Do The Right Thing: Give Back The Chagos Islands
The UK has not, to put it mildly, always done the right thing.
Between 1967 and 1973, the UK evicted the people of the Chagos Islands to allow the US to build a military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the archipelago of 60 small islands. At the time, the population was over 1,000 people.
The UK promised that the islands would be returned once they were no longer needed for security purposes and made a 50 year agreement with the US over the islands, which has since expired. However, in 2010 the UK designated an area twice the size of Great Britain as the Chagos Marine Protected Area. A leaked diplomatic cable from 2009 showed that it was designed, at least in part, to try to put to bed any resettlement discussions. In 2015 the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the reserve broke international law. The UK ignored this ruling.
In February 2019 the International Courts of Justice ruled that the UK infringed on the rights of self-determination of the Chagos Islanders and that it should cede its control of the islands back to Mauritius. The UN General Assembly voted on a resolution to welcome this ruling in May 2019 and to demand the UK’s unconditional withdrawal of the administration of the islands. The resolution passed 116 to 6 in favour. The UK government’s response to this overwhelming verdict from our friends and allies? It ignored this ruling and has not ceded control of the islands.
The legal story is, as you can imagine, a great deal more extensive and complicated than this, and has lasted a lot longer than the examples I cite. What is crystal clear to understand who is right and what the UK’s responsibilities are.
The UK’s decision to defy international law is nothing new and is deplorable. Not only does it completely ignore and disrespect the self-determination of the Chagos Islanders (which will presumably erode the self-determination arguments for Gibraltar and The Falklands), it also makes a laughing stock of claims that the UK is a force for good in the world and promotes the rule of law. How on earth can we expect others to abide by international law if we don’t?
We should be better than that and we can be better than that. As Sam from the excellent podcast Extremities said in his most recent podcast: “History isn’t something that happened, it is something that’s happening all the time”.
Admittedly, this is in an episode about St Helena, but the point about history stands. This is 2019 and Britain is writing history with the actions it takes. The UK government could begin to write a history of the UK respecting and upholding international law. This is a perspective that is currently laughable to many former British colonies for reasons such as this.
I hope that you join the growing number of people who will write to their local MPs and call on the UK government to do the moral, legal and responsible thing: respect international law and give the Chagos Islands back to the islanders.
