‘We want to stay British’: The Chagos islanders sold out by Starmer

The Prime Minister says the UK-Mauritius agreement will ‘address the wrongs of the past’. Many Chagossians aren’t so sure

Last Thursday, Vanessa Calou got a phone call from a number in Mauritius. “They said, ‘I think Mauritius got Chagos’, and I could not believe it,” she says. 
Neither could the Foreign Office’s news desk when she called them immediately afterwards. “They didn’t know about it and asked me where I’d found out about it. They said they couldn’t believe they weren’t aware of it.” 
Calou, 44, and her brother Misley Mandarin, 46, opened up the Government’s online announcements page and refreshed it until an update came through. Then it was confirmed: Prime Minister Keir Starmer had struck a deal after years of negotiations. The British islands they call “home” would be handed over to a foreign country.
Mandarin and Calou are amongst the 3,000 Chagossians who currently reside in the UK. This new handover treaty has failed them and their wider community, Calou says, and threatens to end their lifelong dream of permanently returning to their “ancestral home”. Despite plans for a fund for displaced Chagossians as part of the deal, there has been no promise from Mauritius that Chagossians living in Britain will have the right to return there, meaning a life in the Chagos Islands looks less achievable than ever. It is an insult that, for some, has been “worse than the original expulsion”. 
The siblings’ father was among those forced to leave. British colonial authorities “exiled” him from the island of Peros Banhos, where he was born, more than 50 years ago.
“Our dad was dumped on the docks of Mauritius with nothing,” Mandarin says. It was a fate he shared with at least 1,500 others, marooned on the African island state some 1,300 miles west of his birthplace. Between 1967 and 1973, every single Chagossian was deported to either Mauritius or the Seychelles, to make way for a US naval base on Diego Garcia, the largest Chagos island. Britain had some of its debts wiped by the American government in return. 
Mandarin describes the pair’s childhood in Mauritius, where they were born, as “horrendous”. “We were treated as second-class citizens and we were marginalised,” he says. While Chagossians are of mixed Indian and African descent, “70 per cent of the population of Mauritius is of Indian descent, and there is a very big issue about caste and race, so we were always discriminated against.” 
Calou and Mandarin now live in London with their father. The siblings came to Britain in 2002, when the government granted citizenship to Chagossians born abroad between 1969 and 1983. Their father joined them in 2007. Many other Chagossians remain in Mauritius only “because they don’t have the money to fly to London,” Mandarin says. To this day, “90 per cent of the Chagossians who still live in Mauritius live in abject poverty.” 
The siblings co-run the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) Citizens platform, which Calou says represents 5,000 Chagossians in Britain and Mauritius. Life in Britain has been good for them, they say, and for many others. “My daughter is at university here,” says Mandarin. “We wouldn’t have had that opportunity in Mauritius. We’re thriving and very happy.” 
But Thursday’s news has upended their lives. Calou was still in shock when she spoke to The Telegraph on Sunday, her brother irate. Both say that most of the Chagossians living in Britain – predominantly in Crawley, near Gatwick Airport, where Calou now works for British Airways – share their feelings. 
“It was hugely distressing and people are very angry,” Mandarin says. “Some people have said that they don’t want to live in a world with this injustice. Those of us who are still in Mauritius are very angry too and say that they want nothing to do with the Mauritian government.” 
The relationship between the Chagos Islands and Mauritius has long been fraught. Despite their geographical distance from one another, both were governed as part of the same colony by the French, and then the British when they were handed over in an 1814 treaty. 
When Mauritius gained independence from the British Empire in 1968, Britain held on to the Chagos Islands, which it had renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Since then, Mauritius has claimed the Chagos Islands as its own territory, making a formal challenge to Britain’s sovereignty over them in 2022. 
Even before then, Mauritius had outlawed BIOT postage stamps, overwritten Chagossians’ passports to mark their birthplaces as “Mauritius” and brought in a law “that any Chagossian who says the islands are British could be put in jail for 10 years, or pay a hefty fine,” Mandarin points out. 
Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s claim in a House of Commons statement that the deal “secures a right to settlement for [Chagossians] to the outer islands” has brought him and his sister little hope. 
