Comment by o11c
7 months ago
> Chagosians will finally be allowed to go back to their homes.
This is a reminder that these islands were uninhabited prior to European discovery.
It is true that they imported ... basically slaves ... from/via semi-nearby islands to work on it, but it's not like it was some ancestral island to them. When the work stopped, they were returned to the islands their ancestors came from (or at least via).
(This case is somewhat different than the also-originally-uninhabited Falkland Islands, where most people living there were always of European descent).
They still spent a few centuries there, similar to the Falkland islanders. Descent is irrelevant - a group of people has been living in a previously uninhabited place for a few centuries, it's their home.
And they weren't "returned", they were expelled from their homes and dumped somewhere else with no assistance.
That would be true if it were the same workers descending from prior workers. But especially in the last decades it was exactly the opposite.