A military base, a displaced people and Trump’s China fears: Burnham’s Chagos test
Britain’s new prime minister’s first challenge may lie in the Indian Ocean where the future of a US-British facility remains unresolved.
Source excerpt
Bertrice Pompe was born in Diego Garcia, situated in the Indian Ocean halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia, in 1971, making her one of the last Chagossians to enter the world on an island that her family would soon be forced to leave.
“Some families, like brothers, sisters, were separated,” she said. “Some went to the Seychelles, some to Mauritius … close family, brothers, sister, mother, father, separated … and they never saw each other again.”
Before Mauritian independence in 1968, the British government detached the Chagos Islands from the Mauritius administrative boundaries to create the British Indian Ocean Territory.
The entire population of the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago was removed in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for one of the most strategically important US-British military bases in the world.
Bold News stores the normalized extraction for evidence and analysis. This public wrapper shows a limited excerpt; use the original link for the publisher's complete presentation.