The UK’s government on Wednesday confirmed that it would not finalize a deal to hand over sovereignty of the contested Chagos Islands to Mauritius until US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration is consulted.
The governments of the UK and Mauritius have been negotiating in recent months to complete an agreement to settle the future of the disputed Indian Ocean archipelago, which is home to a strategically important UK-US naval and bomber base.
However, the agreement was opposed Trump and his supporters. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, warned last year that the deal posed “a serious threat” to US national security.
Photo: AP
The military base, on Diego Garcia, the largest of the chain of tropical islands off the tip of India, has supported US military operations from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, the US acknowledged it also had been used for clandestine rendition flights of terror suspects.
The official spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it was “obviously now right” for Trump’s administration to consider any deal.
“It is perfectly reasonable for the new US administration to actually consider the detail and we will obviously have those discussions with them,” he said. “We will only agree to a deal that is in the UK’s best interests and protects our national security.”
Media reports this week had said that officials from the UK and Mauritius were hurrying to complete the deal before Trump entered the White House.
The UK split the islands away from Mauritius, a former British colony, in 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence, and called the Chagos archipelago the British Indian Ocean Territory.
In the 1960s and 1970s the UK evicted up to 2,000 people from the islands so the US military could build the Diego Garcia base.
Mauritius has long contested the UK’s claim to the archipelago, and in recent years the UN and its top court have urged the UK to return the Chagos to Mauritius.
The UK agreed to do so in a draft deal in October last year, but that has been delayed by a change of government in Mauritius and reported quarrels over how much the UK should pay for the lease of the Diego Garcia airbase.
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