It is no longer an empire on which the sun never sets. Not that, following decades of decolonisation, it is still much of an empire anyway. But last week the UK, in the landmark return of the remote Indian Ocean Chagos Islands to Mauritius, finally closed a long chapter in its inglorious history of African colonial conquest and exploitation, and cast a shadow over the once-ever-sunlit empire. As night falls on the Pitcairn Islands it will be hours before dawn again lights UK territories further westwards.
The UK leaves the islands, however, much as it governed this vast, largely empty but strategically important archipelago, with a total disregard for the feelings or aspirations of its displaced indigenous people. They were evicted en masse, close to 2,000 of them, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, against their will and with minimal compensation, to make way for the construction on the island of Diego Garcia of one of the largest and most important US-UK military bases. In return for expelling everybody from their homeland and an extended lease, Washington gave the British government a $14 million discount on the purchase of American Polaris nuclear weapons.
In what has been described as a crime against humanity, the Chagossians were shipped out to what became shantytowns in Mauritius, 2,000 kilometres away, or the similarly distant Seychelles, with several hundred eventually also settling in poverty in the southern English town of Crawley.
The US has since invested more than $3 billion in the docks, airport and monitoring facilities which support bombers, submarines and naval ships, and which were used most notoriously to launch its long-range bombing raids on Afghanistan and Iraq. It remains a key strategic asset in countering China’s increasing naval presence in the region.
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Last week’s announcement, which will allow first- and second-generation islanders to return after years of campaigning, was no generous concession of self-determination – the Chagossians were not consulted at all – but grudging and belated. Rulings in 2000 of the UK High Court found that the evictions were illegal and the UN’s International Court of Justice said the same of the occupation in 2019. In the same year, the UN general assembly overwhelmingly (by 116 to 6) backed a motion saying it should return the islands to Mauritius.
Labour’s new government, typically with the same high-handed and insensitive approach to Britain’s colonial legacy as the Tories have always manifested, has followed one historical wrong with another
Following 13 rounds of negotiations, the UK will now cede sovereignty to former ruler Mauritius but retain a lease for the US base to remain in place until 2090. A return to the island will not be possible until then except for a few recruited to work at the base.
Many Chagossians don’t see Mauritius as a disinterested guarantor of their rights; a significant number wanted self-determination.
Over the years the UK, by claiming that the inhabitants of Chagos were “contract labourers” rather than permanent residents, could maintain a legal fiction that they were not required to report on their treatment to the UN committee on decolonisation, or to create any system of self-government. As one Foreign Office memo put it dismissively in 1966, the locals comprised simply “some few Tarzans and Man Fridays whose origins are obscure”.
Not so. The archipelago, 55 islands halfway between east Africa and Indonesia, was settled in the 16th century by the Dutch, who brought slaves to tend coconut plantations. The French then ruled until 1814, when they relinquished the islands to the British under the terms of the Paris peace treaty. Slavery was abolished, and the “Ilois” or islanders, stayed, mostly working in agriculture or fishing.
In 1965, the Chagos Islands were formally designated the British Indian Ocean Territory and, when its colony Mauritius, to which they were formally linked, was three years later granted independence, the UK retained control of the islands.
Meanwhile 60 Tamil refugees, hoping to reach Canada after setting sail in a boat from southern India, have been stranded on Diego Garcia for three years in what are described as appalling conditions. A court ruling about whether or not they have been unlawfully detained there is expected shortly.
And so Labour’s new government, typically with the same high-handed and insensitive approach to Britain’s colonial legacy as the Tories have always manifested, has followed one historical wrong with another. The Chagossians are undoubtedly better off but, as usual, the colonised and their aspirations are given short shrift.
Other colonised hoping to shake off the yoke of their supposedly benevolent former master, or indeed like the Falklanders or Gibraltarians hoping to retain that link, might do well to take note that ultimately raisons d’etat rather than their views will determine their fate. And, as we are being reminded again and again during the Brexit contretemps, international law and opinion matter little to UK diplomacy. Britannia waives the rules.