The Art of the Steal; Chagos Islands
A geostrategic catastrophe
One of the background policies that has been lurking in the Starmer Government is the deal to transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. A geostrategic catastrophe that sees the UK paying another nation for an island it already owns. Thankfully, the deal seems as dead as a doornail but still serves as an illustration of British delusions about the international world order.
Background
The Chagos Islands are a group of seven atolls and sixty islands in the Indian Ocean (see the map below).
The islands are of keen interest to the British and the Americans because they are centrally located in the Indian Ocean. They are home to Diego Garcia, arguably one of the most important military bases in the world for power projection.
The history of the islands is fraught. In short, the French in the 18th century laid claim to Réunion, Mauritius, and the Chagos Islands (uninhabited at the time). They then brought over slaves from Africa to the Chagos Islands to farm coconut oil.
After the defeat of Napoleon, the British claimed the islands and began to nominally administer them from Mauritius. However, Mauritius's laws did not apply to Chagos, and there was no representation for the Chagos Islands on Mauritius's partially elected legislative council. For context, Chagos and Mauritius are 2,150 kilometres away from each other.
The islands were grouped for administrative ease, and Mauritius has never had sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.
Fast forward to the 1960s, the UK and the Mauritius government, three years before its independence, agreed to the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in exchange for £3m. Analysis by Professor Stephen Allen suggests that none of the Mauritian political parties opposed the islands' detachment. Numerous statements from Prime Minister Seewoosagur Ramgoolam agree with that analysis. To him, the detachment of the Chagos Islands was legally correct and fully agreed to by both opposition parties at the time. In a Parliamentary hearing in 1974, the Prime Minister stated, "It was a matter that was negotiated, we got some advantage out of this and we agreed."
However, in the 1980s, under the newly elected socialist government, a new narrative emerged that the deal was, in Mauritius's mind, an act of coercion from the British.
In the backdrop to this is the scandal of deportation. When the British took control of the islands, they deported the inhabitants, with Chagossians spreading to the UK, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. The Chagossians is keen to return home and have received significant compensation for their deportation. However, the UK won’t allow them to return to the islands.
Through careful diplomacy and legal craft, Mauritius has managed to attach their claim for sovereignty to the plight of the Chagossians, even though they are two distinctly different issues.
Mauritius then escalated their concerns to the United Nations, who requested a judgement from the ICJ, which in 2019 resulted in a non-binding resolution demanding the UK give sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius.
The ICJ concluded that the "detachment [of the Chagos Islands] was not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned."
However, in its advisory opinion, the ICJ ignored both evidence from the time and supporting statements after the fact from the Mauritius government about their agreement to the deal.
Furthermore, the advisory opinion concluded that the treatment of the Chagossians was a crime against humanity but prescribed that the islands should be handed back to Mauritius—a country that never exercised sovereignty over the islands—instead of the Chagossians.
Why do the Chagos Islands matter?
Diego Garcia's utility is in two key factors:
Firstly, and most importantly, is the island's location. Diego Garcia is in the middle of the Indian Ocean; it has close proximity to major shipping routes and provides an unparalleled location from which to surveil large swathes of the Indian Ocean. It is one of the two critical U.S. bomber bases in the Indo-Pacific region (the other being Guam). The base was of key utility in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan and remains a key operating base for power projection in the region.
As a result of this, Diego Garcia is known as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier," a term that originated in World War 2 to describe islands of key military significance that function as aircraft carriers during conflict. The classic example is Midway Atoll, which during the Battle of Midway in 1942 was pivotal to victory and acted as a turning point in the Pacific campaign.
Diego Garcia is poised in any future conflicts with Iran or China to act in the same way.
Secondly, Diego Garcia has a large and deep lagoon which can accommodate America's largest warships and submarines. This is significant because the nearest UK facility is some 3,400km (2,100 miles) away, and for the US, nearly 4,800km (3,000 miles).
Matthew Savill, military sciences director at the leading UK defence think tank RUSI, says Diego Garcia is an "enormously important [base] because of its position in the Indian Ocean and the facilities it has: port, storage, and airfield".
