Foreign Policy

The Islanders Expelled To Build the West's Middle East Fortress

The British Empire evacuated the Chagos Islands to build a military base, which the U.S. is using in the Iran War. Now, a court ruling is giving the original owners hope of going home.

Matthew Petti | 4.1.2026 2:25 PM

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(Photo: News Licensing / MEGA / Newscom/NEWSUK/Newscom)

One of Michel Mandarin's last memories of his hometown was the U.S. government throwing all the dogs into a gas chamber. In 1967, the British authorities declared that people of the Chagos Islands were not "permanent inhabitants," and expelled them to make way for a new U.S.-British military base on the island of Diego Garcia. American naval engineers infamously killed the islanders' pets as a threat against staying.

This week, a British court ruled that people like Mandarin were really permanent inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, and they have a right to go back.

"There is no historical authority for a prerogative power to expel or permanently exclude a population of British subjects from the territory to which their citizenship belongs," British Indian Ocean Territory Chief Justice James Lewis wrote in his Tuesday ruling, denouncing the government's "inglorious" decision "to perpetuate the fiction that there was no settled or permanent population on the islands."

The Chagossian issue is one of the most stark underdog stories in modern times. On one side are several thousand exiles from a poor country, whom British officials dismissed as "some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure." On the other side are the interests of a superpower government; Diego Garcia has been key to U.S. military operations in the Middle East, including the current Iran War. Recently, Chagossians found an unexpected ally in British conservatives, who oppose a plan for Britain to give up control of the island.

After an international court in The Hague ruled in 2019 that the Chagos Islands rightfully belonged to Mauritius, the British government agreed to give Mauritius the territory and rent it back with a guaranteed 99-year lease on Diego Garcia. The Biden and Trump administrations both pressured Britain to take the deal. From the U.S. perspective, it was a win-win scenario, bringing Mauritius closer to the U.S. (and further from China) with a bribe that Britain paid.

Win-win for everyone except Britain, which was paying for the privilege of losing territory. Right-wing politicians seized on the deal as an obvious liability for Prime Minister Kier Starmer's left-wing Labour Party. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch called the planned handover "an act of great stupidity and a sign of total weakness" from the floor of Parliament. Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage went further, accusing Starmer of "treachery."

Chagossians themselves were divided about the deal. Olivier Bancoult, chairman of the Chagos Refugee Group, who was exiled at age four, called the treaty with Mauritius "a sign of recognition of the injustice done against Chagossians." But Frankie Bontemps, chairman of the nonprofit Chagossian Voices, whose mother was exiled, said that the handover left the community "powerless and voiceless in determining our own future." As it turned out,........

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