If you feel good news has in recent times gone the way of the dodo, look no further than the homeland of that long-extinct bird — Mauritius — for a dose of encouragement. There, among the islands of the Indian Ocean, the Chagossian people have demonstrated the power of peaceful resistance.

Amid ongoing slaughter from Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and the Congo, Mauritius offers a victory for resolving conflicts through diplomacy rather than force. It’s a victory for decolonization and international law. And it’s a victory for Africa, the African diaspora and indigenous and other displaced peoples who simply want to go home. To the shock of many, US President Donald Trump actually made this possible by bucking far-right allies in the United States and Great Britain.

In late May, the British government signed a historic treaty with Mauritius. They gave up Britain’s last African colony, the Chagos Islands, and allowed the exiled Chagossian people to return home to all but one of them. The British also promised to pay an estimated £3.4 billion ($4.6 billion) over 99 years in exchange for continued control over the largest island, Diego Garcia. Though few Americans even know it exists, the Chagos Archipelago, located in the center of the Indian Ocean, is home to a major Diego Garcia-based US military station. This base was established in 1971 and has played a key role in virtually every US war and military operation in the Middle East since.

Diego Garcia is one of the most powerful installations in a network of more than 750 global US military bases that have helped control foreign lands in a largely unnoticed fashion since World War II. Far more secretive than the Guantánamo Bay naval base, Diego Garcia has been, with rare exceptions, off limits to anyone but US and British military personnel. Until recently, that ban also applied to the other Chagos Islands from which the indigenous Chagossian people were exiled during the base’s creation. Human Rights Watch has called this exile a “crime against humanity.”  

While the victories the Chagossians, a group numbering less than 8,000, finally achieved are anything but perfect, they wouldn’t have happened without a more than half-century-long struggle for justice. A real-life David and Goliath story, it demonstrates the ability of small but dedicated groups to overcome the most powerful governments on Earth.

A history of resistance

The story begins around the time of the American Revolution, when the enslaved ancestors of today’s Chagossians began settling on Diego Garcia and the other uninhabited Chagos islands. French businessmen from Mauritius brought them from Africa and, with the combined force of indentured laborers from India, used them to build coconut plantations there.

Over time, the population grew, gained emancipation and formed a new society. First known as the Ilois (the Islanders), they developed their own traditions, history and Chagossian Kreol language. Although plantations dominated their islands, the Chagossians enjoyed a generally secure life, thanks in part to their often militant demands for better working conditions. Over time, they came to enjoy universal employment, free basic healthcare and education, regular vacations, housing, burial benefits and a workday they could control, while living on gorgeous tropical islands.  

“Life there paid little money, a very little,” one of the longtime leaders of the Chagossian struggle, Rita Bancoult, told me before her death in 2016. “But it was the sweet life.”

The footprint of freedom

Chagos remained a little-known part of the British Empire from the early 19th century, when Britain seized the archipelago from France. That ended in the 1950s, when Washington grew interested in the islands as possible military bases.

Amidst Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and accelerating decolonization globally, US officials worried about being evicted from bases in former European colonies that were gaining independence. Securing rights to build new military installations on strategically located islands became one solution to that perceived problem. This led Stuart Barber, a US Navy planner, to find what he called “that beautiful atoll of Diego Garcia, right in the middle of the ocean.” He and other officers loved Diego Garcia because it was within striking distance of a vast region, from southern Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia. Additionally, it also possessed a protected lagoon capable of handling the largest naval vessels and a major air base.

In 1960, American administrators began secret negotiations with their British counterparts. By 1965, they had convinced the British to violate international law by separating the Chagos Islands from the rest of their colony of Mauritius to create the “British Indian Ocean Territory.” No matter that the UN decolonization rules then prohibited colonial powers from chopping up colonies when, like Mauritius, they were gaining their independence.

Britain’s last created colony would have one purpose: hosting military bases. US negotiators insisted Chagos come under their “exclusive control (without local inhabitants)” — an expulsion order embedded in a parenthetical phrase.

The US and Britain sealed their deal with a 1966 agreement: Washington would secretly transfer $14 million (over $1.3 billion today) to the British government in exchange for basing rights on Diego Garcia. The British agreed to do the dirty work of getting rid of the Chagossians.

First, they prevented any Chagossians who had left on vacation or for medical treatment from returning home. Next, they cut off food and medical supplies to the islands. Finally, they deported the remaining Chagossians 1,200 miles to Mauritius and the Seychelles in the western Indian Ocean.

