Expulsion of the Chagossians
The United Kingdom, at the request of the United States, began expelling the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago in 1968, concluding its forced deportations on 27 April 1973 with the expulsion of the remaining Chagossians on the Peros Banhos atoll. The removals were carried out to make way for the establishment of a UK–United States military base on Diego Garcia, following bilateral defence agreements. The inhabitants, known at the time as the Ilois, are today known as Chagos Islanders or Chagossians.
The British government separated the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, creating a new colony in Africa, the British Indian Ocean Territory. To avoid accountability to the United Nations for its continued colonial rule, the UK falsely claimed that the Chagos had no permanent population.
Chagossians and human rights advocates have said that the Chagossian right of occupation was violated by the British Foreign Office as a result of the 1966 agreement between the British and American governments to provide an unpopulated island for a U.S. military base, and that additional compensation and a right of return be provided.
Legal action to claim compensation and the right of abode in the Chagos began in April 1973 when 280 islanders, represented by a Mauritian attorney, petitioned the government of Mauritius to distribute the £650,000 compensation provided in 1972 by the British government. It was not distributed until 1977. Various petitions and lawsuits have been ongoing since then, but have not had much effect due to the repeated refusal of the US and UK to provide reparations and repatriation beyond limited monetary compensation.
In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that the United Kingdom did not have sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and that the administration of the archipelago should be handed over "as rapidly as possible" to Mauritius. The United Nations General Assembly then voted to give Britain a six-month deadline to begin the process of handing over the islands, though the resolution was not binding. In October 2024, the UK announced it would be giving up sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a deal, which is still subject to finalising a treaty. Additionally, the current military base on Diego Garcia would be leased to the British government for an initial period of 99 years under the deal. Some Chagossians in Britain criticised the deal for excluding the Chagossian community from the decision-making process.
Chagossians
The Chagos Archipelago was uninhabited when first visited by European explorers, and remained that way until the French established a small colony on the island of Diego Garcia, composed of 50–60 men and "a complement of slaves". The slaves came from what are now Mozambique and Madagascar via Mauritius. Thus, the original Chagossians were a mixture of the Bantu and Austronesian peoples. The French Government abolished slavery on 4 February 1794 but local administrations in Indian Ocean hindered its implementation.The French surrendered Mauritius and its dependencies to the UK in the 1814 Treaty of Paris. However, nothing precluded the transport of slaves within the colony, and so the ancestors of the Chagossians were routinely shipped from Mauritius to Rodrigues to the Chagos to the Seychelles, and elsewhere. In addition, from 1820 to 1840, the atoll of Diego Garcia in the Chagos became the staging post for slave ships trading between Sumatra, the Seychelles, and the French island of Bourbon, adding a population of Malay slaves into the Chagos gene pool.
The British Government abolished slavery in 1834, and the colonial administration of the Seychelles followed suit in 1835, with the former slaves "apprenticed" to their former masters until 1 February 1839, at which time they became freemen. Following emancipation, the former slaves became contract employees of the various plantation owners throughout the Chagos. Contracts were required by colonial law to be renewed before a magistrate at least every two years, but the distance from the nearest colonial headquarters meant few visits by officials, and that meant that these contract workers often stayed for decades between the visits of the Magistrate, and there is little doubt that some remained for a lifetime.
Those workers born in the Chagos were referred to as Creoles des Iles, or Ilois for short, a French Creole word meaning "Islanders" until the late 1990s, when they adopted the name Chagossians or Chagos Islanders. With no other work to be had, and all the islands granted by the Governor of Mauritius to the plantation owners, life continued for the Chagossians as before, with European managers and Ilois workers and their families.
On the Chagos, this involved specific tasks and rewards, including housing, rations and rum, and a relatively distinct Creole society developed. Over the decades, Mauritian, Seychellois, Chinese, Somali, and Indian workers were employed on the island at various times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the Chagossian culture, as did plantation managers and administrators, visiting ships' crews and passengers, British and Indian garrison troops stationed on the island in World War II, and residents of Mauritius — to which individual Chagossians and their families traveled and spent lengthy periods of time.
