Editors at National Review Online criticize a deal that could have a negative impact for the American military.
A late 19th-century British historian once wrote that the country had acquired its empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” That’s a subtler phrase than it sounds, but, however it is interpreted, it doesn’t describe Britain’s Labour government plan to hand over the Chagos Archipelago, a last scrap of empire, to Mauritius some 1,300 miles away.
The Chagos Islands and Mauritius, of which it was once a “dependency,” were British since things went wrong for Napoleon. In 1965, the archipelago became a separate colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. The following year, the U.K. agreed that Diego Garcia, the largest Chagos island, should become the site of a major, primarily American, military base. In a shabby episode, the Chagossians (of whom there were about a thousand on the island) were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Another thousand living elsewhere were not allowed home.
Mauritius, independent since 1968, has long demanded the “return” of the Chagos Islands, to which it had only been attached as a matter of administrative convenience. …
… The Chagossians (who now number about 10,000), many of whom now live in the U.K., found themselves at the wrong end of another deal over which they had no say. Many have little affection for Mauritius (some would prefer self-determination), where they had often been marginalized. …
… Mauritius has agreed not [to] lease any other Chagos islands to anyone else, but given its increasingly close relationship with China, that’s at best tepid comfort. There would be nothing to stop the Chinese maintaining some sort of presence on land (albeit short of a lease) or at sea disturbingly close to Diego Garcia.
Diego Garcia matters. It is a key depot in a strategically valuable location, an ideal jumping-off point for operations in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia and well situated for keeping an eye (or more) on various potential maritime choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz.
