United States President Donald Trump appears to have endorsed the deal struck by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to hand over the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, weeks after calling it a “great stupidity”.
Trump had last month described the United Kingdom’s decision to cede sovereignty of the Indian Ocean archipelago, which includes a joint US-UK military base on the island of Diego Garcia, as an “act of great stupidity”.
The US president said he held productive talks with Starmer on Thursday and that the UK leader had made the “best deal he could make”.
But he also warned in a post on Truth Social that the US would retain the right to “militarily secure and reinforce” the US presence on the island of Diego Garcia if it were threatened.
The British government said in a statement that “the leaders agreed their governments would continue working closely to guarantee the future operation of the base and speak again soon”, the AFP news agency reported.
Under a deal agreed last May, the governments of the UK and Mauritius jointly announced that full sovereignty of the Chagos, a remote group of more than 60 islands, would again belong to Mauritius in exchange for guarantees that the US military base could continue operating there for the next 99 years.
Last year’s announcement stirred a range of emotions among the Chagossians, who were forced from their island home in the 1960s and 1970s and resettled in Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK. For decades, they have campaigned to return to their ancestral lands freely, without any restrictions.
The Chagos Islands have been under British control since 1814. In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain forcibly evicted nearly 2,000 locals to make way for the US military base, which played a pivotal role in US military operations in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, the US also acknowledged that the base had been used for covert rendition flights of “terrorism” suspects.
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