Mauritius says may leave Commonwealth in Chagos row

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By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - The President of Mauritius said on Wednesday his country would be prepared to quit the Commonwealth in its row with Britain over the forced expulsion of the people of the Chagos Islands.

In an interview on BBC radio, Anerood Jugnauth said he sympathised with the islanders expelled by Britain from the Chagos archipelago in the 1960s and 1970s who have been fighting for decades to be able to return home.

"I think ultimately we will have to go to court ... to the International Court of Justice," Jugnauth said.

Asked whether he would be prepared to pay the price of leaving the Commonwealth to pursue the legal battle, the president said: "I believe that yes".

About 2,000 Chagossians were exiled from the coral islands which lie halfway between Africa and Indonesia and moved hundreds of miles away on Mauritius and the Seychelles.

The islanders, who mostly arrived as slaves from Africa in the 18th century, have been forbidden from returning on the grounds that their presence would threaten the security of the American military base on Diego Garcia, one of the islands.

After a long legal battle, the High Court ruled last May that Britain’s treatment of the islanders had been "repugnant" and that special measures taken to block their return were unlawful.

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Jugnauth said he believed Mauritius, which became independent from Britain in 1968, had also suffered injustice.

"We have always claimed Chagos from the British. Our position has always been very clear on that," he said. "We were the first victim, we were deprived of part of our territory and this is against all the United Nations resolutions."

Britain claimed the Chagos Islands when it took Mauritius in 1814 and then leased Diego Garcia to the United States in 1966, when Washington was seeking a military base in the Indian Ocean.

Jugnauth said he did not think leaving the Commonwealth, a 53-nation grouping of mainly former British colonies, would be too high a price to pay.

"I won’t say (it is) a very high price," he said. "We are in the Commonwealth, we get some benefit out of it, but there’s not much that we get."