UK-Mauritius Agreement on the Chagos Archipelago Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Roberts of Belgravia
Main Page: Lord Roberts of Belgravia (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Roberts of Belgravia's debates with the Leader of the House
(2 days, 11 hours ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, which has been a major driving force behind these legal attacks on the British Indian Ocean Territories, was founded in November 1961 and was dedicated to erasing the phenomenon of non-self-governing territories. It had important work to do in the 1960s and 1970s, the period of winds of change, when western colonial powers were decolonising much of the globe.
However, the special committee has utterly failed to recognise that the world has changed, as has the nature of modern colonisation. “The process of decolonisation is not complete”, the special committee threatens on its website, saying that it is dedicated to “completing this mandate”. It then numbers the 17 territories that it has yet to force to decolonise, and these include the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, the Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, the British Virgin Islands, Monserrat, the Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The majority of the places in its sights are therefore British; indeed, English is the main language in 14 of them.
Whether the overwhelming majority of people of those territories wish to remain British—which, in vote after vote in places such as Gibraltar and the Falklands, they remind us that they certainly do—is utterly immaterial in the eyes of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization, one of whose three vice-chairs is Cuban and another is from Indonesia, the country that occupies West Papua. There are 29 states represented on the special committee, including such bastions of democracy and human rights as China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela. These are the countries that are denouncing Britain for colonialism in places such as the Chagos Islands, where for over half a century there has been no permanent civilian population.
China, meanwhile, has blocked the classification of Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, Macao, Tibet and Xinjiang as non-self-governing territories under the terms of reference of the United Nations special committee, even though, of course, they are all effectively run from Beijing. Russia has blocked no fewer than 26 territories, such as Crimea, from being put on the list. Why does Britain put up with this glaring farce? There is effectively an entire bureau of the United Nations dedicated entirely to eradicating British overseas territories such as the Chagos Islands. Once the Chagos are handed over to Mauritius, the special committee will simply justify its own existence by moving on to the next British territory.
This is happening at a time when there are plenty of examples around the world of powers that have genuinely occupied and colonised other countries. I have mentioned Russia, China and Indonesia, but with varying degrees of legality and lethality, Turkey occupies Northern Cyprus, India occupies Kashmir, Armenia occupies parts of Nagorno-Karabakh, and so on. Yet none of these appears on the United Nations committee’s hit list. Imperialism was never solely a western pathology, any more than war or slavery are, yet the only powers that the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization accuses are western, except for Morocco in the Western Sahara.
In 1965, the United Kingdom split the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, which never owned it. So, what could be more imperialist today than handing over these islands, against the wishes of their exiled inhabitants, to a foreign power over 1,300 miles away that never ruled them in the past? Could anything be more ruthless and more contemptuous of the principle of self-determination, whatever the utterly egregious United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization might say?
In a recent survey, only 19% of British people said that the British Government stuck up for our national interests. This is shocking, but hardly surprising if the present measure is anything to go by.