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Lord Prescott strongly supports the return of Chagossians to Diego Garcia

Lord Prescott says with the 50 year UK-US agreement on US military use of Diego Garcia ending in 2016, it is the perfect time for Chagossians to return home

British ex Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has made a powerful intervention in the campaign to grant Chagossians the right to return to their homeland, reports the UK Chagos Support Association.

 Writing in the The Mirror, Lord Prescott notes with the 50 year UK-US agreement on US military use of Diego Garcia coming to an end in 2016, now is the perfect time to grant Chagossians the opportunity to return home.

And the association points out that as it has consistently argued, “any renewal of the agreement must include US support for Chagossian resettlement”.

As Lord Prescott notes, the UK received an £11 million discount on Polaris nuclear weapons in exchange for deporting the Chagossians in the original UK-US deal. Adjusted for inflation, this would be worth £200 million today. This would be more than enough to pay for resettlement of the islands.

On costs, Lord Prescott makes the very reasonable point that KPMG estimates, which begin at £60 million over three years, are “a small price to pay for the injustice we dealt Chagossians.” That these cost estimates are thought overly high by a range of experts only makes any opposition to return even more unreasonable.

The ‘cost’ of Chagossian return, to say nothing about the UK’s moral obligation, is also interestingly compared with the cost of maintaining the Falkland Islands. Resettlement of the Chagos Islands could be accomplished for less than the UK spends on the Falkland Islands in one year. The UK has obligations to all its Overseas Territories.

Speculating why the Government has been so keen to support the Falkland Islanders and so opposed to Chagossian return, Lord Prescott notes that the former are “white.”

Considering the history of Chagossians’ deportation, in which they were dismissed as “Tarzans” and “Man Fridays” by UK and US Government officials, and only recently were to as “so-called Chagossians” in a Telegraph article, this is not an unreasonable conclusion.