The tragedy of the Chagos Islanders is the 50 year-old story of a displaced people, forcibly evicted from their homeland and resettled in Mauritius or the UK where many finally migrated. The Chagos Islands, of which Diego GarcĂa was the most populated, were handed over to the Americans by the British to be used as a military base. The Chagos formed part of what was then the British colony of Mauritius, which gained its independence in 1968. The two thousand islanders were left without a home from 1967 to 1973, the year the last ship, the Nordvaer brought the last Chagossians to Mauritius.  The ruthless handling of the Chagossian people, dispensable objects that had to be removed to make way for the military use of the island of Diego Garcia, is poles apart from the protection and support received by the Falkland Islanders during the conflict with Argentina in 1981.  The British declared the area a marine reserve in 2010, but their refusal to allow the Chagossians the right to return to their homelands is not to protect the environment, but rather to safeguard the political agreement based on economic and military imperialism.
The Chagos Islands were originally populated with slaves from coastal East Africa and Madagascar who arrived there via Mauritius, but Mauritius itself has no indigenous population as everybody there was a migrant, either voluntary or enforced. By the mid-twentieth century Chagos had a population of approximately 2 000, most working in the coconut plantations, producing copra and coconut oil for export (Jeffery, 2006: 298). In 1965, following independence negotiations with Mauritian politicians, the UK government excised Chagos from colonial Mauritius to form part of the new British Indian Ocean Territory.
In 1968 Britain began illegal and secret removal of the population of the Chagos Islands following an agreement in 1966 to lease the islands to the US so that Diego Garcia would become available for a US military base. In this way the Whitehall conspiracy that contended that there were no indigenous inhabitants was formulated. At the request of the US government, the UK government had literally depopulated the entire archipelago by 1973, first by restricting the importation of supplies and preventing the return of Islanders who had gone to Mauritius for medical treatment, and later by forcibly removing the remaining Islanders and sending them to Mauritius and the Seychelles. In other words,  the British government saw fit to invent a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), just to justify the detachment of part of what was in fact the colony of Mauritius. As Mauritian historian Jocelyn Chan Low pertinently asks: “Why a new colony in the Indian Ocean at a time when the British seemed bent on getting rid of the remaining dust of empire?” (Chan Low, 2007: 107).
The Chagos Islands and their inhabitants were fairly isolated from the outside world but before the creation of BIOT “the Indian Ocean connected the Chagos and Mauritius on a regular but somewhat infrequent basis” (Johannessen, 2018: 268). It is undeniable that the sole purpose of creating BIOT was to kick the Chagossians out.  They were not regarded as permanent inhabitants of the islands, but rather as a so-called “floating population”, that is temporary workers or, imported labourers (ibid: 279). This is of course untrue as Chagossians had been living on the islands since the early 19th century, proof of which are the numerous graves of people dating back several generations. Instead of acknowledging their right to the land, the British showed an imperious attitude of contempt towards the islanders by maintaining the fiction that they didn’t exist as political subjects. According to the British and the Americans, there was no functioning civilization on the islands so the people were expendable, in other words, their presence was regarded as a trivial detail. This is disturbingly obvious in John Pilger’s moving documentary, Stealing a Nation (2004) where he argues that the recuperation of the Chagossians’ right to their land is a quest for justice.
The newly independent state of Mauritius does not come out of this issue completely blameless as it decided not to put forth its claims over the Chagos and not to raise the issue at the United Nations (Chan Low, 2007: 120). Chan Low goes on to argue that if Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam – the first Prime Minister of independent Mauritius – finally conceded on Diego Garcia it was because he had become convinced – the British having manoeuvred brilliantly to convince him – that if he proved conciliatory on the excision of the Chagos Archipelago, the British government would finally decide in favour of independence for Mauritius at the close of the Constitutional Conference in 1965 (Chan Low, 2007:  118; Jeffery, 2006: 304).  It is only in recent years that Mauritius is claiming sovereignty over the islands that it happily signed away. The inclusion of the Chagos Archipelago – and the intervening waters – as part of Mauritian territory would increase its size and importance on the world stage. Mauritius failed to act in accordance with the basic tenets of humanity as the deported Chagossians were left to their own devices once they were disembarked in Port Louis and relegated to the lowest position in society. Their living conditions were – and many still are – precarious and unsanitary. (See Jeffery & Vine, 2011: 98-100 and  Ravi, 2010: 345).
It is true that the years leading up to and immediately after the independence of Mauritius were highly volatile with interethnic strife, rising unemployment  and a housing shortage threatening the viability of the new state (Jeffery, 2010: 1102) which was not the ideal scenario for the integration of the new migrants.  Over the years various Chagossian groups in Mauritius have campaigned for fair compensation and the right to return to Chagos.  Their records document one thousand surviving islanders plus approximately 4,500 of their second generation offspring. The Chagossians won limited financial compensation from the UK government in 1978 and 1982 but lost a legal claim for further compensation in 2003 (Jeffery, 2007: 963). A judicial review in the name of the Chagos Refugees Group leader, Olivier Bancoult, concluded in 2000 that the depopulation of Chagos had been unlawful since it was contrary to the laws of the territory. In response, the UK government used the royal prerogative to impose a new immigration ordinance in 2004 preventing Chagossians from entering the territory so the people would be banned forever from returning to their homeland. Olivier Bancoult’s legal team won a judicial review of this latter legislation in 2006 – a shaming rebuke from the High Court which ruled in favour of the Islanders. The UK government appealed unsuccessfully in the Court of Appeal in 2007, but won its final appeal in the House of Lords in 2008 (See Allen, 2014, chapters 1 & 2; Johannessen, 2010: 72; Lobo, 2016: 13).
It is beyond the scope of this blog to delve further into the legal proceedings and the political tug-of-war over sovereignty among the Chagossian communities in Mauritius and in the UK but suffice it to say that certain groups would be in favour of the Chagos returning to Mauritius while others are claiming for total independence (See de l’Estrac, 2011, chapter XIII for a detailed discussion on the sovereignty issue).
The 2019 United Nations Resolution has – unsuccessfully – demanded the UK return control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius but despite all these setbacks, the Chagos Refugees Group remains committed to seeking the right to resettle Chagos.  The decision of the maritime law tribunal of the United Nations so far has been a victory for everybody except the United Kingdom who steadfastly refuses to hand back the Chagos Archipelago until the territory is no longer required for defence (Harding, 2021). The wound is therefore still open as Britain refuses to relinquish its hold on its last colony in Africa.