Return of Chagos Islands brings an end to shameful colonial episode

This was the predictably doolally reaction from some self-styled British patriots to the news that the UK Government has finally agreed to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius last week.

People who couldn’t find these islands on a map have quickly acquired strong views on the topic. There have been ­immediate demands for “guarantees that no other British overseas territories would be signed away under Labour”, suggestions Sir Keir Starmer can’t be trusted not to “hand back” Northern Ireland to the Republic, and yet another outbreak of misplaced ­imperial nostalgia about defending Britain’s “place in the world”.

Last week, “Britain’s place in the world” meant keeping hold of all outlying islands which global demands for decolonisation in the 1960s didn’t manage to wrest from the British Empire. Brexit Britain seems particularly susceptible to the onset of this kind of acute psychic episode.

Former ­United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously observed in the 1960s that “Great Britain has lost an ­empire but has not yet found a role”. Not much seems to have changed. For some of the more easily triggered figures on the British right – they’re apparently still ­experiencing the process of losing the ­empire and are still smarting from the sense of political diminution it brings.

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One of the Conservative Party’s ­ugliest instincts is how freely they feel able to ­attack the patriotism of their opponents. And lo and behold, this was precisely the ­allegation immediately levelled at the ­Labour ­government by James ­Cleverly when the story broke, suggesting ­Starmer had reneged on his promise to be ­“patriotic”.

“Weak, weak, weak!” Cleverly ­thundered. That suggestion began to wilt in the sun minutes later, after alert people pointed out that the Tory leadership contender had himself kicked off the negotiations with Mauritius when he was Foreign Secretary in the last government.

But the rhetorical fire has proven ­catching. For Robert Jenrick, the decision was a “dangerous capitulation”. Suella Braverman dubbed it “a dark day for our country’s sovereignty” and characterised the David Lammy as “China’s useful ­idiot”. Boris Johnson – who has ­somehow barrelled his way back into the media spotlight – managed to frame it as an example of “political correctness” gone mad. The optical illusions they’re trying to work here aren’t exactly subtle.

In the press, the decision has been ­further criticised on the basis that it might destroy the islands’ costal reefs, to lightly disguised suggestions in the ­Express that Sir Keir must have sold ­British ­sovereignty over the islands out as a bung for his old friend and colleague Professor Phillipe Sands KC who has played a leading role in the international litigation about the status of the archipelago. Who knew ­Britain’s feral press cared so much about the fishy lifeforms of the Indian Ocean?

Chagos Islanders have expressed dismay at not being consulted about the dealBut perhaps most significantly, and for different reasons entirely, the Chagossian islanders themselves have also expressed a sense of betrayal about the deal, which was cut between governments, behind closed doors, without their involvement. Experience has taught them the hard way the truth of the old slogan that nothing about us without us is likely to be for us.

Their experience has been conspicuously absent from much of the coverage of the decision this week, and it should not be. What the British state did to around 2000 Chagos islanders is the very ­definition of perfidious Albion at work, and the ­cynical indifference and flexible relationship with truth which raison d’état encourages. You can understand why displaced Chagossians might think Britain is now washing its hands of them, before justice is served, before a meaningful restitution is made.

Because you can’t really understand this decision without understanding the historical context, and it casts this ­country in a profoundly shabby light.

The Chagos archipelago lies in the ­middle of the Indian Ocean. It is made up of a series of low-lying coral ­atolls, lying approximately 2200 miles east of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, just over 1000 miles south of India and around 800 miles away from Mauritius ­itself. It is more than 5800 miles south east of London.

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The UK was ceded the territories by the French in 1814. Historically, the ­islands were administered as part of ­Britain’s Mauritius colony. But on ­November 8, 1965, the UK discreetly dismembered the island range from ­Mauritius, and folded it into a new ­colony, which it dubbed the British ­Indian Ocean Territory.

The UK Government used the royal ­prerogative – effectively the Queen’s ­residual legal authority – to do all this with minimal resort to democratic ­processes or potentially embarrassing ­publicity. An Order in Council, passed without ­parliamentary knowledge or ­authority, ­established what was ­effectively a new viceroy for this new colony, who was ­given expansive legal powers over the ­people that lived there.

IN truth, this official had one mission: to exile the indigenous population from its homeland to make way for exclusive American military occupation of this ­strategic site. You may recognise the name of the base they eventually ­established, once the inconvenient locals had been duped or compelled into leaving their homes: Diego Garcia.

This conspiracy to strip the island of its population took different forms. To please the Americans, to avoid ­diplomatic ­embarrassment, and to present the ­strategic base of Diego Garcia to them bereft of inconvenient human beings, British officials mobilised a range of bad faith strategies to pretend Chagos has no permanent population, but was instead sparsely populated by transient workers who could be compelled to leave to make way for the US Marine Corps.

This was described in nakedly ­dishonest terms by Foreign Office ­officials as ­“maintaining the fiction that the ­inhabitants of Chagos are not a ­permanent or semi-permanent ­population.”

This was a lie, and known to be a lie, by the British civil servants and politicians who promoted it.

Another memo from the Foreign Office referred the locals the British state were determined to displace “Tarzans and Man Fridays” whose continued presence on the islands put the special relationship at risk. You don’t need to search far for the racial undertones here. Another senior ­official wrote:

“We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a ­Committee (the Status of Women Committee does not cover the rights of Birds).”

That chortling memos like this were changing hands as civil servants ­plotted the covert elimination of hundreds of ­people from their generational homes is disgraceful, but it is wholly in ­keeping with what we know about official ­attitudes.

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An Immigration Ordinance was quietly made and minimally published, ­depriving the Chagossian islanders of any right to remain or return to the islands. Some were put on boats for Mauritius by British officials without a penny in their pockets and no stable accommodation awaiting them. Others only discovered their newly exiled state after they travelled to ­Mauritius for essential medical care, and were told they couldn’t board the boat back.

As Lord Hoffman observed in ­a ­subsequent court case about the ­legality of expelling the natives – the ­judges ­ultimately sided with the ­British ­government – “the removal and ­resettlement of the Chagossians was ­accomplished with a callous disregard of their interests. For the most part, the community was left to fend for itself in the slums of Port Louis. The reasons were to some extent the usual combination of bureaucracy and Treasury parsimony but very largely the government’s refusal to acknowledge that there was any indigenous population for which the United Kingdom had a responsibility.”

In February 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory ­opinion on the legal consequences of this dismemberment. They concluded that the cynical detachment of the Chagos ­Islands from Mauritius to serve the UK’s ­diplomatic interests was unlawful, flying in the face of basic principles of decolonisation, including the requirement for ­occupying powers to respect the territorial integrity of states they’re pulling out of.

The world court also held that the UK has “an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos ­Archipelago as rapidly as possible”. The Labour ­government’s decision finally honours that obligation.

Amid all the political blowback this ­decision has received from the ­Pasionarias of British Patriotism, much of the ­reaction has been bereft of any ­reflection on the gross injustice ­successive ­governments’ claims of British sovereignty have already visited on the Chagos islands and the people who used to call them home. ­Ignorance is bliss, particularly if you are determined to defend the indefensible.