Stealing the Islands of Chagos: Another Forgotten Story of Colonial Injustice

Abstract

For more than a decade, the UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic at the American University Washington College of Law (UNROW) has been part of a global effort to seek justice for the Chagossians, the indigenous inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Chagossians’ plight is not wellknown, yet it repeats a familiar narrative from the history of colonialism. The most well-known and stark example is perhaps the Trail of Tears, when the U.S. government ordered the forced removal of the Native American nations residing in the southeastern parts of North America. The world stood by as the U.S. governement forcefully and violently expelled tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homes on a death march—to be resettled in lands west of the Mississippi and never to return. Less well-known is that merely a few decades ago, in 1967, history would repeat itself when the U.K. forcibly expelled thousands of indigenous people of the Chagos Archipelago from their homeland to make way for a U.S. military base.