Tiny group of atolls returned to Africa

Noticed by very few, a small blow was struck this month for the decolonisation of Africa when Britain agreed, caving in after a 56-year battle, to hand over the remote Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius.

The Chagos, a collection of five Indian Ocean atolls, are fully 2,000km from the Mauritian capital of Port Louis, and the usually brilliant Rome2Rio travel planning site is totally stumped as to how to get from one to the other: there are no connecting air routes or sea lanes.

The Chagos are much closer to the southern tip of the Maldives, 500km away, so it is peeved at having had its counterclaim on the atolls spurned by Britain’s foreign office.

Africa’s most far-flung country and what is now termed British Indian Ocean Territory are linked by a slender thread of colonialism.

From 1715, the atolls had been a dependency of Mauritius under French colonial rule, which was toppled after Napoleon’s defeat. The island and its remote dependency were ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Paris in 1814.

The Chagos were then administered as a dependency of the British colony of the Seychelles, 1,880km west; this was switched back to Mauritius in 1903.

Yet when it became clear in the “wind of change” era sweeping Africa that Mauritius, by then a self-governing colony, would gain full independence, Britain purchased the atolls from Mauritius for ₤3m in 1965, creating the British Indian Ocean Territory. Mauritius became independent three years later and started agitating to have its former dependency reincorporated.

But the British had other plans, buying out the Seychellois coconut plantation company but then shutting down the plantations to deliberately deprive the Chagossians of an income and so persuade them to voluntarily leave.

Colonial office chief Dennis Greenhill stated in a notorious 1966 memo: “The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a committee. Unfortunately, along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure.”

The main reason Britain wanted the islands depopulated was because it had negotiated an agreement allowing the US to use the south-westernmost island of Diego Garcia, the largest at 32.8km², for 50 years, with an optional 20-year extension, as its own military staging-point.

Diego Garcia was developed as an intelligence listening post, refuelling station, bomber base for raids on Afghanistan and Iraq and, most infamously, it and vessels anchored offshore became CIA “black sites” for the transit, interrogation and torture of suspects illegally kidnapped during the war on terror in the 2000s.

The Americans had originally been nervous about potential political instability on the islands, and so required their total depopulation. Those of the Chagossian population of 1,151 people who did not leave of their own accord were forcibly expelled by 1973, being settled in Mauritius and the Seychelles.

The islands having apparently had no indigenous people, the Chagossians had first been brought to the archipelago as slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar in 1793 to work France’s newly established coconut plantations. Freed in 1836, they stayed on as plantation workers, creating a unique Creole culture, and so consider themselves natives of the Chagos.

The governments of Mauritius and the UK early this month announced the Chagos would return to Mauritius, subject to the finalisation of a treaty to that effect — with the rider that the Diego Garcia island would remain under British jurisdiction for another 99 years.

Promising to “address wrongs of the past”, the treaty will establish a trust, allowing the Chagossian diaspora, now numbering 10,000, to resettle on the islands except Diego Garcia. But the 5,000-odd Chagossian citizens of Britain are outraged that their homeland was given away without consultation, with Paul Poche, who was expelled to Mauritius as a child, quoted as saying: “We are being treated like animals just being passed off between owners.”