Louis Marcel Humbert
Chagossian Exile · 1955
Who is Louis Marcel Humbert?
Louis Marcel Humbert was born in 1955 on Peros Banhos, one of the atolls of the Chagos Archipelago, within what later became the British Indian Ocean Territory. As a child he lived through the forced removal of the Chagossian population, carried out by the United Kingdom between 1968 and 1973 to clear the archipelago for the construction of a US military base on Diego Garcia. His account of the moment his mother told him and his siblings that their lives were about to change forever, and the hardship that followed the family's resettlement in Mauritius, was recorded by researchers for Human Rights Watch as part of a broader investigation into the expulsion. That testimony, gathered decades after the events it describes, became part of the documentary record used in the organization's 2023 report on the displacement of the Chagossians, published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the final deportations. Beyond his role as a firsthand witness to the expulsion and its lasting effects on his family, detailed public biographical information about his later life is not extensively documented in available sources.
Sources: Human Rights Watch, "That's When the Nightmare Started": UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes, 15 February 2023