Significant demographic shifts in the island population began in 1962 when the French-financed Mauritian company Societé Huilière de Diego et Peros, which had consolidated ownership of all the plantations in the Chagos in 1883, sold the plantations to the Seychelles company Chagos-Agalega Company, which then owned the entire Chagos Archipelago, except for six acres at the mouth of the Diego Garcia lagoon. Thus, at no time did anyone living on the islands actually own a piece of real property there. Even the resident managers of the plantations were simply employees of absentee landlords.
In the 1930s, Fr. Roger Dussercle reported that 60% of the plantation workers were "Children of the Isles"; that is, born in the Chagos. However, beginning in 1962, the Chagos-Agalega Company began hiring Seychellois contract workers almost exclusively, along with a few from Mauritius, as many of the Ilois left the Chagos because of the change in management; by 1964, 80% of the population were Seychellois under 18-month or 2-year contracts.
At this same time, the UK and U.S. began talks with the objective of establishing a military base in the Indian Ocean region. The base would need to be on British Territory, as the U.S. had no possessions in the region. The U.S. was deeply concerned with the stability of the host nation of any potential base, and sought an unpopulated territory, to avoid the U.N.'s decolonization requirements and the resulting political issues of sovereignty or anti-Western sentiment. The political posture of an independent Mauritius, from which the remote British islands of the central Indian Ocean were administered, was not clearly known, but was of a nature expected to work against the security of the base.
As a direct result of these geopolitical concerns, the British Colonial Office recommended to the UK Government in October 1964 to detach the Chagos from Mauritius.
In January 1965, the U.S. Embassy in London formally requested the detachment of the Chagos as well. On 8 November 1965 the UK created the British Indian Ocean Territory by an Order in Council. On 30 December 1966, the U.S. and UK signed a 50-year agreement to use the Chagos for military purposes, and that each island so used would be without a resident civilian population. This and other evidence at trial led the UK High Court of Justice Queen's Bench to decide in 2003 that the UK government ultimately decided to depopulate the entire Chagos to avoid scrutiny by the U.N.'s Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, known as the "Committee of 24".
In April 1967, the BIOT Administration bought out Chagos-Agalega for £600,000, thus becoming the sole property owner in the BIOT. The Crown immediately leased back the properties to Chagos-Agalega, but the company terminated the lease at the end of 1967, after which the BIOT assigned management of the plantations to the former managers of Chagos-Agalega, who had incorporated in the Seychelles as Moulinie and Company, Limited.
Throughout the 20th century, there existed a total population of approximately one thousand individuals, with a peak population of 1,142 on all islands recorded in 1953. In 1966, the population was 924. This population was fully employed. Although it was common for local plantation managers to allow pensioners and the disabled to remain in the islands and continue to receive rations in exchange for light work, children after the age of 12 were required to work. In 1964, only 3 of a population of 963 were unemployed. Three of the islands were inhabited: Diego Garcia, Île du Coin in the Peros Banhos atoll, and Île Boddam in the Salomon Islands.
In the latter half of the 20th century, there were thus three major strands to the population — Mauritian and Seychelles contract workers, and the Ilois. There is no agreement as to the numbers of Ilois living in the BIOT prior to 1971. However, the UK and Mauritius agreed in 1972 that there were 426 Ilois families numbering 1,151 individuals who left the Chagos for Mauritius voluntarily or involuntarily between 1965 and 1973. In 1977, the Mauritian government independently listed a total of 557 families totaling 2,323 people — 1,068 adults and 1,255 children — a number that included families that had left voluntarily before the creation of the BIOT and never returned to the Chagos. The number reported by the Mauritian government in 1978 to have received compensation was 2,365, consisting of 1,081 adults and 1,284 minor children. The Mauritian Government's Ilois Trust Fund Board certified 1,579 individuals as Ilois in 1982.
The entire population of the Chagos, including the Ilois, was removed to Mauritius and the Seychelles by 27 April 1973.