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 Monday 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.
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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 center of all this tragedy,” said Frankie Bontemps, who called the U.K.-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 U.S. acknowledged it also had been used for clandestine rendition flights of terror suspects.
Many of the islanders resettled in Britain and fought unsuccessfully in U.K. 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 U.K. had unlawfully carved up Mauritius when it agreed to end colonial rule in the late 1960s.
The U.N. General Assembly followed that opinion with a resolution demanding that Britain end its “colonial administration” of the Chagos Islands and return them to Mauritius.
Britain’s newly elected Labour government says that without the deal the status of the military base would be under threat from legal challenges.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the new government “inherited unfinished business” from the previous Conservative administration, which began negotiations with Mauritius in 2022.
“The status quo was not sustainable,” Lammy told lawmakers in the House of Commons. “A binding judgement against the U.K. seemed inevitable.”
Under the agreement, the U.K. will retain sovereignty of Diego Garcia for an initial period of 99 years, paying Mauritius an undisclosed rent.
U.S. President Joe Biden welcomed the deal, saying it “secures the effective operation of the joint facility on Diego Garcia into the next century.”
But Britain’s Conservative opposition said the decision to hand over a piece of U.K. territory sets a worrying precedent for other far-flung possessions including Gibraltar, which is claimed by Spain, and the Falkland Islands, claimed by Argentina.
The government strongly denies that. Starmer spokesman Dave Pares said Monday that “British sovereignty of Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands is not up for negotiation.”
The agreement will create a resettlement fund for displaced Chagossians aimed at letting them move back to the islands – apart from Diego Garcia. The U.K. says details of any returns are now the responsibility of Mauritius.
“They shouldn’t have made this deal without asking us what we wanted,” said Jemmy Simon, whose grandparents were expelled from the Chagos Islands. “It might just be another island to them. It might just be a military base for them. It might just be keeping everybody else safe. But to us, it is home.”
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Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.