PREVIEW
Prime Minister Ramgoolam claims it completes the ‘decolonisation process’
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer is taking heat at home over his government’s £3.4 billion deal with Mauritius that will allow Britain to retain control of the US-UK air base on Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos Island archipelago in the Indian Ocean, under a 99-year lease (Dispatches, 12/11/24, A change of the dynastic guard).
Though the agreement is supported by Mauritius and the United States government, the decision to cede to Mauritius the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, has been criticised by the opposition Conservative Party over the costs involved and claims that it could encourage China to deepen its diplomatic ties with Mauritius. That is despite the fact that the previous Conservative government had negotiated for several years with Mauritius on the islands after a 2019 International Court of Justice opinion in favour of Mauritian sovereignty (AC Vol 63 No 18, What will Truss mean for Africa?).
UK officials insist that a series of rulings by the United Nations stating Mauritius’ sovereignty over the islands had forced their hand. Starmer’s Defence Secretary John Healey told the House of Commons that ‘without this deal, within weeks, we could face losing legal rulings and within just a few years the base would become inoperable’.
Negotiations on the lease have been fraught, with a final delay after the UK High Court granted an interim injunction, which was later lifted, to Bertrice Pompe, a British national who was born in Diego Garcia and criticised the deal for excluding Chagossians, several thousand of whom were forcibly removed from the islands in the 1960s.
‘With this agreement, we are completing the total process of decolonisation,’ Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam said in a televised broadcast on 22 May.
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