The Government announced that the UK will hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, in a contentious deal intended to end years of legal wrangling about the Indian Ocean archipelago.
In a joint statement with Mauritian PM Pravind Jugnauth, Keir Starmer said that Mauritius will take control of the islands, while allowing Britain and the US to keep operating a military base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, under an “initial” 99-year lease. That island will also be exempt from plans to resettle displaced Chagossians.
A collection of seven atolls comprised of more than 60 islands, the Chagos Islands have been controlled by Britain since 1814. Once administered as part of the British colony of Mauritius, they were carved off in 1965, before Mauritian independence. Britain’s sovereignty has long been contested; but critics of the deal said that ceding the islands to Mauritius could allow China to gain foothold in the Indo-Pacific, undermining Britain’s security.
An act of ‘pure folly’?
This deal goes some way to addressing a grave injustice, said The Guardian. In 1967, Britain began forcibly displacing the Chagossians to make way for its military base. The islanders (notoriously described by one UK official as “a few Tarzans and Man Fridays”) have been campaigning for a right to return for years. They won a crucial victory in 2019, when the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK’s “occupation” of the archipelago was illegal; two years later, a UN court agreed. That left Britain with few legal routes to keep the islands, said The Standard. The then-Tory government duly opened talks with Mauritius in 2022, paving the way for this sensible deal.
Giving up the islands is “an act of pure folly”, said The Times. The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), as the archipelago is known, only amounts to 23 square miles. But the base there has helped safeguard the UK’s security for 60 years. In ceding control to Mauritius, which is being courted by Beijing as it looks for bases of its own in the Indian Ocean, the PM is putting “anti-colonialist sentiment” above the national interest.
China’s influence
“I am almost too angry to write about the abandonment of the British Indian Ocean Territory,” said Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the islands, which lie 1,300 miles away from it; and when Britain hived them off, it raised few objections (and accepted a £3m “sweetener”).
The evacuation of the islands was a “genuine tragedy”. Those Chagossians who were removed to Mauritius in the 1970s were treated terribly, although Britain paid Mauritius a significant sum to help their resettlement; many ended up in slums. Others moved to the UK (indeed, there are more Chagossians in Crawley than there were on Diego Garcia in the late 1960s). And while some lobbied me, as their MEP, to be allowed to return home, none demanded the islands be given to Mauritius. Yet somehow, it has managed to acquire them. Did Beijing push it to start agitating for sovereignty over this distant atoll? We may never know; but it leaves Britain having to pay to retain a base that has proved its value to our strategic interests time and again. Diego Garcia played a vital role in the campaign to bomb Saddam Hussain out of Kuwait, and in fighting the Taliban ten years later.
China has some influence over Mauritius, said Cahal Milmo in The i Paper. It is the biggest importer into the country, and its firms have built a host of infrastructure projects there, including a major airport terminal funded by Chinese loans. Beijing seems to view the island as a “gateway” for inward investment into Africa. But Mauritius is one of only a few small nations in the region not to have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and is far closer politically to India than to any other state: Hinduism is its most practised religion, and India is its largest export market. As China is India’s rival, Mauritius is unlikely to let Beijing open a naval base on the Chagos Islands, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. The deal to hand over the islands is not a strategic disaster. It is better described as “a long-overdue tidying up of an anomaly”.
What next?
The agreement ceding control of the islands, which the Government hopes to ratify in 2025, has been severely criticised by a group representing the Chagossian diaspora. The Chagossians are angry that they were excluded from the talks; some say that they’d like to return to the islands, but not if they’re controlled by Mauritius.
The Conservative MP James Cleverly was criticised by other Tories for having kicked off the talks with Mauritius as foreign secretary in 2022. Tom Tugendhat MP said it was a disgrace that the process started “under our watch”.