Comment by IncreasePosts
7 months ago
What exactly is the Mauritian connection to the Chagos Archipelago?
Is it just because a lot of Chagossians went to Mauritius after getting kicked out? Obviously Mauritius and Chagos were ruled by the same people previous (French, then British), but is there a deeper history there?
I ask this because the Chagos archipelago is like 1500 miles away from Mauritius - the Maldives, Seychelles, and even Sri Lanka and India are all closer than that. And to my untrained eye, the Chagos archipelago looks like an extension of whatever process created the Maldives.
There isn’t one, as you say it’s over 2000km between them, the only link is that when Britain was administrating them it did so as a single territory. This is not some reunification of a country separated by a colonial power.
Its more a sort of shakedown of a ex-colonial power
The UK was shaking down the US for this military base.
The whole thing stands as a monument to the decline of the British Empire.
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More like reparations
>What exactly is the Mauritian connection to the Chagos Archipelago?
I can see where this line of questioning is going but what's the connection between Britain and Chagos or the US and Chagos for that matter?
215 years of British sovereignty?
The United States of America has had sovereignty of itself for 248 years, should the USA give up it's sovereignty in North America or do you draw the line between somewhere between 215 and 248?
At what point do you say, it is what it is?
215 years of sovereignty Or 215 years of colonialism? Are the displaced people able to vote for UK parliamentary elections? Are they UK citizen?
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>At what point do you say, it is what it is?
When you've lost the argument.
The obvious difference, is that you're comparing sovereignty over a nation/state's mainland, vs sovereignty over a separate colony, thousands of km away from the mainland (and even used only for military purposes, apparently)
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I think this is missing the point of the original question, which is - why would a Mauritian feel "relief" at the return of a geographical territory which is extremely far from itself? The claims of the UK or the US are irrelevant to this reasoning.
Indeed, I would like to understand the answer to the above question better, since the only reason I can see is that Mauritius as a colony used to govern the islands, and that seems to have just been a convenience of the French that doesn't strongly justify any current claims of sovereignty. And since the UK were the ones to forcibly evict the Chagossians from the islands, it seems a double-injustice to "return" their land to another sovereign power which is equally at a distance from the islands themselves. Do the Chagossians support this claim by the Mauritian government?
> Do the Chagossians support this claim by the Mauritian government?
They've complained about not being part to the discussion, but in practice most of them have Mauritian citizenship now, and it should be easier for them to deal with the Mauritian government to reclaim some of their land. It's a lesser-evil situation.
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Their “relief” comes in form of US dollars to be deposited
If both sovereigns have equal claim to the land, keeping the status quo should be preferred.
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/169
I'm assuming if the were ruled as the same entity for a significant amount of time that there was a lot of movement between the two regions during that time with all that implies, intermarriage etc.
All of which would probably still mean there are lots of people still alive from the time the regions were separated that feel themselves to be nonetheless connected and unfairly kept apart.
There is no people to be reunited here. Everyone was kicked out of Chagos to Mauritius so the UK military base could be build.
Ok, assumed the base just had part of it. So I guess there are people who want to go back to where they came from - but they can't because the base is still there?
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I imagine for such a small island chain you'd need a "parent" country to provide services, so picking the one where most people when when they were exiled probably makes sense. May also be a language thing?