A deal for Chagos, not for the Chagossians
The Chagos agreement resolves a legal dispute while leaving the original victims behind
Now that a deal on the Chagos Islands has been concluded, the British government speaks as if a long and awkward problem has finally been tidied away. Sovereignty will pass to Mauritius. The military base on Diego Garcia will continue under lease. Ministers talk of international law, partnership, and closing a chapter of history. It is remote from the disorderly lives of the people whose history is supposedly being settled.
Yet before the ink is dry on the agreement the wider realities intrude. The Trump administration has warned that the deal is a strategic mistake. Some critics argue it weakens Western security; others insist it is the only way to safeguard the base in the long term. What was presented as a tidy act of decolonisation begins to look, once again, like a decision about military convenience.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Britain expelled the entire population of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean to make way for a United States air and naval base. Families who had lived there for generations were loaded onto ships and deposited in Mauritius and the Seychelles, often with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Officials described them as “contract workers” and “transients”, phrases chosen not because they were accurate but because they were useful. If the islanders were not a real people, then no real injustice had occurred.
For decades afterwards, the British state behaved in a familiar way when confronted with inconvenient victims: it delayed, denied, and spoke in a bureaucratic language designed to obscure reality. Resettlement was deemed “impractical”. Compensation was “final”. Legal defeats were treated as administrative nuisances. Meanwhile, the wretched Chagossians remained scattered and dependent on the goodwill of other countries that had not expelled them.
Now the vocabulary has shifted again. The rhetoric of empire has been replaced by the vocabulary of decolonisation. Among its supporters, the British government is said to be “respecting international rulings” and “returning the islands”. On paper it sounds like an overdue settling of accounts. But there is something curiously bloodless about a settlement that resolves a dispute between governments while leaving the original victims in much the same limbo as before.
The deal treats Chagos primarily as territory. Yet the central fact about Chagos is not who owns the land, but what was done to the people who lived on it. Changing the flag does not, by itself, absolve the crimes of the past.
Indeed, there is a risk that the transfer makes justice even less likely. Once sovereignty passes to Mauritius, Britain can now disclaim responsibility. Future problems can be treated as matters for the new sovereign. Apologies, already delivered in cautious instalments over the years, acquire the comforting air of closure. The crimes of the past are written off.
To argue that Britain should have kept Chagos while restoring the islanders’ rights is not to defend empire. It is to insist that the state which expelled them should bear the cost of putting that wrong right. In practical terms justice would have meant funded resettlement for those who wished to return, serious compensation for decades of exile, and political autonomy for a revived Chagossian community.
Instead, Britain has opted for a convenient posture: relinquish sovereignty, retain strategic access, and issue vague expressions of regret. The military base stays, the geopolitical benefits remain, and the burden of direct rule disappears. The settlement may satisfy lawyers and diplomats, but it leaves the moral arithmetic largely unchanged.
There are, of course, those — mainly conservative writers — who insist that Britain must keep Chagos under any circumstances. They have shown little interest in the welfare of the islanders, preferring instead to cling to a familiar imperial nostalgia. For them, the islands are less a homeland than a symbol that Britain “punches above its weight”. But celebrating the handover as a triumph of international law sidesteps the fact that almost nothing has been done to rebuild a society the British deliberately dismantled.
One of the quiet ironies of the affair is that Britain’s legal vulnerability arose from its own decision to remove the population. Had the Chagossians been allowed to remain, their wishes would be central to any settlement, as they are in the Falklands or Gibraltar. Instead, the absence Britain created is treated as evidence that the islands belong elsewhere. The people were removed to secure sovereignty; now sovereignty is surrendered because the people are gone.
A government that wished to act honourably would not treat this as the end of the matter. Britain expelled the Chagossians, prevented their return, and resisted them in the courts for decades. These facts do not change because a treaty has been signed.
What would begin to right the wrong is money, infrastructure and sustained effort to rebuild a community Britain destroyed for reasons of state. Anything less leaves the central injustice intact, merely administered under a different authority.
British public life has a persistent habit of treating legal form and diplomatic approval as moral closure. The Chagos deal risks becoming one more example.
If Britain wishes to show that this settlement is more than an exit strategy, it should begin with restitution that is tangible and costly. Empires have always preferred to rewrite the account rather than repay it. But changing course does not erase what was done to get there.
