The Chagos Islands Were Never Britain’s to Give Away

Mark Curtis says Nigel Farage and the Conservatives are having a meltdown about Britain “giving up sovereignty” of illegally occupied land.

By Mark Curtis
Declassified UK

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy will  this weekend in Munich meet his new U.S. counterpart, Marco Rubio, to rescue Labour’s plan for the joint U.K.-U.S. military base on the Chagos Islands.

The Trump administration appears to be challenging the U.K. government’s deal to permit Mauritius to take up sovereignty over the Indian Ocean islands. 

Last October, Keir Starmer’s government announced an agreement with Mauritius whereby the U.K. would keep operating the military base on the largest island in the Chagos group, Diego Garcia, but that Mauritius would have sovereignty.

Ever since, a number of prominent Conservative and Reform MPs in Britain have become thoroughly incensed at the government. They have put down over 100 written questions in Parliament about the plan in the last four months.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel laments that the U.K. is “to give away a key strategic asset in the Indian Ocean ending more than 200 years of British sovereignty”. 

Two former defence ministers have slammed the deal, with both Andrew Murrison and James Cartlidge calling it the Chagos “surrender”. 

Cartlidge has also made the extraordinary comment that, given the importance of the base to the U.S., “anything that damages its defence posture… also undermines our national security”.

Right to Return

Yet the most scandalous aspect of the proposed deal is that Britain and the U.S. will continue to operate the military base at all, and deprive the Chagossians of being able to return to Diego Garcia.

Britain forced the population off the islands in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the base.

The U.K.’s deal with Mauritius would allow Britain to lease the base for 99 years, and then to renew it after. 

The Chagossians will be allowed the possibility of resettling only on the smaller, outlying islands and to “visit” Diego Garcia, presumably under tight control given the U.K.-U.S. military presence there dominates the tiny territory.

Ninety-nine years and more isn’t enough for some Tories. Lord Bellingham, a former foreign minister, says the mere 99-year lease “will only encourage the Chinese” and therefore the U.K. should “go for a sovereign base island in perpetuity”.

International Law

These MPs are displaying the same level of commitment to international law as they have done over Gaza. 

In 2017, states at the United Nations voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion on the status of the islands. In February 2019, the Court concluded that Britain had violated international law when it created the “British Indian Ocean Territory” (BIOT) in 1965. 

The ICJ stated that “as a result of the Chagos Archipelago’s unlawful detachment and its incorporation into a new colony, known as the BIOT, the process of decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when Mauritius acceded to independence in 1968”.

The ICJ added that the U.K.’s administration of the Chagos Archipelago “constitutes a wrongful act entailing the international responsibility of that State”. It stated the U.K. should bring its control of the territory to an end “as rapidly as possible”.

Two years later, in 2021, the maritime law tribunal of the U.N. also ruled that Britain has no sovereignty over the islands. 

Nigel Farage recently told Parliament that his allies in the then incoming Trump administration “cannot understand why we would surrender the sovereignty of the islands on an advisory judgment from a pretty obscure court”.

In fact, the only basis to Britain’s claim to the islands is that it acquired them after the Napoleonic wars in 1814 — and never let go of them despite decades of opposition from most countries in the world. 

Preemptive Strike

The reason the government has made this deal with Mauritius now is crystal clear — Whitehall has been worried that international legal bodies would in future deliver even tougher judgements on Britain’s unlawful control of the islands.

Foreign minister Baroness Jenny Chapman told Parliament last month that she feared “future rulings” against the U.K. and stated: “We believe that we are in a stronger position to negotiate ahead of a binding ruling than we would be waiting for one.”

Her Foreign Office ministerial colleague Stephen Doughty has been just as frank. He has said that the U.K.’s operation of the base was threatened because “courts were reaching judgments” and that “a legally binding decision against the U.K. seemed inevitable”. 

This is why the government now says that “for the first time in 50 years, the base will be undisputed and legally secure”.

Put another way, Whitehall has known for decades it has been operating unlawfully. Chapman told MPs in Parliament unequivocally last month that the move “to separate the colony” in the 1960s was “not allowable under international law.” 

“That is why we have ended up where we have”, she added.

It will again be the people of the Chagos Islands who will likely remain the main losers from whatever agreement emerges between Labour and Donald Trump.

Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.

This article is from Declassified UK.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.