London accepts its return to Mauritius, but the island of Diego García is left out of the agreement
It’s a story that dates back to the 1960s, or even earlier. 2,000 kilometers from Mauritius, but 9,000 from London, Chagos is located in a privileged position, halfway between Africa and Asia, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, as a privileged geostrategic and military post.
This factor early unleashed the ambitions of Great Britain, which took over Mauritius after giving it to Paris at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, in 1903, London took the opportunity to integrate Chagos into Mauritius, an archipelago located about 1,100 kilometers from the island of Madagascar. But in 1965 the British Government incorporated the Chagossian archipelago into what it called the “British Indian Ocean Territories” (BIOTfor its acronym in English), which meant the separation of these islands from Mauritius, which was financially compensated. The geographical importance of Chagos is such that even the United States has maintained a military base on one of its islands, Diego García, since 1966, after agreeing with the European metropolis on its joint management, which extends to the present day.
During the dizzying era of independence in Africa, it was Mauritius’s turn. It was 1968 and from that moment on he began to demand the restitution of Chagos from London. The independent administration of Port Louis alleged that Great Britain forced it to hand over the archipelago as an essential condition for achieving its emancipation. For this reason, last October 3 will remain in the memory of the African nation. The Government led by Keir Starmer agreed to grant the restitution of the archipelago to Mauritius, after two years of direct negotiations. The agreement provides for the maintenance of the American presence, a military commitment that was renewed in 2016 for an “initial period” of 99 years.
Great Britain had refused for 56 years to return Chagos to Mauritius despite having received pressure from the International Court of Justice and the UN General Assembly in 2019, to which were added protests from Mauritian civil society, which came to place, in open defiance of the British administration, a flag of the country in the archipelago.
The other side of the agreement
The negotiations that have led to the return, argued from Downing Street, have sought to prevent Chagos from becoming a link in illegal human trafficking networks, in addition to outlining the application of a financial package that includes funds and infrastructure for Mauritius.
But the future of the formerly displaced Chagos communities remains uncertain. For groups in the diaspora, the agreement does not clarify what will happen to the Tamil communities that have been living poorly in Chagos since 2021, arriving as a product of the religious persecutions that persist in southern India, where they come from, now that the possibility of relocate them to UN facilities in Romania. The original problem has to do with the fact that the installation of the military base in Diego García forced the forced displacement of up to 2,000 people from the archipelago between 1968 and 1973, which has caused that currently nearly 10,000 nationals are distributed between Mauritius, Seychelles and the former metropolis. Those expatriates were promised that they would never return to the islands. And Great Britain, consistent with its declaration, blocked for decades and in every possible way the return of that population to Chagos, in a flagrant humanitarian crime.
The details of that expulsion have become known in recent years. In 2019, the British Government apologized for the damage inflicted on this group, to which it added the promise of restitution of the archipelago to Mauritius when the geostrategic needs were no longer met, although it did not specify much more. In 2022, a small group of Chagossians were able to undertake a return trip without escort or British authorization.
The current agreement will allow the resettlement of Chagossian communities in the diaspora, except on the island of Diego García. Due to this and other factors, opinions within the native communities are quite divided. Some long for return and have shown enthusiasm at the possibility of returning to their places of origin, others are more concerned about their rights in Britain, while a third group believes that what happened in Chagos should be the product of their own decisions and not of external wills.
In relation to this last group, another criticism that has transcended the agreement reached between Mauritius and Great Britain is that it has excluded from the consultations the population of Chagos, a people who have not enjoyed the right to self-determination and who could have questioned their inclusion in Mauritius and opt for the path of independence. Added to this is the reality of those who have not been able to return to their homes for decades.
The first restitution?
Furthermore, the question is pertinent as to whether this specific movement could inspire other returns of British territories such as the Malvinas or Gibraltar, among the most striking of the 14 that still retain overseas power. What happened could raise hopes for the sovereign claims of Argentina, Spain and other states.
This issue has had a relative media echo. For example, the journalist and columnist Simon Jenkins, from the British newspaper Guardianpublished an article on October 8 in which he raised the idea that Britain should abandon its imperial illusions and that Chagos could be a good starting point for this. Jenkins recalled in his article that Margaret Thatcher’s Government, before the outbreak of war in 1982, was negotiating a transfer of the Malvinas that was highly questioned by the Kelper population, a process that interrupted the operation of the Argentine Military Junta, then ruling, and whose Failure precipitated the end of the dictatorship the following year. At the end of the article, the journalist pointed out that only the cost of maintaining the Falklands, which amounts to £60 million a year for less than 4,000 Falklands, would be a logical argument for returning the islands. However, feeling challenged, Downing Street ruled out the possibility of returning the archipelago, the Rock and perhaps the rest.
