DID YOU KNOW?

The Chagos Archipelago is a group of seven atolls comprising more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean about 500km south of the Maldives archipelago. The Chagos Islands had been home to the Chagossians, a Bourbonnais Creole-speaking people, until the UK expelled them from the archipelago at the request of the US between 1967 and 1973 to allow the US to build Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a military base on Diego Garcia, on land leased from the UK military in the British Indian Ocean Territories. Since 1971, only the atoll of Diego Garcia has been inhabited, and only by employees of the US military, including American civilian contracted personnel. Since being expelled, Chagossians, like all others not permitted by the UK or US governments, have been prevented from entering the islands. When Mauritius was a French colony, the islands were a dependency of the French administration in Mauritius. By the Treaty of Paris of 1814, France ceded Mauritius and its dependencies to the UK. In 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a non-binding advisory opinion stating that the UK ‘has an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, and that all Member States must co-operate with the UN to complete the decolonisation of Mauritius’.