3 hours ago
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There has long been a lobby against returning the Chagos Islands to Mauritius based on tenuous environmental arguments, and Clive Hambler’s letter (28 January) is an example. While the marine ecosystems of the Chagos are relatively pristine, the terrestrial environments are not, as the islands were used as major coconut plantations for a couple of centuries before being forcibly depopulated in the 1970s.
Aside from Diego Garcia, they have been effectively rewilded through neglect, so the vegetation is secondary forest, good but not “virgin”, and does support important seabird colonies. As for the marine environment, the now-displaced islanders fished the waters during those 200 years, also exporting some fish to Mauritius.
As I understand it, the Mauritian plan is to retain much of the current marine conservation zone for limited “artisanal” fishing only – the wider seas have been plundered by large-scale international fishing operations for decades, and in the 19th century for the industrial harvesting of sperm whales.
From their first settlement in the late 1700s, the islands were administered from Mauritius until detached as the British Indian Ocean Territory on Mauritius becoming independent in 1968. The displaced inhabitants, employees of the monopolist Chagos Agalega Company, were Mauritian and Seychellois citizens. The islands’ return to Mauritius is thus both legally and morally correct. There is no evidence that it will cause the “irreversible destruction” that Hambler claims.
Anthony Cheke
Co-author, Lost Land of the Dodo: The Ecological History of Mauritius, Réunion & Rodrigues
Clive Hambler notes that the Chagos Islands is the best protected tropical ecosystem on Earth and that Mauritius’s plans for fishing after regaining sovereignty threaten this. We need to recognise the reasons why the Chagos Islands are a “last great tropical wilderness” area.
The UK exiled thousands of British subjects in the 1960s and 1970s from the Chagos Islands to make way for an American military base. Declassified archival documents show that various legal mechanisms were used, including claiming that the Chagos Islanders were merely Mauritian “contract labourers”, to “clear” the islands to make way for the American inhabitation of the archipelago.
The UK imposed environmental protections more recently to counter Chagossians’ claims to their homeland, not out of concern for the environment. We must be careful not to repeat this logic by equating Mauritian sovereignty and the Chagossians’ return home with the notion that the islands’ biodiversity will be undercut. To do so is to repeat the narrative used by the UK to exile its own citizens decades ago.
Dr Tom Frost
Senior lecturer, Loughborough Law School
Chagos is not “pristine” – it has been ravaged by widespread bleaching and coral death. Its remarkable ecosystem is due to its geography and controversial history. It is remote, with nearly 200 years of low-impact plantations, banishment of about 1,500 Chagossians in the 1970s by Britain, a licensed tuna and inshore fishery for over 20 years, and 15 years as a no-take marine protected area (MPA).
The licensed fishery was well regulated, with no evidence that fish stocks were depleted, nor that a no-take regime was needed. In 2015, the MPA was found to be in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and is no longer recognised by world authorities. No longer legitimate, in due course it would become unenforceable.
The future no longer lies in failed fortress conservation but in the Mauritius MPA, announced in 2022, which will permit Chagossians to return to their homeland while protecting the islands and seas from exploitation. Where fishing will be permitted, there is to be “an agreed sustainable quota for artisanal, traditional, ceremonial and subsistence purposes”. No commercial fishing will be allowed. Under the treaty, the UK has agreed to provide assistance to Mauritius.
Richard Dunne
Lead author, The Creation of the Chagos Marine Protected Area: A Fisheries Perspective (Advances in Marine Biology volume 69, 2014)
