About 60 years ago, the United Kingdom government secretly planned, with the United States, to force an entire Indigenous people, the Chagossians, from their homes in the Chagos Archipelago. The Indian Ocean islands were part of Mauritius, then a UK colony. The two governments agreed that a US military base would be built on Diego Garcia, the largest of the inhabited Chagos islands, and the island’s inhabitants would be removed. The UK government split the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, creating a new colony in Africa, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). So that it would not have to report to the United Nations about its continued colonial rule, the UK falsely declared that Chagos had no permanent population.

The reality was that a community had lived on Chagos for centuries. The Chagossians are predominately descendants of enslaved people, forcibly brought from the African continent and Madagascar to the then-uninhabited Chagos islands where they worked on coconut plantations under French and British rule. Over the centuries they became a distinct people with their own Chagossian Creole language, music, and culture.

But the UK and US governments treated them as a people without rights, who they could permanently displace from their homeland without consultation or compensation to make way for a military base. From 1965 to 1973, the UK and US forced the entire Chagossian population from all the inhabited Chagos islands, not only Diego Garcia but also Peros Banhos and Salomon. They abandoned them in Mauritius or Seychelles, where they lived in abject poverty.

Report by the Human Rights Watch