A Dreadful Piece of British Colonial History Has A Chance To Be Corrected

Chagos Islanders May Soon Return Home

Location of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago

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When I spoke with Olivier Bancoult several years ago, I was genuinely perplexed by the question of how he could maintain a deeply personal connection to a homeland he barely knew?

Bancoult is Chagossian. This is a small archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean that is formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory. At the age of four, Bancoult was forcibly deported from his home, along with thousands of others, as part of a deliberate campaign by the British government.

It was the early 1970s, and the UK government wanted to clear Chagos to make way for an American milita…