Today, we’ve landed in Mauritius, a small island nation (similar size to Luxembourg) located in the Indian Ocean roughly 200 km Northeast of Réunion.
Mauritius is best known for its beautiful white beaches, lush jungles, sugarcane plantations and being the home of the ill-fated dodo. Today though, we’re skipping the dodo jokes and imaginary beach holiday as I’m going to wade into a thorny geopolitical issue.
Along this journey, I’ve learned quite a lot about how badly my own country, the UK has behaved in the past. Whether that’s colonising countries, enslaving populations or pillaging resources for profit. Most of these events did however occur hundreds of years ago. Somehow, this (maybe in my mind at least) softens the shock of some of these acts. The UK nowadays portrays itself as a global leader in human rights and democracy and is more often than not now on the right side of history. Well provided we forget about Brexit, anything to do with fishing, or its treatment of the Windrush Generation.
That’s why I find the UK’s nefarious behaviour in the events surrounding Mauritius’s independence utterly shocking.
UK and Mauritius have a long-standing dispute about who owns the Chagos Archipelago. At first, this sounds pretty standard - many countries have territorial disputes. Mauritius was previously a British colony (and a French, and Portuguese colony before that). In this case, shortly before Mauritius became independent the UK sliced off the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius to form British Indian Ocean Territory. It’s not really independence if you decide to carve off a significant part of a countries territory before claiming it is “independent”. Understandably, Mauritius has never been too keen on this arrangement.
If appropriating large swathes of Mauritian territory this wasn’t dastardly enough, the UK forcibly expelled up to 2000 islanders from the Chagos Archipelago in the 1970s. Why would the UK expel the entire population from their own island you might ask. Well so that the island of Diego Garcia, could be leased to the US and be developed into a military base. Right in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago is the perfect place for a strategic military base.
Despite losing multiple legal battles in the UN court, the UK is still refusing to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, or allow its former residents to return to their rightful home. I suspect that as long as Diego Garcia remains strategically important to the US, nothing will change.