By: Muhammad Ayub
The agreement comes after 13 rounds of negotiations that began in 2022, following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UN General Assembly’s acknowledgment of Mauritius’s sovereignty claims in 2019 and 2021.
The ICJ, the principal judicial body of the UN, resolves disputes between countries.
Before granting independence to Mauritius in 1968, Britain was found to have unlawfully separated it to create a new colony on the Chagos archipelago, named the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).
Initially, the UK rejected UN resolutions and court rulings that called for the return of the islands to Mauritius, arguing that the ICJ’s ruling was only an advisory opinion.
In the process of detaching the islands from Mauritius, the UK forcibly removed between 1,500 and 2,000 islanders to lease Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos group, to the United States for military purposes, which both nations have operated together since then.
Reports indicate that the UK inaccurately claimed that Chagos had no permanent residents to avoid reporting its colonial governance to the UN. In truth, the Chagossian community had inhabited the islands for centuries.
The UK and US governments forcibly displaced the Chagossians from 1967 to 1973, affecting not only Diego Garcia but also Peros Banhos and Salomon.
The campaign against British ownership of the Chagos archipelago saw Mauritian ambassador to the UN, Jagdish Koonjul, raise the Mauritian flag over Peros Banhos in a ceremony in February 2022, marking the first Mauritian expedition to the territory since the islanders’ expulsion.
Under the agreement reached on Thursday, the UK will maintain control over the UK-US military base at Diego Garcia.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated that the UK government had secured the future of the military base while also ensuring a strong long-term relationship with Mauritius, a key partner in the Commonwealth.
However, many Chagossians expressed frustration over the UK government’s failure to consult them prior to the announcement, as reported.
Chagossian Voices, an organization representing Chagossians in the UK and other countries where islanders have settled, criticized “the exclusion of the Chagossian community from the negotiations,” which left them “powerless and voiceless in shaping our future and that of our homeland.”
“The perspectives of Chagossians, the Indigenous inhabitants of the islands, have been consistently and deliberately overlooked, and we demand full inclusion in the treaty drafting process.”
