That article is misleading, calling it ethnic cleansing of "indigenous peoples". These islands were uninhabited prior to European contact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

Given that Madagascar was seemingly settled by Polynesians, I'd be amazed if Europeans and their slaves were actually the first ever inhabitants of Chagos, but that aside, if they were, then the Chagossian descendents of those first slaves would be, by definition, the indigenous people of the Chagos Islands.

Edit - and will people stop buying .io domains. They might look cool but it is straight up theft.

https://www.thewebmaster.com/hosting/2016/feb/27/io-tld-top-...

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-ac...

Not true at all. Diego Garcia is just one island among these Archipelago and it was always inhabited by the native creole-speaking "Chagossians".

UK evicted them forcefully in the 70's or 80's I think.

The way I understand what I've found is, the islands were not inhabited before the Europeans arrived there, and "Chagossians" weren't native. They were brought in as slave workers after the settlement. (Then, the population expanded with voluntary migration)

Regardless of their ancestry timeline, the natives have known to have been living there for at least three centuries. Expelling them now is cruel and unwarranted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians

> Sir Bruce Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1000 pets were gassed with exhaust fumes. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked", Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, "and when their dogs were taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried". Sir Bruce had been given responsibility for what the US called "cleansing" and "sanitising" the islands; and the killing of the pets was taken by the islanders as a warning.

What do you mean by "natives"? It's often used for the first people - and as weird as it is in this case, by that definition Europeans were the natives on that island. If we ignore the timeline, then does Dubai become natively Indian?

This does not mean I disagree with the expelling being cruel and unwarranted. I do think it shouldn't belong to the UK, just don't think that "natives" is meaningful here or explains the reasons.

I used to term natives to refer to people who have been living here for centuries and have made it their home.

The equivalent is expelling everyone from Australia because US/UK wants to build military base there.

It is staggering to hear arguments justifying occupied land that has absolutely no connection to the uk. It shows how poorly the west still understands the evil of colonialism.

Regardless of the ancestry of the people living in any territory, they deserve to have sovereignty over their lives.

Err, we did actually pay for it.

And what connection do the "natives" have, they weren't native to it. They'd lived there less than 200 years and were French speakers.

It's not an indigenous population.

It's more complicated than you claim.

I'm pretty strongly anti-colonial, but this ain't that and it takes the piss to frame it like it is.

how many generations of people have to live somewhere to be considered "native" then.

In this case we're talking what 4-5 generations, depending on how you count it, that sounds fairly native to me.

The UK acted poorly here and the pressure that this vote applies to them is good, as if anyone has a right to the islands it's the people who lived there for hundreds of years.

So when do we get to stop wringing our hands about the Israelis?

They've been there well over 100 years now, settlement by the Israelis started in the 1870s. Are they now native?

It's never going to be an easy thing to resolve. Ultimately, if you settle someone else's sovereign land, don't be surprised if you don't get to just claim it unless you've got the guns, tanks and bombers to back it up.

I'm not sure what the connection here is to the Israeli situation, an entirely different and also complex situation.

Here the UK government acted unethically and (according to the UN) illegally in displacing people who had been resident on these islands for a long time.

That pressure is being brought to bear on them for this, seems like a good thing.

Predominantly white colonials buying Palestinian land, forming an independent state and then kicking out all the indigenous people.

You can't see the connection? At all?

I don't see what the point is in discussing this with you, some how you've decided that land bought and paid for should be given back to a people that didn't even come from there past a handful of generations.

And somehow this is 'ethical'.

What a load of nonsense.

I would point out that there were a huge number of abstentions. So don't think the UN were unanimous on this.

So the Chagosian situation didn't have individuals buying land, it was a state (the UK) insisting on a deal to a much less powerful nation and then evicting all the citizens by force.

It's relatively clear from the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago_sovereignty...) that the government of Mauritius were under the impression that their being granted independence from the UK depended on their agreeing to hand over the Chagos Islands

the key quote from British records being

"in theory, there were a number of possibilities. The Premier and his colleagues could return to Mauritius either with Independence or without it. On the Defence point, Diego Garcia could either be detached by order in Council or with the agreement of the Premier and his colleagues. The best solution of all might be Independence and detachment by agreement, although he could not of course commit the Colonial Secretary at this point."

To quote the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48371388) "Mauritius says it was forced to give up the Indian Ocean group"

The UK has a long history of gunboat diplomacy, this is just one example I would suggest.

As to the "huge number of abstentions", the vote was 116-6 of those that voted, not exactly a close outcome...

yes, USA should give Alaska and Hawaii to the local people

Well, principally yes. Or, at least, the US could acknowledge the massive genocide that European settlers have committed in the past, rather than glorifying the "good ol' days" of expansion and slaughtering people and their cattle, and give the indigenous people some real recompensation for the atrocities that have been done to their ancestors.

If you'd suggest the USA might give Alaska and Hawaii back to indigenous populations, what about the entire USA itself? :-D

Thank you for the link.