Chagos: It’s Time to Seal a Deal

Even a saga has an end-story. The future of the Chagos archipelago has been newsworthy for more than half a century. In the past decade, with the ending of a 50-year lease for America’s use of Diego Garcia as its flagship military base in the Indian Ocean, the longstanding dispute reached new heights. It has become a postcolonial cause célèbre in the UN and international courts. Never mind that the original terms of the lease for the American base allowed an extension through to 2036, Mauritius was quick to marshal support for its claim to sovereignty of the remote islands.

For this entire period – in fact, since 1814 – Chagos has been a British colony. When independence was ceded to Mauritius in 1968, the islands (renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory) remained in British hands. Mauritius – in spite of a distance of 2000 kilometers from its capital – claimed then and more recently that, without the inclusion of Chagos, the transfer of colonial power was incomplete. The islands should be ‘returned’ and the original residents allowed to resettle without further delay. There is no infrastructure on the islands to support a permanent community. 1500 ‘Chagossians’ were forcibly removed at the time the base was developed, whereas there is now a total of 10,000 (living in Mauritius, Seychelles and the UK).

Initially, Britain resisted the Mauritian claim to sovereignty, until in 2022 the short-lived UK government led by Liz Truss, committed to a quick resolution; the issue, she claimed, was getting in the way of other international business. Her term of office, however, lasted only 49 days and, before her wishes could be met, a subsequent foreign secretary, David Cameron, ruled that there would be no going back on Britain’s position to retain control of the islands. However, a change of political administration (from Conservative to Labour) in the UK in 2024 led to another u-turn on the future of Chagos, with a proposed deal to hand over all of the islands except Diego Garcia to Mauritius. With the approval of the Biden administration and the Mauritian government, provision was made for the US to continue to retain its base. Part of the deal required Britain to pay Mauritius £80 million each year for the lease of Diego Garcia.

It was, by all accounts, a deeply unpopular deal for the British public. Political opposition is at present numerically weak but questions were asked in Parliament. Why is money being paid to Mauritius when it will become the beneficiary through ownership of  islands with rich fisheries and the prospect of seabed mining? With growing Chinese influence in Mauritius, can it be relied on to honour a continuing lease to the Americans on Diego Garcia? And, at the heart of it all, does Mauritius really have a claim to sovereignty? Certainly, the ruling of the international courts says it does but the only link in the past was when colonial administrators governed the distant territory from the Mauritian capital. Answers to these questions are thinly veiled. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, believes fervently in the sanctity of international law and, for him, that is reason enough to act in this way. In turn, his Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is determined to win back the support of the postcolonial lobby in the international arena, and this seems to matter more to him than public opinion at home.

Shortly before completing the deal, however, two election outcomes changed everything. In Mauritius, the new leadership wanted to negotiate better terms (in effect, they wanted a substantial increase in the annual payments from Britain). More significant by far was the view of the incoming Trump administration that any transfer to Mauritius was not in American interests. It had hardly gone unnoticed that Mauritius (albeit with a majority of its population of Indian descent) was developing a close relationship with China, giving rise to the fear that any kind of exclusion zone around the military base could be eroded. Formally, the UK deal is still on the table but its chances of going ahead are greatly reduced. Trump has yet to meet the UK leader, Keir Starmer, when it is hard to see how the present proposal can survive.

As the present deal shows, it is unlikely that any formula will please all parties. But this is a global issue and to achieve wider goals some radical rethinking is needed. It is suggested that:

• Britain must finally release its hold over Chagos, It is more than time for the colonial era to end. This is not necessarily a legal argument but one of a former colonial power coming to terms with the modern world.
• In the security interests of the region, part of a new deal should be to transfer, for the foreseeable future, ownership (not simply leasehold) of Diego Garcia to the US. This would free the US from the risk of any change of heart by Mauritius and interference by China.
• All of the remaining islands and the surrounding seas should be designated as an internationally protected reserve, demonstrating all the best features of a unique tropical environment
• There is no case for Chagos to be handed to distant authorities in Mauritius, nor to receive payment. The former colony was compensated at the time the islands became part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.
• There should also be no further reparations payable to former residents of Chagos. The material advantages of not being on the islands have almost certainly outweighed the disadvantages of long ago leaving them. Few, if any, of the surviving 1500 would wish to return on a permanent basis to remote islands with no infrastructure.  

[Aerial photograph of the coconut plantation at East Point, Diego Garcia. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.