The UN’s highest court has deemed Britain’s occupation of the Chagos Islands illegalWhen Cedric Joseph, goalkeeper of the Chagos Islands national team, walks around his hometown of Crawley in West Sussex, he often wears his football jersey whether it’s match day or not. “Even when I’m not going to training I wear the shirt. I’m proud,” he says. “People then ask me questions. Some people don’t know anything about the place. I know the history so I can tell them.”I tell them it’s an island paradise, heaven on earth.”Joseph, 19, has never set foot on the land he represents.Growing up in Mauritius, he would beg his grandmother to tell him stories about her homeland, but she would often dodge the question.Joseph’s grandmother was born on the Chagos Islands, an Indian Ocean archipelago. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the UK evicted the entire population to make way for a military airbase operated jointly with the United States.Many of the evicted Chagossians were sent to Mauritius, where Joseph was born. But his grandmother’s heart remained in her mother country, and the pain of her eviction at the hands of the British endured. This is the story of a football team trying to keep the story of their ancestors alive, representing a lost homeland almost 6,000 miles away.The first Chagos Islands team was established about two decades ago in Crawley, where the vast majority of the UK’s 3,000-strong Chagossian population lives. The team joined the NF-Board, an international body for national… Click below to read the full story from BBC Sport
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