Chagos: a 50-year-old crime

During the forced deporation in 1972, the islanders were scooped up, loaded on ships, and dumped on the waterfront of Port Louis in Mauritius, where most of them have lived in abject poverty ever since. But this month a number of them went back to the islands on a Mauritian ship.

The Chagos Islands, an archipelago of 62 coral atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean, would make an ideal bomber base from which to dominate most of south Asia and eastern Africa, and in 1966, the Pentagon wanted it, writes Gwynne Dyer. Britain still insists it is the sovereign power on the islands (although it is the U.S. that runs them), but since the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that the whole expulsion of the islanders had been illegal it has been on the defensive.Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

February 21, 2022

LONDON, U.K.—“The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours... There will be no Indigenous population except seagulls,” wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the British Foreign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos islanders from their homes was taki...

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