LONDON/PORT LOUIS (Reuters) – The British government says it is confident its plan to secure the future of a U.S.-British military base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia will be ratified after an ally of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and the new Mauritian prime minister publicly dismissed the deal.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to finalise a political agreement that hands Mauritius sovereignty of the Chagos Islands while securing a 99-year lease on the base for Britain and its U.S. ally.
The agreement still needs to be ratified by both sides and, since it was signed, a new Mauritian government has been formed by former opposition leader Navin Ramgoolam.
Ramgoolam’s description of the deal as a sellout before an election this month, in which he ousted Pravind Jugnauth as prime minister, has prompted a flurry of diplomacy, with British National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell flying to Mauritius this week.
Powell will also travel to Washington soon for talks to discuss the deal and broader security issues, a government official said.
Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said the agreement poses “a serious threat” to U.S. security by ceding the archipelago – with its strategic base used by U.S. long-range bombers as well as warships – to a country allied with China.
A spokesperson for Starmer said he was confident the deal would be finalised.
“I think it’s an entirely usual process for a new administration to study the detail, but all indications suggest the commitment of the new administration to progressing the agreement,” the spokesperson told reporters on Thursday.
British foreign minister David Lammy had said on Wednesday he was confident the deal would go through, adding that the U.S. intelligence agencies, State Department, Pentagon and White House had all welcomed it.
Britain said last month it would hand over the Chagos Islands, after years of sometimes acrimonious negotiations.
U.S. President Biden supported the deal when it was announced, and Jugnauth said it marked the completion of a push to decolonise the archipelago.
Many of the exiled Chagossians, however, say they were not involved in the negotiations and cannot endorse it.
When Mauritius became independent after a century and a half of British colonial rule in the 1960s, London retained control of the Chagos Islands, forcibly displacing up to 2,000 people in the 1970s to make way for the base.
(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill in London and Villen Anganan in Port Louis; editing by Elizabeth Piper and Kevin Liffey)
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