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15 hours ago
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Keir Starmer is to urge Donald Trump to recognise that a US rejection of Mauritius’s legal claim to own the Chagos Islands including the strategic US military base at Diego Garcia may stoke tensions similar to those in the South China Sea.
Starmer is due to meet Trump next Friday mainly to discuss the future of Ukraine, but also a UK plan for Gaza’s reconstruction under international protection with no need for Palestinians to be required to quit the Gaza Strip. The paper is similar but not identical to proposals being discussed by Arab foreign ministers in Riyadh, which has a strong international component and would prevent Hamas ruling in Gaza.
But Starmer’s team also intend to raise the Chagos deal in which the UK pays the Mauritius government for a 99-year lease on the islands, a series of atolls in the Indian Ocean that have been described as Britain’s last African colony.
They will emphasise the deal was a decision based on a security assessment and not by a desire to adhere to the principles of international law, a concept that does not impress the Trump administration.
Ministers have faced criticism over the agreement to hand control of the islands to Mauritius, although it will remain under UK control for almost a century under the deal.
An interim deal was agreed last year, building on work that began under the Conservative government, but after Navin Ramgoolam was re-elected as the Mauritian prime minister in November, he demanded to renegotiate the proposals.
A steady stream of UK Conservatives has since been trying to persuade the Trump team to reject the deal, embarrassing the Starmer administration. The interim deal negotiated between the Labour government and the previous Mauritian administration last year was endorsed by the outgoing Biden administration.
The UK recognises that the new Trump team has the right to review the deal’s implications for its base at Diego Garcia, but hope that the Pentagon officials who cleared the deal under Biden will maintain their previous support in their new advice to the new defence secretary, Peter Hegseth.
The UK is expecting a US decision in weeks not months, and if Trump vetoed the sale the UK would have little option but to pull out of the draft agreement with Mauritius.
The UK argues that even though an international court of justice opinion in 2019 stating the islands belonged to Mauritius was advisory, it would at some stage become binding, and that would have implications for law of the sea rulings, as well as the provision of services on the island by third parties.
The UK is arguing a deal struck now that the UK government is confident will last the next 100 years is seen as a better way of taking the US lease on the base out of difficult geopolitics.
If no deal was struck, the UK argues the Chinese could use the legally disputed status of the islands to start building listening posts or bases on the outer islands, creating a contested security environment in the Indian Ocean analogous to the current tensions in the South China Sea.
Downing Street said: “The legal and security advice is very clear that the operation of the base will be at risk if there is not a deal.”
The UK and Mauritius have refused so far to detail the precise cost to the British taxpayer of leasing the islands, but insist a cited £18bn figure is wrong. The deal is front loaded and parts of it are inflation indexed.
The US built a military base on the strategic islands after the expulsion of the native Chagossians in the 1960s and 1970s. UK officials claim links between the Mauritian government and China are a myth, and that India is the influential regional power with Mauritius, one of the few countries in the region that has refused to take part in China’s belt and road initiative.