Both governments acknowledged that the expulsions were illegal. Both agreed to “maintain the fiction” that the Chagossians were “migrant laborers,” not a people whose ancestors had lived and died there for generations. In a secret cable, a British executive called them “Tarzans” and, in a no less racist reference to the novel Robinson Crusoe, “Man Fridays.”

In 1971, as the US Navy started base construction on Diego Garcia, British officials and American sailors rounded up people’s pet dogs, lured them into sealed sheds and gassed them with the exhaust from Navy vehicles before burning their carcasses. Chagossians watched in horror. Most were then deported in the holds of overcrowded cargo ships carrying dried coconuts, horses and guano (bird droppings). Chagossians have compared the conditions to those found on slave ships.

In exile, they effectively received no resettlement assistance. When the Washington Post finally broke the story in 1975, a journalist found Chagossians living in “abject poverty” in the slums of Mauritius. By the 1980s, the base on Diego Garcia would be a multibillion-dollar installation. The US military dubbed it the “Footprint of Freedom.”

An epic struggle

The Chagossians have long demanded both the right to return home and compensation for the theft of their homeland. Led mostly by a group of fiercely committed women, they protested, petitioned, held hunger strikes, resisted riot police, went to jail, approached the UN, filed lawsuits and pursued nearly every strategy imaginable to convince the US and British governments to let them return.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, protests won the Chagossians on Mauritius slight compensation from the British government, valued at around $6,000 (around $21,000 today) per adult. Many used the money to pay off significant debts incurred since their arrival. Chagossians in the Seychelles, however, received nothing.

Still, their desire to return to the land of their ancestors remained. Hope rekindled when the Chagos Refugees Group, led by Rita Bancoult’s son, Olivier, sued the British government in 1997. To the surprise of many, they won. Over several tumultuous years, British judges ruled their expulsion illegal three times — yet Britain’s highest court repeatedly ruled in favor of the government by a single vote. Judges in the US similarly rejected a suit, deferring to the president’s power to make foreign policy. The European Court of Human Rights also ruled against them.

A strategic alliance

Despite the painful defeats, Chagossian prospects brightened when the Chagos Refugees Group allied with the Mauritian government to take Britain to the International Court of Justice. Aided by Chagossian testimony about their expulsion, which an African Union representative called “the voice of Africa,” Mauritius won. In 2019, that court overwhelmingly ruled that Mauritius was the rightful sovereign in Chagos. It directed the United Kingdom to end its colonial rule “as rapidly as possible.” A subsequent UN General Assembly resolution ordered the British “to cooperate with Mauritius in facilitating the resettlement” of Chagossians.

Backed by the US, the British initially ignored the international consensus. But in 2022, then-UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s government suddenly began negotiations with the Mauritians. Two years later, the parties reached a deal with the support of then-US President Joe Biden’s administration. The deal recognized Mauritian sovereignty over Chagos but allowed Britain to retain control of Diego Garcia for at least 99 years, including the continued operation of the US base. The Chagossians would be allowed to return to all their islands except, painfully, Diego Garcia, and receive compensation.

The Chagos Refugees Group and other Chagossian organizations generally supported the deal, but continued to demand the right to live on Diego Garcia. Some smaller Chagossian groups — especially in Britain, where many Chagossians have lived since winning full UK citizenship in 2002 — opposed the agreement. Some still support British rule while others seek Chagossian sovereignty.

Right-wing forces in Britain and the US quickly tried to kill the deal. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Brexit protagonist Nigel Farage and then-US Senator Marco Rubio campaigned for continued British colonial rule. They often spouted bogus theories suggesting the agreement would benefit China.

Trump’s 2024 election and his appointment of Rubio as Secretary of State left many fearing they would kill the treaty. Instead, when UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Washington, Trump indicated his support. A finalized treaty grew closer to reality.

An imperfect victory?

In the last hours, the deal briefly faced a block by a lawsuit that a judge later dismissed. “I’ve been betrayed by the British government,” Bernadette Dugasse, one of two Chagossians who brought the suit, said of the treaty. “I will have to keep on fighting the British government till they accept for me to settle [on her birthplace, Diego Garcia].”