The base is one of an "extremely limited number of places worldwide available to reload submarines" with weapons like Tomahawk missiles, and the US has positioned a large amount of equipment and stores there for contingencies.
The Deal:
Although we should not speak ill of the dead, the deal forged to hand over the sovereignty of the islands is catastrophically bad.
The terms of the deal kept changing in an effort by Mauritius to exploit the British, but in the end, the UK would hand over the islands and then pay Mauritius £9 billion to lease it off them for 99 years.
The irony is Starmer, in a rush to get the deal done before Trump became president, conceded on front-loading payments. This led to Mauritius rejecting the proposed deal to squeeze more money out of the UK. Thus leading to Mauritius likely getting neither the islands nor payment.
The deal was also—bizarrely—crafted without the input of the Chagossians and still leaves them in limbo, unable to return to their home, with the diaspora still spread across the UK, Seychelles, and Mauritius.
The real issue with the deal, not just the fact that the UK would be paying for something they currently own, is the ceding of sovereignty. The Chagos Islands are remote and large: 1,600km (1,000 miles) away from the nearest landmass, over 640,000 square kilometres, and a marine protected zone.
This makes the islands extremely easy to secure. The waters are regularly patrolled; unauthorised boats are quickly caught.
This is important because the Chinese are known to use fishing ships as an extension of their military. They strap military-grade sensors and monitoring equipment onto fishing boats and then send them into sensitive waters with plausible deniability.
However, if Mauritius—who want to economically exploit the islands—have sovereignty, they could grant fishing rights in the waters around the base, which could easily allow China and other foreign powers to spy on the installation.
Furthermore, with the ability to develop on the other islands, it would be entirely fitting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative for innocuous infrastructure to be built on the island, which would be packed with military surveillance equipment directly aimed at the base—not an uncommon Chinese tactic, see the African Union HQ.
This all comes at a time when China is a growing fear of the British military establishment, yet the government is keen to strike a deal that weakens its grasp on the region and potentially enables its key strategic enemy.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, the deal is all but dead. The Americans have final input, and with the entrance of Donald Trump into the White House, it will be vetoed.
However, it illustrates the rot in the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy with Jonathan Powell as National Security Advisor. Powell is well known for his successful negotiations of the Good Friday Agreement, but was also a key architect of the British role in the Iraq War.
Worryingly he is a sycophant to the international liberal order at a time when it is all but dead. Powell claims that the Chagos Islands are "very tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean" and therefore shouldn't be worried about their loss.
This as I hope you have learned is both extremely daft and speaks to the intellectual calibre of the British ruling class.
The deal is also problematic as it seeks to perpetuate the myth of the international liberal order. Frankly, it is no longer the 90s. With war in Ukraine initiated by Russia—a nuclear power—who have ignored every attempt by the UN to stop the war and are keen to challenge the Americans via BRICS. Alongside a Cold War creeping along between the Chinese and the Americans, the only real valuable power is that of hard power.
However, many seem keen to live in this fantasy land where the UN and international law are binding.
This is irrespective of the Americans' continuing refusal to submit to a wide variety of international laws exemplified by The Hague Invasion Act—an act that gives the US president permission to invade The Hague "to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution [in the ICJ] or rescue them from custody".
Or the Chinese leveraging their influence through the Belt and Road Initiative to win allies and influence states on the UN Human Rights Council, which has enabled them to kill debates and investigations into the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
But the typical comment made in contrast is that the UK is a middle power and is no longer a global power and therefore shouldn't try to compete.
The UK frankly is a middle power, with a failing military and a poor economy, but the argument that they can't compete is defeatist. Critics' typical prescription, instead of building a working economy, ramping up military power, expanding bases, and global outreach, is instead to hand over remaining territory to potential adversaries and be at peace with the UK's lot in life.
This, of course, is ridiculous and would just perpetuate an even further fall in British political power. So, whilst I have very little in common with Donald Trump, I have at least one thing to be thankful for in that he will kill this daft deal.