President Trump is reportedly wanting to buy the Chagos Islands from Mauritius as his way of securing control of Diego Garcia. First, the United Kingdom must hand back their sovereignty.

In late March, Iran fired two ballistic missiles from 3,800 km to the central Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The US struck Iranian missile launchers from its military base there. Now President Trump wants to buy the strategic territory from the United Kingdom.

According to American, British and Israeli officials, one of Iran’s missiles broke apart during flight; the other appears to have been destroyed by US defences. Iran has denied responsibility for the launches, which until then were thought to be beyond its ballistic missile range.

British Prime Minister Starmer gave the United States permission for the strike from Diego Garcia; he was warned by Iran’s foreign minister against allowing the UK’s territory to be used for ‘aggression against Iran’.

Arguments over Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Island chain, have been going on for 60 years. Initially an Indian Ocean stopover port for Portuguese, Dutch and British sailors, the archipelago was taken over by the Dutch in 1638, who abandoned it in 1710. Plantation workers were brought from the Maldives, Seychelles, and a French possession called Île de France. Britain captured that from Napoleon in 1810 and renamed it Mauritius, which remained a British colony until 1968. Having initially denied that the Chagos Islands were inhabited – terra nullius — the United Kingdom, aware of the value of the Chagos........

© Pearls and Irritations