The Latest Breaking News from Chagos

Chagossians have spent decades fighting to return to the islands after being forced to leave in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for a military base.

Britain and Mauritius have begun talks aimed at ending a decades-old spat over the legal status of the Chagos Islands, whose population was forcibly cleared in the late 1960s to allow the building of a joint UK-US military installation.

When Olivier Bancoult, Liseby Elysé, Suzelle Baptiste, Rosemonde Bertin and Marcel Humbert set off on the Bleu de Nîmes for the Chagos archipelago in February 2022, it marked the first time exiled Chagos Islanders had returned without UK officials. On the surface, the expedition was both scientific (to survey Blenheim…

On 15 February 2022 the Mauritian flag was raised on two Indian Ocean atolls, Peros Banos and Salomon, both belonging to the Chagos archipelago. This was the first time that Mauritius’ flag was raised in the Chagos Islands, even though there is clear evidence that these 60 islands form part…

'The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours.... There will be no indigenous population except seagulls," wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the British Foreign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos Islanders from their homes was taking shape in…

A superyacht hired by Mauritius recently set out to conduct a scientific survey of the Blenheim reef, 230km off the coast of Diego Garcia in the Chagos archipelago. A group of Chagossians accompanied the scientists in what has been hailed as an “historic” event by Mauritian prime minister Pravind Jugnauth.

The decolonisation of Mauritius was never fully completed. This is because, in 1965, the British government put islands belonging to Mauritius into a new colonial jurisdiction, the British Indian Ocean Territory, which still exists today. It is long past time for this colonial-era wrongdoing to be made right, and for…

Between 1968 to 1973 the UK deported islanders to make way for a US Air base and 3,000 settled in Crawley, West Sussex but now risk being deported because they were not born in the UK

Britain has reaffirmed its sovereignty over a remote Indian Ocean archipelago after Mauritius underlined its own territorial claim by planting a flag on the islands