Chagos, decolonisation and Sri Lanka

Recently an agreement was announced between Mauritius and the United Kingdom to resolve a long-standing dispute in the Indian Ocean. The Chagos Archipelago, situated south of the Maldives was administered as a dependency of the colony of Mauritius by the UK between 1814 and 1965. The UK separated the Chagos islands before granting independence to Mauritius in 1968 in violation of the fundamental principles of decolonisation stipulated by the United Nations. 

The UK created the British Indian Ocean Territory, and leased its main island, Diego Garcia, to the United States as a military base. This base has been used in numerous wars in the Middle East and in Afghanistan with long-range bombers operating out of the base. The new agreement will extend the US base by at least another 99 years in the island of Diego Garcia.

In February 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion which concluded that ‘the process of decolonisation of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence in 1968, following the separation of the Chagos Archipelago’. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution that same year welcoming the ICJ advisory opinion and calling on the UK to transfer sovereignty of the islands within months. This resolution was passed with 116 nations voting in favour. The vote saw a majority of countries in the Global South voting in favour of decolonisation where Sri Lanka was a rare exception deciding to abstain. The abstention was seen as a vote in favour of the United Kingdom and its continuous occupation which had resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous community in the archipelago. Today, five years down the road, as the UK has finally decided to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos islands to Mauritius, Sri Lanka’s decision to side with the coloniser has proven to be the wrong one.

This is not the first time Sri Lanka managed to be on the wrong side of history on decolonisation. In 1981 as Argentina and the United Kingdom disputed the sovereignty of the Malvinas, also known as the Falkland Islands, Sri Lanka was one of the very few countries to go against the overwhelming global consensus. At the UN General Assembly when a resolution tabled by Argentina was taken up Sri Lanka voted against it becoming one of only 12 countries to do so. This was despite Sri Lanka at that time holding the Chair of the Non-Aligned Movement, a fundamentally anti-colonial organisation which had passed a resolution at the NAM Summit in Colombo in 1976 that favoured Argentina’s claim for the Malvinas.

During the current ongoing conflict in the Middle East as well, where an artificially created, European settler colonial State is carrying out a systematic genocide against the native population of Palestine and committing the crime of aggression against its neighbours, Sri Lanka has not been able to articulate a principled position that would reflect its own anti-colonial struggles. Such servile, unprincipled positions in the international arena weaken a country’s standing and its credibility. The penchant of recent leaders to run off to faraway lands to attend funerals and coronations of irrelevant monarchs demonstrates this hangover with colonialism, even after 76 years since supposedly breaking those shackles.

While there is no need to carry colonial baggage and it is in our interest to establish and maintain cordial relations with all nations, even former imperial powers, on issues concerning sovereignty and decolonisation, it is imperative to demonstrate a principled position rather than seek temporary transactional benefits.