The Wrong Decolonisation: Why Handing Chagos to Anyone but the Maldives Repeats an Imperial Error

Map illustrating ancient maritime trade routes across the Indian Ocean, highlighting connections between the Maldives, Wadiba, Banda Aceh, Foalhavahi / Golavohi, and Vohimasina, crucial for regional trade and migration.

If decolonisation means restoring land to the people and waters to which it actually belongs, then the Chagos Archipelago is not a footnote to Mauritius. It is the southern edge of the Maldivian world. Geography says so. Older Indian Ocean memory says so. And Britain, which mapped, administered, and bargained over these reefs for two centuries, has always known how close they sit to Addu and how far they lie from Port Louis. To transfer Foalhavahi,the Chagos group,to Mauritius while treating the Maldives as an afterthought would not complete decolonisation. It would freeze one colonial administrative line and call it justice.

That is the choice now facing Andy Burnham. The United Kingdom signed a treaty with Mauritius in May 2025 to transfer sovereignty over the islands and lease back the Diego Garcia base. Ratification then stalled after United States opposition. Burnham, who took office on 20 July 2026, has not publicly reversed the policy. Mauritius, The Telegraph reported, intends to press the frozen handover at the United Nations General Assembly next month. London is being asked to finish a two-state bargain. The missing third party is the nearest archipelagic state.

President Mohamed Muizzu has said the Maldives holds the strongest claim if Britain is going to vest the islands in anyone. Malé has not yet filed a finished historical-title case at the International Court of Justice. It has sent two formal objections to the United Kingdom, in November 2024 and January 2026; raised the matter with British officials, including a December 2025 call involving Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy; withdrawn the 22 August 2022 letter in which the previous Maldivian government eased Mauritius’s diplomatic path; and promised to prepare papers for international bodies. It does not recognise the UK–Mauritius deal. That is late, incomplete, and politically reversed from earlier Maldivian practice. It is still more than a slogan. It is a warning that the “settled” map is not settled.

Look at the water first. Chagos sits in the central Indian Ocean, a scatter of atolls and reefs whose northern features lie only a few hundred kilometres south of Addu, the last inhabited ring of the Maldives. Mauritius is more than a thousand nautical miles farther on. ITLOS itself recorded the relevant distances when it drew a line between Addu and the northern Chagos features: the islands that London now proposes to give away are a neighbour of the Maldives and a remote dependency of Mauritius. Maps that label Chagos “Mauritian” because a colonial office once attached it to Port Louis are performing administration, not geography.

The nearest neighbor to the Chagos Archipelago ,Kandhoo, Foalhavahi or Golaavohi is Addu Atoll Maldives. A photograph taken by HCP Bell in 1922 captures women and children from Gan, Addu Atoll, Maldives. This historical image showcases the traditional attire and cultural essence of the early 20th-century Maldivian community.

That neighbourliness is why the 16th-century title matters, even if it cannot by itself win a modern court. Sultan Hassan IX, after conversion to Christianity, took the name Dom Manoel and lived in exile in Kochi. In letters patent dated 25 June 1560, later confirmed by Portuguese authority in 1561, he styled himself king of the Maldive Islands, the three patanas of Cuaydu (Suvadiva), and “the seven islands of Pullobay.” Malé identifies Pullobay with Foalhavahi, the Dhivehi name used for the southern island groups now called Chagos. The wording survives in Portuguese archival tradition and in the scholarly apparatus around François Pyrard’s voyage. It is not folklore invented last year. It is an exile’s claim, registered with the then dominant maritime power in the western Indian Ocean.

Honesty requires the caveats. Hassan IX was not sitting in Malé when he wrote. Effective control of distant reefs is hard to prove. Some historians treat Foalhavahi as a broader southern-sea name, not a neat synonym for the modern British Indian Ocean Territory. Earlier Maldivian governments even said no previous administration had claimed Chagos as sovereign soil. Those points weaken a courtroom brief. They do not erase the older pattern: Maldivian sailors knew these waters, named them, fished them, and, when a sultan listed his realm for Portuguese clerks, placed a southern island group beside Suvadiva rather than beside Île de France. Britain’s hydrographers later cut the chain at Addu. A survey line is not original title.

Mauritius answers with the legal architecture built since 2017. The International Court of Justice’s 2019 advisory opinion held that the 1965 excision of Chagos from colonial Mauritius was unlawful and that decolonisation of Mauritius remained incomplete. The General Assembly demanded British withdrawal. A Special Chamber of ITLOS, in 2021 and 2023, treated Mauritius as the coastal state of Chagos for maritime delimitation with the Maldives and drew a binding boundary. Port Louis now says sovereignty “can no longer be disputed.” That is the official international-law story, and it is why Burnham is under UN pressure. It is also a story that never asked whether the wrong colony was treated as the parent. The ICJ was asked about detachment from Mauritius, not about whether Mauritius was the only possible successor. An advisory opinion can be authoritative and still leave a neighbour’s older claim unheard.

Britain knows the awkwardness. It created the British Indian Ocean Territory in 1965 for a base, not because Chagos was naturally Mauritian in the way Addu is Maldivian. It bargained with Port Louis because that was the colonial file on the desk. It later negotiated a 2025 treaty that would pay to rent back Diego Garcia, the atoll that actually drives the geopolitics, while transferring the rest of the archipelago as if the legal question were only bilateral. Washington’s freeze of ratification exposed the security truth: the islands are a strategic platform first. The decolonisation script is being used to move title without reopening who should hold it.

Handing Chagos to Mauritius therefore risks a double error. First, it treats colonial attachment as destiny. Chagos was administered with Mauritius in the British period; it was also, in older Maldivian and Portuguese description, a southern extension of the Maldives. Choosing the 19th-century file over the 16th-century title and over raw proximity is a political choice, not a discovery of nature. Second, it locks the Maldives out of waters that affect its fisheries, its exclusive economic zone, and its southern security after ITLOS already shaved the maritime map against Malé. Muizzu’s rejection of that boundary is contested and legally difficult. The grievance underneath it is real: a court that assumed Mauritian coastal status could not fully try a Maldivian historical title that Malé had not then properly pleaded.

The Chagossians themselves are the people most often spoken about and least allowed to decide. Their right of return and self-determination should not be traded as a side-payment in a sovereignty swap. A transfer that ignores both the displaced islanders and the nearest archipelagic state is not a clean end to empire. It is a new allocation of reefs by the same imperial habit: settle with the convenient counterpart, then tell the neighbourhood the matter is closed.

Villagers of Mulaku Atoll Maldives in 1922, captured by H.C.P Bell, showcasing traditional life on the renowned cowry harvest islands, nestled amidst lush tropical surroundings.

September’s General Assembly will test whether Burnham keeps the 2025 treaty frozen, revives it to satisfy Mauritius, or admits that the dispute is no longer two-sided. Britain does not have to pretend the 1560 patent is a modern deed of conveyance. It does have to stop pretending that geography, names, and a registered royal style are irrelevant because they complicate a deal already initialled. If the United Kingdom is leaving Chagos, the least it can do is ask which Indian Ocean people the islands actually face. On that question the compass points north, toward the Maldives—not 2,000 kilometres southwest to a capital that governed these atolls only because London once filed them there.