Diego Garcia. Not a Real Madrid midfielder. Not a flamenco guitarist. Not a Filipino politician. Not a contender for the WBA bantam weight championship. Not a Mexican artist. Not a member of the Buena Vista Social Club. Diego Garcia is a tiny tiny atoll smack dab in the middle the Indian Ocean among the 60 atolls that make up the Chagos Archipelago. How tiny tiny? 30 sq km – roughly the size of Ripon in North Yorkshire. The only people who give a toss about Diego Garcia are the Chagossians, the Mauritians, the British and the US military. Say what?
Here’s the back story.
Diego Garcia
Diego Garcia is located halfway between Tanzania, where I live, and Indonesia. Its closest neighbour is the island of Mauritius, 2150km to the southeast. The atoll got its name from a Spanish explorer who came in 1544. He took a quick look around and left.
Diego Garcia was uninhabited until the French started sending lepers there from Mauritius in the 1780s. The entire Chagos Archipelago became a French colony in the 1790s. It was handed over to the British after the Napoleonic Wars. (To the victors go the spoils – Diego Garcia was a spoil.) The Brits made the Chagos a dependency of the Colony of Mauritius. And there it remained – a few coconut farms and sea cucumber harvesting – for about 150 years.
Not a whole lotta shakin goin on until World War II when the British stationed two squadrons of RAF on Diego Garcia. A detachment of Royal Marines followed. They shut down after the war ended. The atoll went back to its lazy hazy days of summer all year round.
US arrives in Indian Ocean
In the 1960s the US asked the UK for an unpopulated island in the Indian Ocean where it could conduct military activities. They agreed on Diego Garcia. Mauritius had become a self-governing colony and was on the way to independence. It might not agree to turn Diego Garcia over to the Americans. Folks can get a bit nationalistic when it comes to what they consider their territory, even a nothing atoll in a nowhere archipelago.
In order to make things kosher, the UK paid Mauritius – officially still its own colony – £3mn, then created the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) which consists of the Chagos Archipelago and … well just the Chagos Archipelago. Diego Garcia was no longer part of Mauritius, as far as Britain was concerned.
Now everything was copacetic except for one little problem. Diego Garcia and other Chagos atolls were not totally unpopulated. There weren’t a lot of inhabitants but there were some, about 1,000. And most of them liked coconuts and sea cucumbers and wanted to stay put, even after the UK asked them nicely: ‘Wouldn’t you all prefer another archipelago somewhere … pretty please?’ When they said they liked the Chagos just fine, well … stuff ’em. The Brits and Yanks could not let 1,000 nobodies on a nothing atoll in a nowhere archipelago get in the way of their global strategic objectives. Between 1968 and 1973 they forcibly removed every man, woman and child from the Chagos. Most were relocated to Mauritius. For the last 50+ years the only people on Diego Garcia have been US military and American contractors plus a few Brits.
Eviction by statute
Over the years the UK has pulled a few stunts to prevent displaced Chagossians from returning to what they consider home. In 2000, it revoked their ‘right of abode’ in the BIOT – no Chagossians in the Chagos. It then imposed immigration restrictions. Someone from Diego Garcia can’t go there even on a tourist visa. It also tried to declare the entire archipelago a marine protected area but that was shot down by an international tribunal.
Meanwhile the relocated Chagossians on Mauritius became an instant underclass. Chagossian Mylene Augustin wrote in the Guardian: “We lived in a slum and were looked down upon by local people because we had nothing.” Mauritians didn’t need or want some nobodies from a nothing atoll in a nowhere archipelago.
The feeling was mutual – the Chagossians didn’t want to be there. Mylene Augustin stated that if they were given the green light, “my family and I will go back to the Chagos Islands the very next day”. As far as both the Chagossians and Mauritians were concerned, this situation was lose-lose. What to do?
Mauritius has been an independent country for 50 years and a member in good standing of the United Nations. The Chagos Archipelago was still officially British (BIOT) even though almost all its current occupants are US military. So Mauritius took Britain to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2018.
The Court heard arguments whether Britain broke international law when it separated off the Chagos before granting Mauritius its independence, and a year later leased Diego Garcia to the Americans – 50 years rent-free with a 20-year extension to 2036.
Well, it took a while, but the UK finally has agreed to turn over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. I quote my local source of news, The East African: “British Prime Minister Keir Starmer … signed an agreement transferring sovereignty of the Chagos to Mauritius. The deal formally cedes British control of the Chagos Archipelago to the Mauritanian government.”
Ownership returned
The headline of the story reads: “Britain signs deal to transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, US welcomes the ‘historic deal’.” Darn right they do. Back to the story.
“Under terms of the agreement, Mauritius will lease the Diego Garcia military base back to Britain and the United States. The terms of the agreement remain ‘highly classified’. Starmer noted that failure to reach a settlement could have led Mauritius to pursue further legal action at international courts, where Britain was likely to lose.”
Mauritius is happy. Britain is happy. The US military is happy. Everyone is happy except the Chagossians. An 80-year-old Chagossian on Mauritius told a BBC correspondent that he wanted to die and be buried on Diego Garcia. Apparently, that’s not gonna happen.
