The long-forgotten history of the Chagos Islands
White sand beach on a Chagos Atoll, Indian Ocean. (iStock)
Francis Pike
Now that Sir Keir Starmer has unilaterally decided to give up British ownership of the Chagos Islands, the last vestige of our imperial inheritance in the Indian Ocean, it seems an appropriate moment to look back at the long-forgotten history of this remote possession. Mauritius will be the happy recipient of the Chagos Archipelago, which consist of some 60 islands, mainly low-lying atolls and their lagoons. The Chagos Islands were ruled under Mauritius’s mantle until 1968.
Today Mauritius is largely known as a destination for the British middle class who cannot bear the thought of a winter without a week or two’s break on an island on which they can broil under a tropical sun. Mauritius has become the poor man’s Barbados. Personally, like the Dutch who took possession of the island in the 16th century, I have always viewed Mauritius as a hellhole; to me it ranks with Kuwait, or, closer to home, Swindon, as the least desirable places I have ever visited.
In a past life as a financier, I used to go to Mauritius two or three times a year to attend board meetings of ‘offshore’ companies. These were set up as conduits for investment into India with which Mauritius has favourable tax arrangements. Mauritius’s financial industry based in Port Louis (named after Louis XV) is an important component of the country’s wealth, albeit dwarfed by tourism and sugar cane.
It is a country whose coasts are pockmarked by ghastly anodyne resort hotels. Inland the country is largely invisible; with a virtual monoculture of sugarcane, a plant which can grow up to seven metres, driving around the Mauritius is a singularly depressing experience. Interspersed with plantations are the shabby shanty towns or villages in which the field workers live. In desperation I used to hire big-game fishing boats with instructions to go so far out to sea that Mauritius disappeared. A pack of beer, a good book and a sea breeze were a far better alternative to staying on land. These idylls came to an end when we caught a marlin. Seeing this magnificent beast being horribly clubbed to death with baseball bats ended my escape-from-Mauritius strategy.
Mauritius has history when it comes to clubbing. Although the uninhabited island, some 600 miles to the east of Madagascar in the southern Indian Ocean, was first discovered by Arab sailors in the 10th century and then by the Portuguese 500 years later, it was the Dutch in 1598 who first sought to colonise it. They named it after Prince Maurice van Nassau, the stadtholder (governor) of Holland. The colony, which imported Malagasy slaves to grow cane, failed because of disease and starvation. Apart from the name of the island the only lasting mark left by the Dutch was their clubbing to extinction the huge flightless bird, the dodo; hence the popular alliterative expression ‘as dead as a dodo’.
France made a better fist of colonisation when it occupied again-deserted Mauritius in 1715. The island became an important stop-off point for the trading routes between France and its imperial interests centred around Pondicherry and the southeast coast of India.
The French East India Company vied with Britain for the lucrative trade with the subcontinent and competed for control of central southern India with the British, notably Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) in the Maratha Wars. By his own testimony Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Assaye (1803) against French trained Maratha infantry, ranked higher than the Battle of Waterloo as his greatest military achievement. He described it as the battle with ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’.
Some seven years after the Battle of Assaye Britain wrested control of Mauritius from the French. Napoleon had used the island as a base to prey on British merchantmen. It was a conquest which started with the worst defeat of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In August 1810 four British ships were lost in an engagement with the French at Grand Port on the east coast of Mauritius. However, in December a reinforced squadron under Admiral Albemarle Bertie avenged Britain’s earlier defeat and took control of the island.
By this time the Mauritius had become deeply Francophile. Mauritius was populated by slaves brought by Arab traders from the Africa’s Swahili east coast, Madagascar and Zanzibar as well as indentured Indians from Pondicherry; later Chinese traders arrived and settled on the island. A ruling cast of Frenchman ruled this diverse crowd and planted its language as well as spawning a Creole version. Catholicism was not transplanted, however, and the majority religion today remains Hindu. Because of a shortage of women, legend has it that the bordels of Marseilles were emptied and shipped to Mauritius.
Thereafter Britain ruled with a light touch and not only kept Mauritius’s Dutch name but maintained its French and Creole languages. The difference with France’s similarly sized neighbouring island of La Réunion or officially, the Le Département de la Réunion, could not be more marked. While Réunion remains under direct French rule, Mauritius was given independence by Britain in 1968. Queen Elizabeth II continued to be queen there until 1992 when Mauritius became a republic.
From 1810 Britain ruled Mauritius as part of a collective of island trophies that it picked up in its imperial progress; these included Rodrigues, Agalega, St. Brandon, the Chagos Islands and the Seychelles. The latter declared independence in 1976. Rodrigues and Agalega were retained as part of Mauritius albeit with a special autonomous status. However, the Chagos Islands were split out from Mauritius in 1968 by the Labour government of Harold Wilson. They were given the lugubrious new name of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). As compensation Britain paid the Mauritian government £3m.