A shadowy “Great British PAC” (political action committee) is funding Dugasse’s suit and plans for additional legal action. The group, which won’t disclose its donors, is led by right-wing political figures still trying, in their words, to “Save Chagos.” However, “saving Chagos” doesn’t mean saving Chagos for the Chagossians, but saving it from the end of British colonial control. In other words, right-wing figures are cynically using Chagossians to try to uphold the colonial status quo. Even Dugasse fears she’s being used.

On the other hand, the Chagos Refugees Group and many other Chagossians celebrate, at least partially. For the first time in more than half a century of struggle, they can go home to most of their islands. They too criticize the ban on returning to Diego Garcia and the pitiful compensation being offered: just £40 million (over $53 million) earmarked for a Chagossian “trust fund” operated by the Mauritian government with British consultation. Divided among the entire population, this could be as little as £5,000 (roughly $6,678) per person for the theft of their homeland and more than half a century in exile.

“I’m very happy after such a long fight,” Sabrina Jean, leader of the Chagos Refugees Group UK Branch, told me. “But I’m also upset about how the U.K. government continues to treat us for all the suffering it gave Chagossians,” she added. “£40 million is not enough.”

The Mauritian government should benefit more unambiguously than the Chagossians: The treaty formally ends decolonization from Britain, reuniting Mauritius and the Chagos Islands. Mauritius will receive an average of £101 million (nearly $135 million) in rent per year for 99 years for Diego Garcia, plus £1.125 billion (roughly $1.5 billion) in “development” funds paid over 25 years.

“The development fund will be used to resettle” Chagossians on the islands outside Diego Garcia, said Olivier Bancoult, now the president of the Chagos Refugees Group, about a commitment he’s received from the Mauritian government. “They have promised to rebuild Chagos.”

Bancoult and other Chagossians insist they also should receive some of the annual rent for Diego Garcia. “Parts of it needs to be used for Chagossians,” he told me by phone.

The continuing ban on Chagossians living on Diego Garcia clearly violates Chagossians’ human rights, as well as the International Court’s ruling and the UN resolution of 2019. Human Rights Watch criticized the treaty for appearing to “entrench the policy that prevents Chagossians from returning to Diego Garcia” and failing to acknowledge US and British responsibility for compensating the Chagossians and reconstructing infrastructure to enable their return.

“We will not give up concerning Diego,” Bancoult told me. For those born on Diego Garcia and those with ancestors buried there, it’s not enough to return to the other Chagos islands, at least 150 miles away. “We will continue to argue for our right to return to Diego Garcia,” he added.

While the Americans and British have long used “security” as an excuse to keep Chagossians off the island, they could still live on the other half of Diego Garcia, miles from the base, just as civilians live near US bases worldwide. Civilian laborers who are neither US nor British citizens have lived and worked there for decades. Chagossians will be eligible for such jobs, although historically, they’ve faced discrimination in getting hired.

That the US military has ended up a winner in the treaty could explain Trump’s surprising support. The treaty secures base access for at least 99 years and possibly 40 more. That means the treaty is a setback for those Mauritians, Americans and others who have campaigned to close the base. It has cost US taxpayers billions of dollars and been a launchpad for catastrophic wars in the Middle East, which a certain president claimed to oppose.

While many Chagossians are privately critical of the base that caused their expulsion and occupies their land, most have prioritized going home over demanding its closure. The campaign to return has been hard enough.

Ultimately, I’m in no position to decide if the Chagos treaty is a victory or not. That’s for Chagossians and Mauritians to decide, not a citizen of the country that, along with Great Britain, is the primary author of that ongoing, shameful crime.

Let me note that victories are rarely, if ever, complete, especially when the power imbalance between parties is so vast. Chagossians, backed by allies in Mauritius and beyond, are continuing their campaign for the right to return to Diego Garcia, for the reconstruction of Chagossian society in Chagos, and for full, proper compensation. The Mauritian and British governments can correct the treaty’s flaws through a diplomatic “exchange of letters.”

“We are closer to the goal,” Olivier assured me. “We are very near.”

Having won the right to return to most of their islands after 50 years of struggle, Olivier has been thinking about his mother. “I would like that my mom would be here, but I know if she would be here, she would be crying,” he said, “because she always believed in what I do, and she always encouraged me to go until the destination, the goal.”

For now, inspired by the memory of his mother and too many Chagossians who will never see a return to their homeland, Olivier told me, “Lalit kontin” — the struggle continues.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.