India backs Mauritius' claim to Chagos Islands: What is the dispute with UK?

“I would like to again assure you today that on the issue of Chagos, India will continue its consistent support to Mauritius in line with its principal stand on decolonisation and support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations.”

With this statement, External Affairs Minister S Jaishnkar on Tuesday (July 16) reaffirmed India’s support for Mauritius in the sovereignty dispute with the United Kingdom over the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The external affairs minister is on a two-day visit to the country — one of his first bilateral engagements since he reassumed charge of the ministry last month.

However, what exactly is the Chagos Islands dispute about? What is the UK’s role in it? We explore all of it.

About the Chagos Islands

The Chagos Islands or the Chagos Archipelago is a group of seven atolls comprising more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean about 500 kilometres south of the Maldives. The Chagos Archipelago spreads out across 250,000 square miles, an area the size of Texas; taken together, the islands have a landmass the size of Manhattan.

A report in The Atlantic states that the islands were chanced upon by Portuguese navigators in the 16th Century. They mapped the islands and gave some of them the names that they retain even today. The Dutch came next; however, they didn’t stay.

Diego Garcia, largest island in the Chagos archipelago and site of a major United States military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean leased from Britain in 1966. File image/Reuters

Later, it came into the possession of France as well as Mauritius and Réunion. The French gave names to more of the islands. They imported enslaved workers from Madagascar and Mozambique, and later brought workers from southern India, to labour in the coconut plantations. After the defeat of Napoleon, Great Britain acquired Chagos and Mauritius.

Since 1971, only the atoll of Diego Garcia has been inhabited; it serves as a military base to the US and houses 2,500 American-military personnel and temporary foreign workers, mostly Filipino.

Chagos dispute between UK and Mauritius

Mauritius has for decades claimed sovereignty over the archipelago, arguing that it has been a part of its territory since at least the 18th Century, till the United Kingdom broke the archipelago away from Mauritius in 1965 and the islands of Aldabra, Farquhar, and Desroches from the Seychelles in the region to form the British Indian Ocean Territory. In June 1976, after the Seychelles gained independence from the United Kingdom, the islands of Aldabra, Farquhar, and Desroches were returned by the UK.

It was during this time that the UK forcibly removed thousands of Chagossians from their homelands and sent them more than 1,600km (1,000 miles) away to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they faced extreme poverty and discrimination.

After Mauritius gained independence from the UK in 1968, the UK refused to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius claiming that the island was required to “accommodate the United States’ desire to use certain islands in the Indian Ocean for defence purposes”.

As per a report by The Print, the UK threatened Mauritius that it would not grant it independence, lest they conceded to the demand of Chagos. And it seems that it worked with then Premier of Mauritius Seewoosagur Ramgoolam conceding.

Then in 1980, Ramgoolam, as the then-prime minister, asked for the territory to be restored to Mauritius at the United Nations General Assembly.

Years and years of dispute

The dispute between the two continued for decades. However, it was in 2015 that Mauritius initiated legal proceedings in these matters against the United Kingdom in the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in the Netherlands.

In the 2015 matter, the Permanent Court of Arbitration came down heavily against the UK, stating that London had “failed to give due regard to Mauritius’ rights” and declared that the UK had breached its obligations under the (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea).” The ruling also called out the UK for deliberately creating a marine protected area in the waters surrounding Chagos Islands in 2010.

Chagossian Islanders and their supporters arrive at the Court of Appeal in central London in 2007. The two sides have been disputing over the islands for years, but no outcome has been achieved. File image/AFP

However, nothing changed after the ruling and successive Mauritian governments continued negotiations with the UK government, also pursuing legal avenues. In 2019, the matter reached the UN’s highest court of justice — the International Court of Justice. Port Louis had argued that it had been coerced into giving the islands to the UK as part of colonial occupation of the country, a move, it stated, that was in breach of UN resolution 1514 that was passed in 1960, which specifically banned the breakup of colonies before independence, reported the Indian Express.

The ICJ then ruled in its favour, ordering the UK to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible”. However, the United Kingdom Foreign Office said that the ICJ ruling was “an advisory opinion, not a judgment” and claimed that “the defence facilities on the British Indian Ocean Territory help to protect people here in Britain and around the world from terrorist threats, organised crime and piracy.”

In November 2019, after Britain missed the six-month deadline to hand over Chagos, Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth said the UK was now an illegal colonial occupier.

He followed it up by saying that the UK and US lectured countries “to respect human rights, but they are champions of double talk”. “They are hypocrites. Shame on them when they talk about human rights and respect,” he added.

In the same year, the United Nations General Assembly also backed a motion condemning Britain’s occupation of the remote Chagos Islands. While the US, Hungary, Israel, Australia and the Maldives backed the UK in the vote, 56 countries abstained, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland and Romania. Other European allies including Austria, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland voted for the UK to relinquish sovereignty.

UK speaks

Britain has continuously defended its occupation of the Chagos Islands, arguing that “Mauritius has never held sovereignty over the archipelago and we do not recognise its claim.”

And as recently as January this year, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, ruled out the resettlement of former inhabitants of the Chagos Islands. He suggested that a return to the islands was now “not possible” for Chagossians who were forcibly displaced by the British government in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is left to be seen if the newly-elected Labour Party led by Keir Starmer changes its stance on the Islands.

With inputs from agencies