PORT LOUIS, April 23 (Reuters) – Mauritius said it would wait up to the end of July for Britain to finalise a deal to hand over the Chagos Islands after London put the agreement on hold following objections from U.S. President Donald Trump.
A British delegation met Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam on Wednesday in their first talks since the UK paused the deal, which would cede sovereignty of the Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius while retaining use of the U.S.-British military base on Diego Garcia island.
In comments to the national broadcaster after the talks, Attorney General Gavin Glover said Mauritius had no visibility on whether the U.S. government would ultimately give the required approval for the deal to move ahead.
“We will give them until the end of July,” Glover said on Wednesday. “We will wait until then, and at that point, the Mauritian government will have to decide on the way forward depending on what happens in the United Kingdom.”
It was unclear what steps Mauritius might consider and what leverage it would have on an issue that has caught Trump’s eye and become part of a wider geopolitical power-play.
Trump said in February that the deal was a “big mistake” after having previously said it was the best that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer would get.
U.S.-led operations launched from Diego Garcia include bombing strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen in 2024 and 2025, humanitarian aid deployments to Gaza and attacks against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in 2001.
Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia last month, media reported, but did not hit the base.
The Chagos’ six main atolls, among more than 600 islands, lie about 500 km (300 miles) south of the Maldives and halfway between Africa and Indonesia, with about 4,000 people stationed there.
Britain forcibly displaced up to 2,000 indigenous Chagossians in the late 1960s and 1970s to establish the base on the Diego Garcia atoll, but had last year agreed to give sovereignty to former colony Mauritius while paying 101 million pounds ($136 million) per year to secure the installation.
(Reporting by Jean Paul Arouff; Writing by Vincent Mumo Nzilani; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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