“The decolonization” of Mauritius is complete, the country’s Prime Minister Pravind Jugnath said against the backdrop of the return of the Chagos Archipelago to the state by Great Britain.
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The British government said on Thursday that the United Kingdom had reached an agreement with Mauritius to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, including the island of Diego Garcia, where the British-American military base is located.
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“Today, 56 years after gaining independence, our decolonization is complete,” the prime minister wrote on his social networks, accompanying the publication with the hashtags “Chagos” and “Mauritius.”
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Mauritius and Chagos have been colonial possessions of the British Crown since 1845. Mauritius gained independence in 1968, but Chagos continued to remain a British Indian Ocean Territory. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chagossian population was deported to the Seychelles or Mauritius. In 1966, Britain leased the largest island of the Diego Garcia archipelago to the United States for fifty years, on which an American military base was built. In 2016, the lease was extended until 2036.
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Chagos has been the subject of disputes between Britain and Mauritius for decades. In 2019, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requiring Britain to relinquish control of the islands.
