Cullen Murphy
Africa-Press – Mauritius. A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.
You could be forgiven for thinking that a label on a map—in this case the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT, pronounced somewhat like “buyout”—is something you could take at face value.
I own a coffee mug emblazoned with the territory’s coat of arms: a Union Jack, a crown, a palm tree, and some wavy lines representing water, all displayed on a shield supported by two sea turtles.
I have seen coins and stamps from the territory, and have frequently come across the domain name . io (for Indian Ocean). This entity has a flag, a website, and a commissioner in London.
And there is some dry land associated with the name: the 60 or so low-lying tiny islands of the remote Chagos Archipelago, spread across 6,000 square miles of sea, near the Indian Ocean’s geographic center.
I stepped foot on several of the islands last year, bringing back a vial of fine white sand that I hoped customs authorities wouldn’t mistake for something else.
BIOT was created in the 1960s as a useful fiction. The Chagos Archipelago originally formed part of the British island colony of Mauritius, some 1,300 miles to the west. As Mauritius sought independence, Britain set out to detach Chagos from the colony’s administrative jurisdiction.
Keeping it separate was important so that one of the archipelago’s islands, Diego Garcia, could effectively be leased to the United States for use as a major military base. Britain was in the process of a military withdrawal “east of Suez”; the U. S. was moving in, and Diego Garcia offered a strategic location.
To make the detachment from Mauritius look legitimate in international eyes, Britain claimed, falsely, that the islands were populated only by transient “contract labourers” and that, as a result, no vexing issues of self-determination were involved.
Source: Theatlantic
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