1st Edition
Challenges and Prospects for the Chagos Archipelago
Challenges and Prospects for the Chagos Archipelago considers the origins, challenges and future of Chagos, bringing together leading experts and academics specialising in differing aspects of the Chagos dispute.
In 1965, as part of negotiations leading to Mauritian independence in 1968, the UK government excised the Chagos Archipelago from the colony of Mauritius to form part of a new overseas territory, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The UK then set about removing the population of the Chagos Islands in order to allow the United States to construct a military base. As a consequence of the UK’s acquisition of the Chagos Islands and the expulsion of the Chagossian population, there has been wide ranging litigation brought by Mauritius and the Chagossians. This has reached the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly, the European Court of Human Rights and the UK Supreme Court. This book offers a wide-ranging debate between experts and practitioners, including those of Chagossian and Mauritian heritage, touching upon key developments and offering an inclusive approach that transcends traditional disciplinary silos. Issues such as international and constitutional law, human rights, colonialism and decolonisation, using creative writing to express the experience of banishment, international relations, environmentalism, and globalisation, will be explored as part of a dialogue that sheds new light on the Chagos dispute. Edited by experts on Chagos, the contributors are drawn from across the globe, and all have a distinctive take on what has happened, what it means for the world and the region, and how Chagos will both shape and be shaped by the future.
This book will be of great interest to students, academics and researchers from across the humanities and social sciences, including political science, international relations, law, sociology, socio-legal studies, human rights, social anthropology, indigenous rights, history, colonialism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, as well as practitioners, policymakers and general readers who are interested in Chagos.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Foreword, by Olivier Bancoult
Foreword, by Philippe Sands
Indian Ocean map
Chagos Archipelago map
For our Chagossian mother, Mimose
Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun
Introduction
Chris Monaghan, Laura Jeffery, and Mairi O’Gorman
1. The Chagos saga: 21st century dispute about incomplete decolonisation
Milan Meetarbhan
2. The Chagos Archipelago in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean world history
Richard Allen
3. Origins, legacies, and future: the Chagossians, a population in exile
Priya Bahadoor
So immaculate – Peros Banhos, Saloman, Diego Garcia
Saradha Soobrayen
4. Chagos: plantation or paradise? Island edens and Indian Ocean empires, 1600–2023
Chris Hill
5. Human rights and the Marine Protected Area around the Chagos Archipelago
Sue Farran
6. Return of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and Chagossian identity: constitutional, legal, and political perspectives
Charles Fombad
7. Political and legal debates about Chagossian ethnicity and indigeneity
Laura Jeffery
8. Intergenerational challenges, cultural identify, and future prospects for Chagossian communities in the UK
Thierry Mandarin
Ayapana in a british plastic plant pot
Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun
9. Certainty and uncertainty: native and older generation Chagossian perspectives from Mauritius amid the UK Government’s Nationality and Borders Act 2022
Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun
Limuria is in Our trust
Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun
10. Voicing the trauma of the lost territory: creative writing, therapy and the Chagos Refugees Group
Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand
This poem is intuitively aware of the erasure of the Chagos Archipelago…
Saradha Soobrayen
11. Excerpt from Diego Garcia, A Novel
Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams
12. The British courts and the Chagos story: an exercise in colonial justice
Satvinder Juss and Chris Monaghan
13. Stakeholders or bystanders? An attempt by Seychellois Chagossians to intervene in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
Jamie Trinidad, Stephen Allen and Thomas Burri
14. The 1966 BIOT Agreement and Polaris
Samuel Bashfield
15. The power behind the throne: the US Government must face its responsibility for the Chagossian exile
David Vine
‘UK Ambassador Lobbied Senators To Hide Diego Garcia’s Role In Rendition’
Saradha Soobrayen
16. The Indo-Pacific and the Chagos Archipelago: two logics, two futures
Peter Harris
17. Flagpole fights, courtroom clashes, and coconut crabs
Owen Bowcott
18. Why has it taken 25 years for the UK to start negotiating an overall settlement on Chagos with Mauritius?
David Snoxell
An ode to the Chagossian zistwar
Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun
19. Afterword
Sabrina Jean
Biography
Laura Jeffery is Professor of Anthropology of Migration in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has worked with the Chagossian community since 2002.
Chris Monaghan is Head of Law and Principal Lecturer in Law at the University of Worcester, UK. He has interests in the Chagos Islands legal dispute, Constitutional Law, the role of Parliament, executive accountability, and the global use of impeachment.
Mairi O’Gorman is a social anthropologist who holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her doctoral thesis, Tree of Knowledge, Tree of Life: materials, intimacy and being Creole in London and Seychelles (2019), was based on ethnographic fieldwork in both places.
“The Chagossians were brutally expelled from their Indian Ocean home by UK officials who referred to them as ‘Tarzans and Men Fridays’. In 2008 Lord Hoffman denied their right of return, casting them as incapable of living ‘Crusoe-like’. The declaration of a ‘no take’ Marine Protected Area in 2010 further limited their conditions of return. As this language reveals, the expulsion and exile of the Chagossians repeats the gestures and practices of unbridled colonial power; and shows the complicity of law and science. But as the essays and artistic works in this book show, the collusion of successive U.S and U.K governments are resisted effectively at every turn. How are empires and nations created and remade? Can a fully decolonised nation avoid marginalising an ethnic or indigenous minority? How are environmental and ‘green’ agendas deployed for neo-colonial ends? This timely and multi-disciplinary book addresses these urgent questions that apply well beyond the fate of the Chagossians.”
Stewart Motha, Professor of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
“This extraordinary, polyvocal anthology amply documents the historic case of the Chagos islanders and their grotesque treatment at the hands of successive British Governments. It is an indispensable resource that illuminates the juridical, geopolitical, cultural and human dimensions of this long-running scandal. Anybody interested in the persistent politics of empire and colony has much to learn much from it.”
Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities, University College London, UK
“Urgent and uncompromising, this multilayered volume is a powerful reminder of Chagossians’ on-going resistance to British and US colonisation in the 21st century.”
Olivette Otele, Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery, Faculty of Law, SOAS, London, UK
