The Indian Ocean islanders who were pummeled by history—and now by Trump, too

Now they can add President Trump’s whims to the list.

The Chagossians have lived in limbo since being evicted from the Indian Ocean islands in the 1960s and 1970s to create a buffer around the secret U.S.-U.K. military base on Diego Garcia.

Then last year the exiles thought they had finally caught a break: Britain struck a deal that would see the U.K. cede the islands to Mauritius and lease back the Diego Garcia base, providing some much needed cash for both Mauritius and the Chagossians, and perhaps allow the exiles to go home.

Trump was all for it.

Then he was against it.

For it.

Against it.

In the end he seems to have decided to kill it.

“It will be heartbreaking, but what can we do?” says 70-year-old Lyndsay Victor, who left the Chagos with his grandmother in 1973 and found himself dumped on a pier in Mauritius, more than 1,000 miles from home.

“We have no choice,” says Victor. “We’ve had no choice for 50 years.”

Trump’s changes of mind have left hundreds of Chagossian exiles worried they have lost their last shot at the happiness that came with a life, as much gauzy myth as concrete reality, of fishing, friends and family on picture-postcard islands.

“How could you treat people like this?” says Louis Olivier Bancoult, who left the archipelago at age 4 and now heads the Chagos Refugees Group in Mauritius. “What does he want?”

France ruled the Chagos starting in 1715, bringing in slaves to harvest coconut meat. The archipelago switched to British control in the 1814 Treaty of Paris, which briefly paused the Napoleonic Wars. After Britain abolished slavery in 1833, those formerly enslaved continued to work the plantations as contract employees.

In 1965, during the heat of the Cold War, the U.K. declared the Chagos the British Indian Ocean Territory. The following year, Britain and the U.S. agreed to build a military base on Diego Garcia, a slender, open-jawed island, and the two governments began plotting the expulsion of the Chagossians from the entire archipelago.

At the time, seven of 65 islands and atolls were inhabited, by some 1,500 people who survived largely on fishing and coconut harvesting.

“We must surely be very tough about this,” one British diplomat wrote in a confidential 1966 memo to colleagues. “The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours.”

In a handwritten response, another British official disparaged the Chagossians as “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.”

The following year, the British Ministry of Defense bought the entire archipelago from a private coconut company for 660,000 pounds, roughly $14 million today. By 1973, Britain had made good on one diplomat’s projection that “there will be no indigenous population” of the Chagos.

Some Chagossians ended up in Seychelles, and a few dozen in the U.K. or Europe. But most were dispatched to Mauritius, where 314 Chagos-born exiles remain, along with uncounted descendants, according to the Chagos Refugees Group.

British authorities tried to set some up as pig farmers, according to a 2020 article in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Victor recalls his family living for years in a windowless dockworkers’ shack by the port. Sydney Vythilingum, 70, says his family was promised livestock that never arrived. He ended up working on fishing boats out of Mauritius.

“They fooled us,” says Victor, retired after a life as a freighter crewman.

The exiles, who hang paintings of their activist heroes at Chagos Refugees Group headquarters in Pointe aux Sables and slap down dominoes outside of the Chagos Boutique in Tombeau Bay, have tried to fight back.

There have been half-a-dozen rounds of litigation, and sometimes the exiles have come out on top, according to the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

“I just wanted to know who was preventing me from living in my birthplace,” says Bancoult, who was one of the early litigants.

The British authorities argued the locals had been contract plantation workers, not natives, and therefore had no land rights.

In 2002, the U.K. offered citizenship to most citizens of the British Overseas Territories, and some Chagossians moved to Britain.

Last year, however, the U.K. government finally agreed to a sweeping, 99-year deal. Britain would hand the islands to Mauritius, and pay an average of $135 million annually to lease the Diego Garcia base and contribute to trust funds for the Chagossians and Mauritian development.

The British government has said it has to hand over the islands to avoid running foul of international law; a nonbinding advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice in 2019 found that Britain forced Mauritius to split off the archipelago from its jurisdiction as a condition for gaining its independence. The U.K. argues that the handover is necessary to ensure the long-term security of Diego Garcia.

Mauritius is keen, too. “Legitimately it’s one country—it belongs to us,” says Commandant Premanand Budhoo, commander of the Mauritian government’s paramilitary unit, which functions as the country’s armed forces.

The exiles thought they finally would be allowed to return home, or at least get enough cash to take the sting out of their displacement.

“I want my money, and I want to go home,” says Markuse Michel, 64, who remembers swimming in azure waters and kicking a soccer ball around with his friends on Peros Banhos atoll.

The U.K. assured the U.S. that the base would remain a strategic hub for military operations in the Mideast and elsewhere, and effectively handed Washington veto power. “We have always been clear that we will not proceed without their support,” a British Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesperson said in a written response to questions.

At first, the Trump administration offered full-throated support for the deal, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a “monumental achievement.”

By January, however, Trump had swung against it.

“Shockingly, our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital U.S. Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER,” Trump wrote on social media.

A short time later, Trump changed his mind, referring to the treaty as the best deal U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer could make. The White House and State Department announced Trump’s support.

Less than two weeks later, Trump flip-flopped again, suggesting the treaty was the product of “Wokeism” and saying implementing it would “be a blight on our Great Ally.”

“DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” Trump wrote with caps-lock certainty.

Ten days later, at the end of February, the U.S. and Israel started a war on Iran. Iran soon fired two intermediate-range missiles at Diego Garcia, but failed to hit the base.

The Chagos pact now seems stalled in the U.K., where it requires parliamentary approval.

Trump’s head-spinning reversals have left the Chagossians angry, their fate in the uncertain hands of the most powerful man in the world.

AnnMarie St. Marie, 61, was 7 years old when she last saw the Chagos. She nurses memories of a simple existence of fish fresh from the ocean and coconut dangling from palm trees. “Life would be better there,” she says.

“As soon as they sign the deal, I’m going home,” Victor says.

Then there is the reality of wading ashore on islands left to the wind, sun and rain for half a century—and leaving Mauritius, where the malls are full and highways smooth.

In February, four Chagossians gave it a try, landing a rubber raft on tiny Île du Coin in an attempt to establish a de facto right of return, a gambit they called Operation Certain Death.

For all of his bravado about setting sail for home, even Victor wonders what he would be going home to. “If we go back, we’d have to rebuild everything,” he says. “We’re too old to do that. Better that the British government pays us and we die here quietly.”

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com