Walter Finch
THE Gibraltar government has moved to assure its people that the UK decision to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius will have no impact on their future.
Concern had been sparked on the Rock after the British government announced yesterday it was giving up sovereignty of a group of uninhabited islands in the Indian Ocean.
The Chagos Islands are a British Overseas Territory which the UK government had been in dispute over – until yesterday’s decision.
The case has some similarities to the situation with Gibraltar, whose sovereignty Spain has long sought to take from British control.
However, Chief Minister Fabian Picardo was quick to point out that despite superficial similarities, the two cases were in fact very different, and yesterday’s decision would have no bearing on Gibraltar’s future.
“Gibraltar is an inhabited territory, the population of which has rights which cannot be ignored in any circumstances and which entirely trump any other purported claims to our land and surrounding seas, as recognised under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” he said in a statement.
He cited the key difference between the two cases – that the Chagos Islands, home to the strategically vital Diego Garcia US military base – was uninhabited.
The British government under Tony Blair flirted with sharing sovereignty of the Rock with the Spanish government, until a resounding referendum in 2002 left zero doubt that it would be against the will of the Gibraltarians.
Picardo continued: “The United Kingdom has made clear that it will not enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes and also reaffirms at the United Nations and elsewhere that it will not enter into a process of sovereignty negotiations with which Gibraltar is not content.
“Additionally, the new Foreign Secretary, Rt Hon David Lammy MP, has made clear that there will not be negotiations about Gibraltar without the Chief Minister of Gibraltar present.
“That is hugely important and demonstrates the United Kingdom’s cast iron commitment to the right of self-determination of the People of Gibraltar.
It is this assurance from Lammy that has contrasted starkly with the UK’s Chagos Islands negotiations, which were conducted without the consent of the dispossessed people of the islands.
The Chagossians were forcibly removed from their homes in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the US military base in one of the worst episodes of UK colonial history in the post-war era.
“The Chagossians have suffered greatly in being excluded from their islands for half a century and this treaty may finally lead to them being able to go back to the islands,” Picardo concluded.
