When the governments of Mauritius and the United Kingdom issued a joint declaration at the beginning of this month that they had “reached an historic political agreement on the exercise of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago” after a half-a-century long dispute and two years of direct negotiations, Joe Biden reportedly went “so far as to ‘applaud’ [the agreement] within minutes of the announcement!”
The United States president has every reason to be pleased.
After all, according to this much-lauded agreement, British rule over the Archipelago’s 60 or so small and uninhabited islands will come to an end, but there will be no change in the status of its main and most southerly isle, Diego Garcia, which is hosting a vast, secretive US Navy base.
As part of the agreement, Mauritius, which gained independence from Britain in 1968 after abandoning its claim to sovereignty over the Chagos, agreed that it would allow the US base to continue operating on Diego Garcia for the next 99 years – renewable. Under the deal, Chagossians, who were exiled from the archipelago in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the US base, are allowed to return to the smaller Chagos islands – but they are still not permitted to access Diego Garcia freely or resettle there.
While the deal will not satisfy the United Nations, which has long been calling for the “complete” decolonisation of the Archipelago, or Chagossians, who wanted to “return home” without any conditions or exclusions, the White House is understandably relieved that an agreement has been reached between the UK and Mauritius that allows the US to keep the military facility it has been using for more than 50 years.
Diego Garcia is located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, strategically positioned between Asia and Africa. The base may be thousands of miles from Washington, but it is within flying distance of the Middle East, and it has provided the US with important leverage during many crises threatening US interests in and around that region.
After Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution which overthrew the Shah and redrew the global map of alliances, for example, Diego Garcia underwent the largest expansion of any US military location since the Vietnam War. But the base has been the busiest in the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on the US in 2001. Within weeks of the attacks, the base expanded further and welcomed an additional 2,000 Air Force personnel.
During the subsequent so-called “war on terror”, hundreds of individuals were captured, transported around the world and interrogated in secret prisons under the auspices of the CIA, but without legal oversight. We now know that Diego Garcia also played a role in this euphemistically named “extraordinary rendition program”.
For years, however, both American and British officials denied that the base ever hosted, even in passing, any “war on terror” detainees.
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