By Mark Baber
September 19 – The Chagossians, a people forcibly displaced from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, have launched a campaign on Indiegogo to raise the funds to send a team to play their first game outside of the UK against ConIFA member, Szekelyföld LE, a Hungarian-speaking minority group in Transylvania.
The people of the Chagos Island were displaced by the UK and USA from their islands in order to make way for the strategic military base at Diego Garcia which houses 3-5,000 US troops. Exiled from their homes in what the Washington Post in 1975 called “an act of mass kidnapping” the Chagossians have continued to demand a right of return, whilst the US and UK governments have resorted to typically nefarious methods to block them.
A leaked US embassy cable revealed the thinking behind declaring the Chagos Islands a “marine reserve,” saying “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve,” stressing that the UK’s “environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossian’s advocates.”
The Chagos Island team plays in the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA) with other nations, dependencies, unrecognized states, and stateless peoples who are not welcomed into FIFA.
On their Indiegogo page the Chagossians say that “Since our very first football match vs. Sealand in 2012 we always dreamt of getting on the world stage of football one day and representing the Chagos Islands abroad!”
“Under the umbrella of ConIFA, an organization we joined in 2014, we were now offered a great chance to realize our dream and play at a World Cup in 2016.”
The planned game will be against the newest ConIFA-member ‘Szekelyföld LE’, an Hungarian-speaking minority based in the Romanian historic region of Transylvania.
ConIFA’s other members include Darfur United, Zanzibar, Arameans Suryoye, Kurdistan, Tamil Eelam, Abkhazia, Countea De Nissa, Cilento, Ellan Vannin, Franconia, Heligoland, Monaco, Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Occitania, Padania. Romani People, Sapmi , South Ossetia, Cascadia and Quebec.
The Chagossians have so far raised £380 of their target £3,000 goal with 6 days left.
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