Britain’s “outright defiance” of a UN deadline to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius by Friday, in a final act of African “decolonisation”, has been condemned by Mauritius and the globally-scattered communities of exiled islanders. The Labour party’s election manifesto, published on Thursday, pledges to allow Chagossians to resettle in their homeland. Earlier this year, the UN general assembly voted by an overwhelming majority of 116 to six countries in favour of a motion condemning Britain’s occupation of the remote islands and demanding what the Foreign Office terms British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) be reunified with Mauritius. An advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, found the islands had been illegally severed from Mauritius in the 1960s. The president of the ICJ, Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, urged the UK and other member states to “complete the decolonisation of Mauritius”. The UK regards neither the ICJ judgment nor the UN motion as binding. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the archipelago, is now a strategically-important US military base used by American bombers on long-range missions and, in the past, for rendition flights carrying terrorism suspects. Speaking at the UN last month, Jagdish Dharamchand Koonjul, the permanent representative… Read full this story
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