The office is plain and makeshift. When their leader Olivier Bancoult calls from London to announce the verdict they have waited 40 years to hear, the patient faces waiting around the dining-cum-meeting table break into leathery grins.

The Chagossians’ longstanding struggle attained fruition earlier this week when for the third — and final time, a British appeals court upheld a 2006 judgement by the country’s highest judicial instance, its high court, declaring that the British government must close the dirtiest chapter of its colonial history by returning 4000-odd former coconut farmers to their home of five generations: the British Indian Ocean territory (BIOT) of Chagos.

Between 1965 and 1973, 2000 Chagossians, whom classifed British diplomats in classified notes referred to as ‘Tarzans and Man Fridays”, underwent psychological terror and finally, forcible eviction.

In return for a discount on Polaris rockets, Washington leased the largest island Diego Garcia, while the British government pretended to the international community that the islands had always been uninhabited. The Chagossians were dumped on the shores of Mauritius and Seychelles.

In 2000 and with the help of none less than Nelson Mandela’s attorney Sir Sydney Kentridge, Bancoult launched his daring legal process in British courts. When Britain’s highest judicial instance, the high court, became the second in the country to pronounce the eviction illegal, the desperate British Foreign Office turned to the Queen.

In 2004 and with a rare, Royal Order In Council, she overruled every previous judgement and banished the islanders once and for all from their homeland. (See ‘There will be... seagulls’ IE, Dec 14, 2005 for complete story)

Kenntridge appealed again, this time against the Queen herself — and Tuesday’s judgement at the appeals court was more than sensational. It upheld the high court verdict and dismissed the later Order initialed by Britain’s head of state, as a “repugnant abuse of power”.

The court also warned the British foreign office not to waste any more taxpayers’ money — totaling 4 million pounds since 2000 — by appealing yet again and this time as a last resort, to the House of Lords.

Or by making any more excuses:

• That the USA would not allow the islanders to return to any island in Chagos. There are 4000 US personnel, a 4000-yard runway lined with B-52 bombers and four hangars for B2 Stealth bombers on Diego Garcia. The Chagos’ largest island is the US’ most important military base and the one most crucial to its ‘war against terror’ in Asia. (After all, the returning coconut farmers could easily set up “jammers and surveillance devices” in the neighbourhood and impair the invaluable operations being conducted out of Diego Garcia, such as the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq).

• That the islands which once boasted of functioning infrastructure, were now inaccessible.

In theory and being but a tenant till 2050 in Diego Garcia, human rights and legal experts argue that the US can hardly have a say in who lives on the neighbouring islands of Peros Banhos, Salomon and others.

“We are not against the presence of the US military base on Diego,” reiterates Bancoult . “We are ready to cohabitate and work for them, but they must realise we belong in Chagos more than they do.”

Interestingly, Mauritius too claims Chagos, which initially belonged to it and which it ceded only in a trade-off with the departing British, for independence. On the heels of the British verdict, that claim is likely to grow louder. Of the existing Chagossians, around 2000 live in Mauritius, 1500 in Seychelles and roughly 500 of the few who could afford the exorbitant cost of gaining British passports and repatriating entire families to the west, in impoverished circumstances in Britain. And almost everywhere, they have been treated like social outcasts.

Further and 40 years after the Chagossians were first evicted, many of the older generation are dead.

So are younger Chagossians excited by the prospect of rebuilding their remote island, when they have a choice of getting a British passport and moving to London?

Chagossian handyman Gianny Augustin can barely contain his excitement at the thought of moulding Chagos into a revenue-earning tourist destination as prosperous and well-run as the Maldives or Mauritius. “Many young Chagossians may go to England to gain some education, some expertise first,” he says. “But if the British rebuild the infrastructure in Chagos speedily and leave local administration to us, they will certainly return.”

On Tuesday, the sitting justice at the Appeals Court in London elaborated on his verdict. “Few things are more important to a social group than its sense of belonging, not only to each other but to a place. What has sustained peoples in exile, from Babylon onwards, has been the possibility of one day returning home,” he wrote.

Are the new Democrats in the majority in the US Congress, but also other totalitarian states with similar strangleholds on illegal territory, listening?

The writer is Der Spiegel’s southasia bureau chief