Comment by s_dev
7 months ago
>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?
7 months ago
>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?
"People with roots in the Chagos Islands have criticised what they called their "exclusion" from negotiations leading to the UK government's deal to give up its sovereignty of the region."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy78ejg71exo
>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)
Hawaii then, 3,200 km away from the US mainland, home to one of the largest US navel bases and only part of the US for the last 126 years when they annexed it?
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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.
Perhaps things would have turned out differently if the UK had given British citizenship to the Chagossians instead of kicking them out of their islands. After all, this method worked in the Falklands.
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.