The Chagos Islands are a group of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean that make up the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), about 300 miles (500km) south of the Maldives.<\/p>\n
Misley Mandarin, a BIOT citizen, told Politics London: “It seemed like the Labour government (want to) steam ahead with the treaty without considering the most important key component of that deal, which is the Chagossians.<\/p>\n
“And this makes us very angry. I’d rather die for my country than my country go to Mauritius.<\/p>\n
“This is the type of angriness in me right now, and it’s shared with all the Chagossians right now.”<\/p>\n
The UK bought the Chagos Islands for \u00a33m in 1968 and forced the removal of Chagossians from the archipelago over the next five years to make way for a UK-US armed forces base.<\/p>\n
Many of them moved to Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK. <\/p>\n
Vanessa Mandarin, also a BIOT citizen, told the programme: “We want the self-determination to dedicate the future of our homeland, what we want to do with our homeland. <\/p>\n
“And we want the Chagossians to be first. <\/p>\n
“We don’t want another state to come and talk on our behalf. We will be challenging, we will not surrender. We will be challenging until the end.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Chagos Islands are a group of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean that make up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-364173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}