The Chagos Islands, an archipelago of 58 islands about halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia in the Indian Ocean, have been owned by Britain since 1814 when, along with Mauritius, they were handed over by France at the Treaty of Paris.
Discovered by Portuguese mariners in the early 16th century, the islands were colonised by the French, who shipped in African slaves to cultivate coconuts and copra. The Chagossians were freed in 1834, and for many generations lived on the archipelago’s three inhabited islands – Diego Garcia (the largest), Salomon and Peros Banhos – forming a distinct people who called themselves the Ilois, and had their own French-based Creole.
“We had a wonderful life,” says Liseby Elysé, one of the islanders. “We had our traditions, our culture, our school, our church, worked in the copra plantation and lived off fresh fruit, vegetables and fish.” But in the 1960s, the Chagossians’ way of life came to an abrupt end.
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Why did they leave their home?
In 1965, Britain detached the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, shortly before its independence, paying £3m in compensation, and renamed them the British Indian Ocean Territory. By then, the US had identifed Diego Garcia as a good site for a military base and had asked the UK for “exclusive control (without local inhabitants)”.
In 1966, Harold Wilson’s government leased the island to the US in exchange for a discount on the sale of Polaris nuclear missiles. The deal involved removing the 2,000 or so Ilois, not just from Diego Garcia, but from all the inhabited islands. To do so, as a Foreign and Commonwealth Office memo put it, they had to “maintain the pretence” that the islands had no “permanent inhabitants”, who would have UN-recognised rights. The plan to remove the Chagossians, who were described in a 1966 memo by British diplomat Denis Greenhill as “some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure”, commenced in 1969.
How was that operation carried out?
The colonial authorities bought up the plantations, to deprive the islanders of work and encourage them to leave; Chagossians visiting Mauritius found that they were barred from returning home. The final stage came in the early 1970s. First, the islanders’ dogs were poisoned and gassed. Then the inhabitants of Diego Garcia were removed to other islands.
And in April 1971, the civil servant John Rawling Todd told all those remaining that they had to leave, either to Mauritius or the Seychelles. They were herded onto boats, leaving behind their homes and most of their possessions; they were allowed just one chest per family. Elysé, who was pregnant at the time, later described being transported in the hull of a ship “like animals and slaves”.
What became of them?
Most were taken to Mauritius, where initially no provision was made for them; they were left to fend for themselves in the slums of Port Louis. Work was scarce. Many turned to drugs and prostitution. Suicides were common. Elysé lost her baby. The UK paid £650,000 in compensation, which the Mauritian government withheld until 1978.
In 1982, the islanders launched protests and hunger strikes, and £4m in extra compensation followed, contingent on them renouncing any right to return home. No further action was taken until the 1990s, when the Chagos Refugees Group began a legal campaign to return.
What has the campaign achieved?
In 2000, they sued the UK Government in the High Court for the right to return, and won. Plans were considered to resettle the outer islands. In 2002, some Ilois also gained UK citizenship, and established a small community in Crawley, near Gatwick, where they arrived. However, ministers nullified the High Court’s decision in 2004 by royal prerogative, and defended the Government’s position successfully: in 2007, the House of Lords found that the matter had been legally settled in 1982.
However, the Chagossians’ fight has continued in other forums. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK’s sovereignty over the islands – its last African colony – should end “as rapidly as possible”; the UN General Assembly described what the British had done as “a wrongful act” and demanded the archipelago be reunited with Mauritius by late-2019.
Did the UK accept that?
No. The ICJ ruling and the UN motion are advisory and nonbinding, and the UK insists it retains sovereignty over the islands. In 2010, the Government declared the archipelago a marine reserve; a leaked cable from WikiLeaks showed this was done in part to prevent the Ilois from returning. T
The Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan declared in 2016: “We do not consider that the right of self-determination actually applies to the Chagossians.” He accepted that what had happened was “deplorable”; but said their resettlement wasn’t possible for reasons of “feasibility, defence and security interests, and the cost to the British taxpayer”.
Could the campaign succeed?
Britain and the US show no sign of relenting. In 2016, the lease of Diego Garcia was extended for a further 20 years. But the Chagossians are fighting on. In February, a group of five Ilois returned to the archipelago on a voyage mounted by the Mauritian government. It was the first time any had returned, other than on “heritage trips” accompanied by British police. The Mauritian flag was raised in a ceremony on the island of Peros Banhos.
“We don’t understand how the UK can still claim morally and legally that this is their territory,” declared Mauritius’s ambassador to the UN, Jagdish Dharamchand Koonjul. The Ilois visited what was left of their church and the graves of their ancestors. “I am happy to be back,” said Elysé, who was on the voyage. “But I am sad that I have to leave again. I want to stay here permanently.