Wilson’s government then proceeded to expel an estimated 2,000 native Chagossians who were largely employed as plantation workers and fishermen. Largely of slave stock from Africa and Asia, the Chagossians, a French-Creole speaking race, moved either to Mauritius or to Crawley in West Sussex. The Chargossian diaspora now numbers 10,000 people. To persuade them to move, the British government restricted their access to food and medicine. In another particularly nasty strategy, the British authorities shot their dogs. The Chagos Islands’ marginally profitable coconut plantations were shut down. The ‘deracination’ as the Chagossians refer to Wilson’s brutal, almost genocidal expulsion was done to allow Britain to give a lease to the United States to operate an air force base on Diego Garcia, the largest atoll in the Chagos Archipelago.
Today Diego Garcia has a population of 4,200 people almost entirely employed to maintain and operate the US naval base. Pristine beaches apart, it is a desultory spot. Apart from the officers’ club on a scenic promontory there is just one restaurant, implausibly named Peacemaker Inn, which, judging from photographs, offers inedible-looking food. A couple of bars, the Yacht Club and the Brit Club offer alcoholic relief for the tedium of life on the atoll. The importance of Diego Garcia, which is likely to be the subject of a 99-year lease to the US as part of the handover to Mauritius, is that it is within range as a supply and refuelling base for operations in Africa and the Middle East.
The sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago has long been a subject of disputes between Britain and Mauritius. Despite selling the Chagos Islands, Mauritius, which since independence has been largely dominated by left wing parties such as the Mauritian Socialist party (PSM) and the even more extreme Mauritian Militant Movement (MMM), has sought to reclaim them. Their politicians have skilfully played the left-leaning, anti-western international institutions to further their cause.
The ICJ (International Court of Justice) for example issued a non-binding judgement in 2019 that Britain ‘has an obligation to end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible.’ Similarly, in 2021, the United Nations International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, ruled that the UK had ‘no sovereignty over the Chagos Islands’. Sir Keir decision to ‘give back’ the islands to Mauritius is no doubt partly influenced by his deference to these august liberal institutions.
It is the Chagos Island’s maritime importance that will be much discussed. In the dying days of Gordon Brown’s time in office, foreign secretary David Miliband rushed through the creation of a marine reserve covering the Chagos Archipelago’s 250,000 square miles, an area more than twice the size of the UK.
On 1 April, 2010, on the last day before the dissolution of parliament, Miliband instructed the commissioner of the British Indian Ocean Territory to establish a marine protected area. It was widely thought that he had given into pressure from conservations groups. Miliband won plaudits from the international ‘green’ lobby.
In his announcement Miliband boasted:
Its [the marine reserve] creation is a major step forward for protecting the oceans, not just around BIOT itself, but also throughout the world. This measure is a further demonstration of how the UK takes its international environmental responsibilities seriously… I have taken the decision to create this marine reserve following a full consultation, and careful consideration of the many issues and interests involved.
Wikileaks information supplied by Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (formerly Bradley Edward Manning) suggests that Miliband was lying. Leaked US embassy correspondence indicates that the motive for the marine protection area was to add a further obstacle to Chagossians ever returning to their homeland. In a cable sent by the American Embassy in London a British foreign office official is quoted as saying that ‘establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the [Chagos] archipelago’s former residents.’
Miliband also said that he made the decision after ‘careful consideration’ and ‘full consultation’. He did not. As Sabrina Jean, chairwoman of the Chagos Refugees Group said at the time: ‘The consultation was a sham. We Chagossians we will continue our fight to return back home.’ Similarly in a memo sent the day before Miliband’s announcement, Andrew Allen, head of Southern Oceans at the Foreign Office said that his minister’s approach ‘risks deciding (and being seen to decide) policy on the hoof for political timetabling reasons rather than on the basis of expert advice and public consultation.’
At first glance Sir Keir’s yielding of the Chagos Island’s sovereignty appears an instinctive genuflection to the anti-western liberal legal establishment. However, there are legitimate concerns over this seemingly ‘moral’ decision.
Firstly, from a democratic point of view, has the Chagossian diaspora agreed that it should now come under the governance of Mauritius? After all the distance between Port Louis and Diego Garcia is over 1,300 miles – rather like handing over the Shetland Islands to the government of Jersey. There seems little logic to the handing over of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius which is further distant that the Seychelles, the Maldives, Sri Lanka or even India.
There are environment concerns too. Will the government of Mauritius seek to overturn the marine conservation area? And will the area be exploited for its minerals and fish? Mauritius’s environmental record is poor.
Even more importantly, have the geopolitical implications of the move been considered? As I have written in previous pieces for The Spectator, Xi Jinping, like Napoleon before him, sees control of the Indian Ocean an important geopolitical objective. China wants secure trade routes to the oilfields of the middle east. Both Sri Lanka and Mauritius have been targeted as part of Xi Jinping’s ‘belt and road’. Does it make sense for Britain to potentially yield the West’s domination of the Indian Ocean to China?
Rather like the Miliband’s marine protection decision in 2010, Keir Starmer’s decision to give up British sovereignty in the Indian Ocean appears hasty and ill-considered. But as with Miliband in 2010 there may be ulterior political motives. The return of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius may simply be a ploy to take the corruption of ‘free gear’ Keir off the front pages.
The Spectator