08 March 2007

President's threat over Chagos Islands

Sir Anerood Jugnauth, the President of Mauritius has stated that he would be prepared to quit the Commonwealth over the issue of the Chagos Islanders. who were expelled from their homes in the Chagos archipelago during the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the US military base on Diego Garcia. He is also prepared to take the UK to the International Court of Justice over the islanders' plight.

Jugnauth also said he believed Mauritius had also suffered injustice over the issue of the Chagos Islands: "We have always claimed Chagos from the British….We were deprived of part of our territory and this is against all the United Nations resolutions." The Chagos Islands were ceded to Britain in 1814. They were administered first as part of the Seychelles and then as part of Mauritius. The Islands were retained as the British Indian Ocean Territory when Mauritius was granted independence in 1968.

Jugnauth said he did not think leaving the Commonwealth, a 53-nation grouping of mainly former British colonies, would be too high a price to pay."I won't say a very high price," he said. "We are in the Commonwealth, we get some benefit out of it, but there's not much that we get."


Click here for previous posts on the Chagos Islanders

3 comments:

jams o donnell said...

Nobody can ever suggest that the chagossians are anything other than peaceful in pursuit of returning to the Chagos Islands

A lot of the chagossians are on Mauritius which explains the prime minister's interest, that and the long standing territorial claim

beakerkin said...

Jams

The Chagos people are a normal people. The world is filled with similar people and similar complaints. The greatest diservice the radical left has ever done was the overly romantic stereotype of the terrorist.

The time has come for this myth to go. Poverty doesn't breed terror, twisted Utopianism that devalues human life breeds terror.

jams o donnell said...

The likes of Baaader Meinhof were hardly starving in the guttes when they started their terror activities.
THe 9/11 bombers were not poor either.