Maldives aligns with Quasi-Totality of Countries on Sovereignty over Chagos

20.01.2023

In an important re-alignment, the Maldives Government has announced a change in its position and is now in favour of Mauritius’s sovereignty over the Chagos.  (See L’Express, 13 January).

This change highlights the UK-USA diplomatic isolation on this issue. It means only three countries in the whole world now vote with the UK-USA on who owns Chagos:  Israel, Hungary and Australia.

But the congenital idiocy of the colonizer allows the UK-USA to persist in flaunting international law, even when it relies on this very same international law for other issues. 

Chagos sovereignty has been so patently and so publicly adjudicated by the UN’s top court, its top democratic assembly, and its binding tribunal of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, and yet the UK-USA just ignores the law, not to mention the ethics, of its own actions, however ludicrous it makes itself look. Just as the emperor continued to flaunt his invisible new clothes, so the UK-USA continues to flaunt international law. This power that the colonizer (or emperor) exude then proceeds, in turn, to affect the perception of their minions. 

And this, in turn, means that the degree of the illegality, the degree of the enormity of the UK-USA position, has a hard time sinking in to the heads of all those who bow down blindly to “power". Even after all the public clarification? The result is that the obligation for the UK-USA empire to get up and get out of Chagos just does not get acted upon, just as the emperor’s new clothes left him prancing about in the nude.

Thus the importance of Maldives now changing its stand:  it underlines the degree of isolation of the UK before the eyes of the world. Maybe that can make the UK-USA’s minions think?

This change in Maldives’ stance follows the UN General Assembly original vote that already isolated the UK-USA alliance. Then, in 2019, Maldives was one of “FOUR” (repeat “4”) miserable states in the whole world that supported continued British colonization of this part of the Republic of Mauritius. Over 100 countries (116 to be precise) supported Mauritius’s sovereignty. So now, with Maldives’ change in position, it is only THREE countries left that support the UK’s continued colonization.

It is not a time for the Mauritian State to bow down, as it is doing. Nor to concede anything at all. Nor to look for pecuniary advantage.  Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth must simply call for a time-frame in which the UK will leave, taking its ally with it, after having cleaned up the environmental mess this ally, the USA, made on Diego Garcia. The UK was given 6 months by the UN General Assembly to pack up and go. It is already by now in further illegality. And further isolation.

The UK persists in its colonizing mission in claiming the whole of Chagos as its British Indian Ocean Territory following anachronistic “Royal Orders in Council”, splitting the colony of Mauritius, forcibly removing all the Mauritians living on Chagos, subletting one of its stolen islands Diego Garcia to the USA for a military base that was, and still is, outside all social and democratic control, and banishing all Mauritians, including Chagossians. This bit of territory has been exposed as one of the “dark holes” where “rendering” and torture of prisoners took place outside all democratic control. It must now be totally decolonized and full democratic structures for Chagos set up, not unlike those for Rodrigues Island, within the Republic of Mauritius.

The UK bluffed its way for years, or rather for decades, promising the Mauritian State’s gullible leaders that it would “open negotiations” if they just did not go to the international arena over Chagos. Mauritius would, the UK insisted and propagandized, “lose” anyway. This UK hoodwinking Mauritian Prime Ministers went on for 50 years. Eventually the UK, and all its different formal branches of government and even many of its NGO’s, like Greenpeace to name one, ended up, acting like a minion, thus exposing both its government and itself as deceitful: this is why we refer to the “congenital idiocy of the colonizer”. They do not realize that the truth has a way of coming out. The lies that flow from the doctrine of “might is right” end up convincing the inventors of the lies, and all those under its hegemony. This, in turn, makes them look stupid, if not unscrupulous. The British State hoodwinked successive Mauritian governments for so long that it, the UK, in one of its most deceitful moments, requested – before the entire UN General Assembly – 6 months’ delay for a UN resolution on Chagos that Mauritius had placed on the agenda in exchange for negotiations on bilateral Chagos sovereignty. That was in November 2016. What did the UK do when Mauritius agreed? The very next month, it just went ahead and, in front of the entire international community, cold-bloodedly “re-newed” its already illegal 50-year lease arrangement with the USA for Diego Garcia for another 20 years! 

