Blitz Bureau
LONDON: Islanders who were forced to leave their remote Indian Ocean home to make way for a U.S. military base half a century ago protested outside the U.K. Parliament on October 7 against a deal they say has decided their homeland’s fate without them.
The British government announced last week that it is handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius under an agreement that will see the American naval and bomber base stay on one of the islands, Diego Garcia.
Opponents accuse the Government of surrendering sovereignty over a British territory. And the deal has left displaced residents uncertain whether they can go home.
“They announced a deal without even consulting us, which is at the centre of all this tragedy,” said Frankie Bontemps, who called the UK-Mauritius agreement “history repeating itself.”
“They have a deal which is suitable for them, best for them, of course. And what about the people? What about the people that they ignored like 65 years ago?”
The Chagos Islands, a tropical archipelago just south of the equator off the tip of India, have been under British control since 1814. They have been known as the British Indian Ocean Territory since 1965 when they were split off from Mauritius, a then-U.K. colony that gained independence three years later.
Britain evicted as many as 2,000 people from the islands in the 1960s and 1970s so the U.S. military could build the Diego Garcia base, which has supported U.S. military operations from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2008, the US acknowledged it also had been used for clandestine rendition flights of terror suspects. Many of the islanders resettled in Britain and fought unsuccessfully in UK courts to return home. Their cause has garnered international support, notably among African nations and within the United Nations.
In a non-binding 2019 opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK had unlawfully carved up Mauritius when it agreed to end colonial rule in the late 1960s.
