[IncreasePosts]

What exactly is the Mauritian connection to the Chagos Archipelago?

Is it just because a lot of Chagossians went to Mauritius after getting kicked out? Obviously Mauritius and Chagos were ruled by the same people previous (French, then British), but is there a deeper history there?

I ask this because the Chagos archipelago is like 1500 miles away from Mauritius - the Maldives, Seychelles, and even Sri Lanka and India are all closer than that. And to my untrained eye, the Chagos archipelago looks like an extension of whatever process created the Maldives.

[rndmio]

There isn’t one, as you say it’s over 2000km between them, the only link is that when Britain was administrating them it did so as a single territory. This is not some reunification of a country separated by a colonial power.

[ItCouldBeWorse]

Its more a sort of shakedown of a ex-colonial power

[Yeul]

The UK was shaking down the US for this military base.

The whole thing stands as a monument to the decline of the British Empire.

[N19PEDL2]

As someone pointed out on Reddit, for the first time in centuries the United Kingdom will no longer be the empire on which the sun never sets.

[Yawrehto]

There will still be a British presence there (an overseas military base if I recall correctly), so you could argue it doesn't, but yep.

Randall got it wrong in What If (https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/). The sun's going to set on it because of the Indian Ocean territory going.

[practice9]

More like reparations

[s_dev]

>What exactly is the Mauritian connection to the Chagos Archipelago?

I can see where this line of questioning is going but what's the connection between Britain and Chagos or the US and Chagos for that matter?

[InsomniacL]

215 years of British sovereignty?

The United States of America has had sovereignty of itself for 248 years, should the USA give up it's sovereignty in North America or do you draw the line between somewhere between 215 and 248?

At what point do you say, it is what it is?

[netc]

215 years of sovereignty Or 215 years of colonialism? Are the displaced people able to vote for UK parliamentary elections? Are they UK citizen?

[InsomniacL]

"People with roots in the Chagos Islands have criticised what they called their "exclusion" from negotiations leading to the UK government's deal to give up its sovereignty of the region."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy78ejg71exo

[s_dev]

>At what point do you say, it is what it is?

When you've lost the argument.

[berdario]

The obvious difference, is that you're comparing sovereignty over a nation/state's mainland, vs sovereignty over a separate colony, thousands of km away from the mainland (and even used only for military purposes, apparently)

[InsomniacL]

Hawaii then, 3,200 km away from the US mainland, home to one of the largest US navel bases and only part of the US for the last 126 years when they annexed it?

[berdario]

I'm not aware of nations in nearby islands/archipelago who are claiming the territory of Hawaii, so that's one difference.

But for sure, the locals would've appreciated it if the US didn't colonise Hawaii

https://x.com/SilverSpookGuy/status/1836132280806576289

[ivanbakel]

I think this is missing the point of the original question, which is - why would a Mauritian feel "relief" at the return of a geographical territory which is extremely far from itself? The claims of the UK or the US are irrelevant to this reasoning.

Indeed, I would like to understand the answer to the above question better, since the only reason I can see is that Mauritius as a colony used to govern the islands, and that seems to have just been a convenience of the French that doesn't strongly justify any current claims of sovereignty. And since the UK were the ones to forcibly evict the Chagossians from the islands, it seems a double-injustice to "return" their land to another sovereign power which is equally at a distance from the islands themselves. Do the Chagossians support this claim by the Mauritian government?

[toyg]

> Do the Chagossians support this claim by the Mauritian government?

They've complained about not being part to the discussion, but in practice most of them have Mauritian citizenship now, and it should be easier for them to deal with the Mauritian government to reclaim some of their land. It's a lesser-evil situation.

[N19PEDL2]

Perhaps things would have turned out differently if the UK had given British citizenship to the Chagossians instead of kicking them out of their islands. After all, this method worked in the Falklands.

[someguydave]

Their “relief” comes in form of US dollars to be deposited

[kombine]

If both sovereigns have equal claim to the land, keeping the status quo should be preferred.

[neom]

https://www.icj-cij.org/case/169

[bryanrasmussen]

I'm assuming if the were ruled as the same entity for a significant amount of time that there was a lot of movement between the two regions during that time with all that implies, intermarriage etc.

All of which would probably still mean there are lots of people still alive from the time the regions were separated that feel themselves to be nonetheless connected and unfairly kept apart.

[Maken]

There is no people to be reunited here. Everyone was kicked out of Chagos to Mauritius so the UK military base could be build.

[bryanrasmussen]

Ok, assumed the base just had part of it. So I guess there are people who want to go back to where they came from - but they can't because the base is still there?

[DiggyJohnson]

The plantation workers still on the island in 1971-1973 were forcibly relocated to Mauritius.

> However, the UK and Mauritius agreed in 1972 that there were 426 Ilois families numbering 1,151 individuals[24] who left the Chagos for Mauritius voluntarily or involuntarily between 1965 and 1973.[14]: par 417 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.

[frereubu]

I imagine for such a small island chain you'd need a "parent" country to provide services, so picking the one where most people when when they were exiled probably makes sense. May also be a language thing?