This act of diplomatic treachery so angered the Mauritian then Prime Minister Aneerood Jugnauth that, along with decades of pressure from grass-roots activism in Mauritius, it combined, eventually, to force the Mauritian state to begin to act on the international arena by organizing the African union to propose that the UN General Assembly request the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion. And no-one knows better than the ICJ. The ICJ said the UK was occupying the whole of Chagos illegally, and always had been, and that the whole of Mauritius, including Chagos, should at once be decolonized. 

And the Mauritian state, under political pressure from us and others, proceeded in other UN bodies. And it won and won and won in all the international forums. The UK just lost and lost and lost. International law won the day. The United Nations map of the world now has Chagos as part of the Republic of Mauritius. Even the Universal Postal union has chucked BIOT stamps out! The UN’s Indian Ocean Tuna Commission has expelled the UK as a “coastal state” member, because its claim to BIOT is illegal. And on it goes.

And now, the Maldives, one of four countries that originally supported the UK-USA at the UN General Assembly in 2019, has even gone and abandoned the UK-USA. 

So, it is not just a case of Maldives aligning itself with the position of merely “de nombreux pays, principalement africains, qui ont decide de reconnaitre la souverainete de Maurice sur les Chagos,” as L’Express sub-title puts it in its article signed “La Redaction” on 13 January. It is Maldives aligning itself with the whole of the UN system, with the whole of the African union, alongside the State of Mauritius, and against the UK-USA, who now stand out like two sore thumbs. They have only THREE remaining allies.  They are the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu, Hungary of Victor Orban, and when Australia voted, it was under the right-winger, PM Scott Morrison.

All this to emphasise that it is a moment in history for the Mauritian state to act on principle. 

The UK-USA have painted themselves into a terrible unethical corner. They rely on international law to justify their actions in supplying arms to Ukraine with the political aim of weakening, or perhaps defeating, Russia. They might be stretching “international law” if they try to claim it to cover the destruction of the North Stream Pipeline, which they stand accused of. They said they would do it. And no-one else has an interest in doing it. Not many countries have the capacity to, even if they wanted to. Now their un-transparent enquiry, from which they excluded Russia, comes to the ludicrous conclusion that there is “no proof Russia did it”, as if Russia had any interest at all in blowing up its own facilities. All this to say, the UK-USA are right now isolated, and they do not like it. Their role in regard to Mauritius’ decolonization over the Chagos issue has been atrocious for 60 years. Now it exposes their hypocrisy in relying on “international law” to justify their arming of Ukraine.

The UK must leave Chagos now, and must take its illegal US “tenant” with it. Sovereignty is not negotiable. Any negotiations Pravind Jugnauth goes into should be only be over the question of a time-frame for closing the base, cleaning up the mess, and the UK-USA getting off all islands of Chagos.

The UK will definitely owe immense reparations – both to Chagossians for their inordinate suffering at the hands of the UK colonizer and US occupier, and to the Mauritian state for loss of use of part of its territory for all those decades of military occupation.

Now is the very worst moment for Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth to go looking for money from the USA in the form of rent for part of the Republic of Mauritius for the USA to house a military base. For a start the base will be outside the democratic control of the people of Mauritius responsible for what happens on Mauritian territory. The history of illegal US aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan already bodes ill for the future. So, why does the Mauritian Prime Minister take the low moral ground when finally there is victory against the colonizer? And why bind Mauritius into a military alliance with a country like the USA, at the very moment when the extreme right is gaining ground? And why go into a military alliance with the UK-USA at a time when India, also under Modi’s very right-wing leadership, is in that same military alliance, and has built military facilities on Agalega, part of Mauritius, under a treaty agreement that is still kept secret from the Mauritian people? It is all wrong.

This is a moment of all dangers. 

We call for a non-aligned status for the state of Mauritius. 

Now is the time to tell the UK to respect international law, and to provide a time frame for exactly when it and its ally the USA intend to go, as go they must, under international law. 

Alain Ah Vee, Lindsey Collen and Ragini Kistnasamy

for LALIT

17 January 2023