Who lost the Chagos?

Last week we looked at the contest for the Conservative leadership in Britain, but it would be remiss not to highlight a particular issue that it’s raised, because it’s one that we’ve talked about here before: the sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory. (You can read my last report on it here, from a couple of years ago, and a longer story from 2021 here.)

Briefly, the Chagos, which are strategically important due to the presence of a major American base on Diego Garcia, have been disputed for many years between Britain and Mauritius. In 2019 the International Court of Justice ruled in favor of the Mauritian claim, and later that year the United Nations general assembly called on Britain to give up the islands by a majority of 116 to six, with Australia, Israel and the US joining Britain in the minority.

Boris Johnson was prime minister at the time, and showed no inclination to compromise on British sovereignty. But under his successor, Liz Truss, it was decided to open negotiations with Mauritius, as announced in November 2022 by the then foreign secretary James Cleverly – the same James Cleverly who has just been eliminated from the Tory leadership contest.

Two years later, the negotiations have borne fruit. Earlier this month prime minister Keir Starmer and his Mauritian counterpart, Pravind Jugnauth, released a statement committing them to a treaty that “will agree that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia,” with a reservation to protect the lease of the US base for 99 years. Both leaders proclaimed that they had negotiated “in a constructive and respectful manner, as equal sovereign States, on the basis of international law.”

And this, of course, fitted much too well into a familiar narrative – “Labour sells out national interest” – for the Tories to be able to resist, thus setting off an escalating blame game. Cleverly blamed Labour for the deal; leadership rival Tom Tugendhat blamed Cleverly; Cleverly then blamed Truss, who in turn blamed Johnson. And all of them denied that they would ever have given up British sovereignty.

It’s rather revealing that different varieties of Conservatives all feel that adherence to international law is something they need to apologise for. Even Labour seemed reluctant to draw attention to that side of it, saying that they had “inherited a legal car crash” from their opponents. Nonetheless, the result is that the rule of law has been vindicated, and victories of that sort are sufficiently rare these days to be worth celebrating.

The Chagos islanders, having been forcibly removed by Britain in the 1970s, have been promised a resettlement program, although not to Diego Garcia itself. Some of them object, however, that their fate has again been determined without consultation, and they seem to have little enthusiasm for becoming part of Mauritius.

Personally, I find the Mauritian claim less than convincing. Although the archipelago was governed from Mauritius under both French and British colonial administration, it is more than 2,000km away (the Maldives are much closer) and never seems to have been an integral part of it. And the prohibition on ever dividing colonial territories strikes me as arbitrary.

But that’s why we have courts, to adjudicate these questions, and if the islanders now want to struggle with Mauritius for self-determination they can do so. Britain for once has done the right thing, and by the time the Conservatives get back into power it will be too late to do anything about it.