“I was targeted all my life in Mauritius,” says Calou. “Border police detain Chagossians and take their passports, or provoke them so that they can put them in prison. Those same policemen will be on our islands and will treat Chagossians the same if we go there. Our first priority has been to have the right of return to Chagos, and to have self-determination, but we want to go there as British, or BIOT, citizens.” 
It has been especially painful then that this handover deal was struck in secret, without consultation of the BIOT Citizens forum or even Peter Lamb, the Labour MP for Crawley, who reportedly was informed of the decision only shortly before the public announcement was made. 
Lammy claimed that he had “sought to keep the Chagossians informed” throughout the sovereignty negotiations. But at a meeting with Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty just three days before the deal was announced, a number of Chagossian representative groups were told that the negotiations could not be discussed, another group called Chagossian Voices has claimed.  
The pact will “address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare of Chagossians”, a joint statement from Starmer and Pravind Jugnauth, the Mauritian prime minister, on Thursday read. It adds insult to the siblings’ injury.
“The idea that this is a progressive deal is a hoax,” says Mandarin. “It will give us no right of return.” The Mauritian government has not confirmed that it will allow people to live on the Chagos Islands, and previous international rulings have talked about repopulation in terms of “Mauritian nationals, including those of Chagossian origin”. 
“Mauritius has already said that the outer islands will be difficult to repopulate,” says Mandarin, “so we get the sense that our islands will become cash cows for the Mauritian economy.” 
Of particular concern to him is the country’s treatment of Agaléga, its small island dependency 600 miles north of Mauritius proper, where India has been building a strategic naval outpost since March 2015. 
“Those people [on Agaléga] are suffering as well,” Mandarin says. “I’m seeing this happen in front of my eyes to another island, and I look at Chagos, which we can’t get to currently, and I see 59 other islands that Mauritius could sell to India.” 
The deal struck between Britain and Mauritius will, however, secure the future of Diego Garcia, the tropical atoll used as a joint US-UK base. The site is home to around 2,500 mainly American personnel, and is a key component of both countries’ strategic outlook in the Indo-Pacific region. 
Lammy said the handover agreement had secured Diego Garcia’s “long-term future”, with a 99-year lease agreement in place with Mauritius. 
The siblings are aware that they don’t speak for all the Chagossians in Britain or Mauritius, though Mandarin believes that “90 per cent” share their views. The Chagos Refugees Group, which has claimed to represent more than 9,000 Chagossians around the world, wrote to Parliament in January to ask that it follow a 2019 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that Britain should end “its administration of the Chagos Islands as rapidly as possible”.
A lack of total agreement on who should administer the islands is why “we want to have self-determination, and maybe when we’re in Chagos we can go to a referendum,” Calou says. For all, she adds, “right of return is the main priority”. 
Her brother agrees that a referendum would be right. “It’s not fair for them to say that we can come here and be British, and yet they give away our islands to Mauritius. So Keir Starmer has to do a referendum.” 
As Parliament returns from recess, the siblings’ private tragedy is playing out as an almighty political row. The Prime Minister will be forced to hold a vote on the treaty, with many MPs worried about the risk posed to international security by the move. Mauritius is a close ally of China, Mandarin points out, and the trading away of his home islands “could create a very unstable political situation in the Indian Ocean”. 
For now, “we want to know the timetable of when the vote is going to take place,” he says. “We will be coming out in front of Parliament and demonstrating, to show that what the Government is doing is wrong, and that we want to stay British.” 
An FCDO spokesperson said: “The government has sought to keep Chagossian communities informed of the status of negotiations.
“The Minister for the Overseas Territories [Stephen Doughty] has had two meetings with Chagossian communities, following three meetings with Ministers and Officials under the last government. There are a range of views among Chagossian communities.
“The agreement supports the interests of Chagossian communities, including the freedom for Mauritius to develop a programme of resettlement on the Chagos Islands other than Diego Garcia, UK funding to support Chagossian communities in Mauritius, and a joint effort to facilitate visits for Chagossians to the Chagos Archipelago.”