Jagdish Koonjul, the Mauritian ambassador to the UN, last month raised his country’s flag on the Chagos archipelago – what Harold Wilson’s Labor government of 1965 named the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), in a flagrant breach of international law.
At a stroke, all the rights of the inhabitants – human, economic, civil – were torn up in a move opposed by international institutions ever since.
The British government evicted the entire indigenous population of more than 1,500 islanders from their homes on the archipelago.
It realized it could establish a new colony, claim sovereignty over the territory, and ignore a 1960 UN resolution on the right of self-determination – so long as no one lived there.