Comment by bpodgursky
7 months ago
No, because they will always find some phantom menace of colonization to complain about.
Look at the Chagos Islands themselves — they were literally not inhabited until Europeans settled them. There's no "decolonization" narrative here, because there's no native population.
Once the UK leaves the Chagos islands, it will be about foreign aid with strings attached, or IMF loans, or foreign investment in farmland, or whatever. It's not a solvable problem.
> they were literally not inhabited until Europeans settled them
Decolonization is not simply about removing troops from here or there, it's about taking responsibility for actions that enriched $motherland at the expense of $colony. French and British colonialists moved people to Chagos for their own profit, and then (together with Americans) ejected their descendants from what had become, by then, a homeland; pushing governments to take responsibility for these actions is the moral thing to do.
You are illustrating my point perfectly.
There is no amount of "decolonizing" the UK can do that will put an end to the grievances. As long as African warlords want to blame their problems on someone else, they will find a way to link it in some nebulous way to lasting inter-generational damage by ex-colonizers.
> There is no amount of "decolonizing" the UK can do that will put an end to the grievances.
That's not true. Plenty of decolonized countries just go about their business, once the outstanding issues are solved; or even when they try to stir shit, nobody listens to them.
Here though we do have an outstanding problem that needs to be solved. Once the islands go to Mauritius and the expelled population is resettled, there will be nothing left to complain about in that particular area. Obviously, thanks to the sheer size of injustice perpetrated in colonial times, there will be plenty left to complain about elsewhere. The only answer is to solve problems with goodwill, not to bury our heads in the sand pretending our ancestors never did what they did.