Please will you restrain the shouts of “Betrayal” from the current Tory leadership candidates and one past PM? They are all based on false assumptions:
- The Joint base on Diego Garcia is secured by a 99-year lease under UK control, despite Mauritian sovereignty.
- The USA and India are fully in support of this deal. President Biden has specifically welcomed it. There is no chance that China will sneak in by the back door.
- The return of the deported population should warm the hearts of those who want minorities to go back home. I have been fighting their legal cases for the past 25 years.
- The cost of looking after the current Sri Lankan asylum seekers has cost tens of millions of pounds and is now the responsibility of other countries
- It was a Tory Prime minister, Liz Truss, who first agreed with Mauritius to discuss returning Chagos to Mauritius.
- It was James Cleverly who announced the pursuit of these discussions but was stalled by David Cameron who had forbidden the return of the Islanders in 2016
- If the UK had supported the return of the population in 2000, when the High Court declared the deportation of the population to be illegal, the Islands would have had a UK-supporting population living there, just as in the Falklands. In all probability, Mauritius would never have been able to mount a successful claim at the International Court.
- It is arguable that PM Cameron and the FCDO are responsible for forfeiting sovereignty by reckless decisions to exclude the Chagossians from their homeland.
- Having lost the case in the ICJ, while Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary, the UK was directed by the United Nations to quit Chagos within 6 months.
- If there is any substance in shouts of betrayal, it lies in the failure of both Labour and Tory governments to respect the rights of Chagossians to go home under the flag they would have preferred.
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