It is welcome news that the agreement between the UK and Mauritius to return sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius means that the Chagos Islanders will be able to return to the vast majority of the islands (Britain to return Chagos Islands to Mauritius ending years of dispute, 3 October). For far too many years, the UK applied one set of values to the (white) Falkland islanders and another to the (black) Chagossians, who had actively been expelled by the UK from the islands that they had called home for generations.
While shamefully late – too late for the hundreds of Chagossians who have died in the intervening years – it is never too late to draw on our values and the future identity we want to have as a country, and change tack. It takes courage to do this, and I applaud the new government, led by Sir Keir Starmer, and civil servants for doing so. It also took courage for the Chagossians, led by Olivier Bancoult, to never give up and to be strong in their own identity.
And deep applause to two other players: the late Sir Anerood Jugnauth (the former Mauritian prime minister) for the personal conviction he brought to Mauritius’s cause, having been part of the wider Mauritian negotiating party that succumbed to intense pressure to allow the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in the 1960s; and David Snoxell, one of my predecessors as British high commissioner to Mauritius, who challenged groupthink and gathered cross-party support in parliament to ensure the issue remained on the domestic political table. He was called a traitor (as was I) for daring to challenge orthodoxy. He understood that a truly successful country can never rise in the future if it remains shackled by injustices from the past.
Jonathan Drew
British high commissioner to Mauritius, 2014-2017
