the wholesale removal of a people from the land where they belong" was reprehensible and illegal.

Mr. Bancoult walked out of court with hands raised above his head, making a V-sign with his fingers.

Victory was sweet.

This is an "unforgettable moment," he told reporters on the steps outside the law courts.

"People who were unlawfully uprooted will be able to return freely and live in their homeland."

The Ilois have said they will not interfere with the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, and will be happy to live on the uninhabited part of the island.

It could take years to settle on the details, but Mrs. Isou has spent the past month dreaming of the day she steps on the powder-soft sand she left more than 30 years ago.

"People did not believe that my son could fight the British, but he did," she said recently.

"I always told him, 'It just takes one man to be brave.' "

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