Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) might have flown over an island at the center of a tussle between superpowers last weekend, but it’s not the one you are thinking of.
Lai had planned to visit the small African country of Eswatini two weeks prior, but the trip was postponed because three countries in the Indian Ocean — Mauritius, Seychelles and Madagascar — either withdrew or never granted diplomatic overflight clearance for the Taiwanese aircraft.
Domino Theory has written about why it’s unclear that Taiwan would have needed that permission, which should only pertain to airspace directly over their territory rather than the flight information regions around them. Regardless, Lai didn’t fly as scheduled, but instead hitched a ride back with the Eswatini foreign minister who came to Taipei last week. Lai’s presence on the Eswatini jet was kept confidential and it appears that the flight did go through Mauritius’s and Madagascar’s and flight information regions in question.
But if you look at a map of flight information regions, you might not be seeing the full picture. At the northern end of Mauritius’s region, as marked, are some islands you might have heard of: the Chagos Archipelago.
To give them a second name, the British Indian Ocean Territory.
To give the largest island a third name, Diego Garcia, the location of a key military base that the U.S. effectively leases from the U.K.
If Lai didn’t fly over these islands, he certainly could have.
The Chagos Archipelago has been the subject of a long-running diplomatic sore between the U.K., which owns them, and Mauritius, which claims them. It would be tiresome to recount the whole affair here, but effectively when Mauritius was a British colony the Chagos Archipelago was a part of that colonial territory, and when Mauritius became independent the U.K. hived off the Chagos Islands as the British Indian Ocean Territory so that the U.S. could build the base there.
In 2024 during the dying days of the Biden administration, the U.K. agreed to give the territory to Mauritius in exchange for a 99-year lease on the base. But since Trump took office, he has periodically criticized the agreement.
The state of play right now is that the U.K. government has seemingly accepted that with an U.S. veto a possibility, the deal simply can’t go ahead and it has been dropped from the political program.
This is increasingly obviously a good thing. Giving the Chagos Islands to Mauritius does not serve the U.K. nor the U.S. well. Many had leveled the charge that Mauritius was a country in China’s camp, and that China might even be allowed to open a military base near to the U.S.’s.
After Lai’s trip was postponed, Taiwan’s Presidential Office alleged that one reason Mauritius had done so was China’s debt trap diplomacy, the idea that China loans developing countries huge sums of money they can’t repay and then leverages this obligation. Others, like the China-Global South Project, have pushed back, saying that China actually holds relatively little Mauritian debt.
Regardless, it drops into the current milieu as a direct example of Mauritius serving China’s interest, and opposing the U.S.’s, insofar as the U.S. supports Taiwan having diplomatic ties.
Keeping the Chagos Islands as British territory wouldn’t do all that much to help Taiwan, but it would do plenty for the U.S. and the U.K., which would also avoid paying billions to Mauritius in rent.
But it could help someone else as well. When the British Indian Ocean Territory was created, there were native inhabitants who were displaced. They are the Chagossians. It is to the shame of the U.K. that they have never been allowed to return.
Despite Mauritius claiming that the Chagos Archipelago should be “decolonized,” the U.K government has admitted that the agreement contains no guarantee that the Chagossians can return. Mauritius has a plan for “Mauritian citizens, including those of Chagossian origin,” to settle the islands.
The Chagossians were completely shut out of these negotiations. The people who have repeatedly hurt the most by this are still not at the table.
With the agreement between the U.K. and Mauritius having stalled, it’s the perfect time to put the Chagossians at the center of the process. If they want to let Lai land there in the future, so much the better.
But it should be up to them.
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