Chagossians urge UK to complete islands’ handover to Mauritius

Original article by Geneva Abdul

A Chagossian delegation visiting the UK has urged parliamentarians to complete stalled legislation to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which they say has been “hijacked within the halls” of UK politics.

The six-person contingent from the Chagos Refugees Group expressed their full support for the UK to conclude an agreement after the government was forced to shelve legislation when the US dropped support for the agreement.

“It’s not a question of sovereignty for us, the most important is our rights,” the delegation leader, Louis Olivier Bancoult, told a room full of Chagossians, some native-born, gathered in West Sussex on Friday.

“There is not a real will for the British government to find a solution for our people. We need to find a way,” he added. “We’re still suffering and our position is clear, we have the right to live in our birthplace.”

In 1996, Bancoult started a legal battle against the UK government and has continued to fight for their return after his family was uprooted in 1965 and unable to return after travelling to Mauritius for his sister’s illness.

The delegation has also said the current legal restrictions under the British Indian Ocean Territory regime prohibit resettlement, and criticised far-right UK leaders and press over narratives claiming they are a “pure, isolated race” with no ties to Mauritius, and that they oppose a negotiated settlement.

“We have watched with profound concern as the sacred issue of our human rights has been hijacked within the halls of UK politics,” said Bancoult in a parliamentary briefing statement.

Delegation member Rosemonde Bertin was deported to Mauritius in 1972 and was the last person to give birth on Chagos Islands, she told the room. She had the opportunity to visit the islands with permission, and regretted how she was unable to spend more than a day in her birthplace.

“How can it be that I was born in Chagos, but I cannot go there without permission and other people, third and fourth generation can go and stay there?” she said in creole.

Other individuals present, who left as children, spoke of the desire to return to the islands, of their wishes to die in their birthplaces and called for reparations from the British government. Also in attendance was Liseby Elysé, who when forced to leave the islands in 1973, suffered a pregnancy loss at four months.

“[We] expect nothing more than justice for the hardship that we have suffered all these years,” said 71-year-old Joseph Bertrand, who lives in the UK after being forcibly moved to Mauritius at the age of 12. “We don’t want heritage visits,” he said. “We want to go there, we want to live there.”

The delegation has met parliamentarians including Jeremy Corbyn and David Alton, the chair of the joint committee on human rights, who has long supported the Chagossians in returning to their homeland.

“I emphasised my longstanding personal support for their right to return permanently to their homeland where they should be free to determine their own future,” said Lord Alton.

Corbyn said it was clear in all aspects of international law that the islands “must” be part of Mauritius, as per an international court of justice ruling. In 2019 an advisory opinion by the ICJ, endorsed by the UN general assembly, found the UK in breach of international law by seeking to maintain its claim to the archipelago.

“This has been dragged through the courts for the past 30 years,” said Corbyn. “It’s time the Tory party and Reform stopped fiddling around with some colonial inheritance, which simply doesn’t exist.”