Africa Brief/ Nosmot Gbadamosi
The United Kingdom said Thursday that it will transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, ending its last African colony and a long acrimonious legal battle. The deal secures the future of a vital U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean as China competes for influence.
The Chagos Archipelago contains Diego Garcia, the largest of 58 islands and home to a joint U.K.-U.S. military base strategically positioned about halfway between East Africa and Southeast Asia. Diego Garcia is of huge importance to U.S. security interests in the Indo-Pacific. It allows surveillance of the Middle East and was critical to air operations during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Britain detached Chagos from Mauritius three years before its independence in 1968 and governed it as a new colony—the British Indian Ocean Territory. More than 1,000 inhabitants were forcibly evicted to build the military base in exchange for a $14 million discount on the U.K. purchase of Polaris nuclear missiles at the time—an act British officials now regard as a shameful episode in Britain’s colonial legacy. Mauritius was paid some $8.4 million in compensation.
For years, Britain dismissed various court rulings on the islanders’ right to return home. In 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion noting that “the process of decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed” and that the U.K. had violated United Nations resolutions that prohibited the breaking up of colonies before granting independence. In his book The Last Colony, Philippe Sands, who consulted on the Chagossians’ 40-year legal case, wrote that neither the ICJ nor the U.N. General Assembly had the power to force the U.K. and United States to comply with international laws.
Britain and Mauritius started formal negotiations over Chagos in 2022, at a time when African leaders began presenting a unified voice within the General Assembly against what they perceived as hypocrisy from the U.K. and United States, which were ignoring multiple international court rulings on Chagos while calling for African nations to support their stance against Russia’s colonization and war in Ukraine.
Perhaps drawing on those criticisms, Labour Member of Parliament Tim Roca said the Chagos agreement “sends a message to aggressors like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin that negotiation and dialogue are the ways to resolve disputes in the 21st century, not war.”
Opposition figures from the U.K. Conservative Party and senior U.S. Republicans worry that ceding Chagos to Mauritius gives Beijing an opportunity to build its own base there. U.S. Sen. James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the transfer of sovereignty “gives in to Chinese lawfare and yields to pressure from unaccountable international institutions like the International Court of Justice at the expense of U.S. and U.K. strategic and military interests.”
However, Mauritius is the only African nation other than Eswatini that’s not part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Instead, the likeliest power to benefit from the sovereignty agreement is India, a U.S. ally that has the strongest trade ties with Mauritius and is keen to counter China in the Indian Ocean, argued Samuel Bashfield, a defense researcher at the Australia India Institute who follows Mauritian security partnerships. India has built a military facility on the Mauritian island of Agaléga to keep watch on China, and most Mauritians have Indian ancestry, wrote David Vallance, a research associate at the Lowy Institute.
But there are other contested colonies that U.K. officials now fear losing. Former British Armed Forces Minister Mark Francois said the deal would “embolden nations like Argentina to press for control of the Falklands.” Britain still has 13 contested territories in regions from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, including Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands. On the other hand, by ignoring the African Union and Mauritius, the West gave China the upper hand in projecting itself as an anti-colonial ally of African nations. China ramped up investments and signed a free trade agreement with Mauritius the same year as the ICJ ruling—its first free trade agreement with an African country.
“The status quo was clearly not sustainable,” British Foreign Secretary David Lammy told lawmakers in the House of Commons on Monday. “A binding judgment against the U.K. seemed inevitable.”
Thursday’s deal was welcomed by the White House, the African Union, and Chagossians who can now return to homes in Peros Banhos and Salomon Atoll.
Marie Sabrina Jean, the chair of the Chagos Refugees Group in the U.K., said the agreement “represents the culmination of decades of our efforts.” Jean is a second-generation Chagossian born in Mauritius. “I have often stated that if the British government were to expel me, I could return to my country of origin. My father, however, who was born on Peros Banhos, would have nowhere to go as neither Mauritius nor England is his homeland. Today, I can joyfully tell my dad, ‘You can now go home,’” she told Foreign Policy.
The deal, however, bans resettlement on the island of Diego Garcia because Mauritius has pledged to honor the U.S. lease for 99 years with possible extension.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote in an email statement that exclusion of Diego Garcia from the deal continued “the crimes long into the future.” “It does not guarantee that the Chagossians will return to their homeland, appears to explicitly ban them from the largest island, Diego Garcia, for another century, and does not mention the reparations they are all owed to rebuild their future,” said Clive Baldwin, HRW’s senior legal advisor. The activist group Chagossian Voices denounced the deal as a “betrayal.” Chagossians have accused the British and Mauritian governments of excluding them from negotiations and protested outside the U.K. Parliament on Monday for the right to self-determination.
Chagossians were brought to the archipelago as enslaved people from Africa and indentured laborers from India (another system of forced labor) by Britain and France, the latter of which ceded Chagos to the U.K. more than 200 years ago. A British government memo at the time of the expulsion dismissed the islanders as “some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure.”
Conservation also became an instrument to keep Chagossians away, according to U.K. Foreign Office records published by WikiLeaks in 2010. A Foreign Office official told Washington in a cable that setting up a “marine protected area” would “effectively end the islanders’ resettlement claims.” The marine reserve was declared illegal by a U.N. court because it voided Mauritius’s fishing rights.
Diego Garcia had the largest number of people living there at the time of expulsion, and some consider it the only island that can reasonably be inhabited today without great expense. Some Chagossians living in Britain and the Seychelles wanted to remain British citizens but be allowed to return home to Diego Garcia. On paper, that dispute has only been kicked further down the line.
