ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV strongly affirmed the rights of the weakest against the ambitions of the powerful during an audience Saturday with exiled refugees from Chagos, the contested Indian Ocean archipelago that is home to the strategic U.S.-U.K. military base, Diego Garcia.
History’s first American pope insisted on the right of the Chagossian people to return to their homes and hailed a recent U.K.-Mauritius treaty over the archipelago’s future as symbolically important on the international stage.
Leo met with a delegation of refugees from Chagos, some 2,000 of whom who were evicted from their homes by Britain in the 1960s and 1970s so the U.S. could build a naval and bomber base on the largest of the islands, Diego Garcia.
Displaced islanders fought for years in U.K. courts for the right to go home. In May, Britain and Mauritius signed a treaty to hand sovereignty over the islands to Mauritius while still ensuring the future of the base.
Leo told the refugees he was “delighted” that the treaty had been reached, saying it represented a “significant victory” in their long battle to “repair a grave injustice. He praised in particular the role of the Chagossian women in peacefully asserting their rights to go home.
“The renewed prospect of your return to your native archipelago is an encouraging sign and a powerful symbol on the international stage: all peoples, even the smallest and weakest, must be respected by the powerful in their identity and rights, in particular the right to live on their land; and no one can force them into exile,” Leo said in French.
He said he hoped that Mauritian authorities will commit to ensuring their return, and pledged the help of the local Catholic Church.
Under the agreement, the U.K. will pay Mauritius an average of 101 million pounds ($136 million) a year to lease back the base for at least 99 years. It establishes a trust fund to benefit the Chagossians and says “Mauritius is free to implement a program of resettlement” on the islands other than Diego Garcia.
But it does not require the residents to be resettled, and some displaced islanders fear it will be even harder to return to their place of birth after Mauritius takes control.
Philippe Sands, the international lawyer who has represented the Chagos people and long championed their right to go home, said the pope’s words were enormously important. He noted the intimate private audience, originally expected to be part of a general audience, was instigated by Leo himself.
“The words spoken by His Holiness offered clear support for the urgent return of Chagossians to the islands from which they were deported and sent the clearest possible signal to the governments of Britain, United States and Mauritius that the Vatican expects the Chagossians to be able to return and remake their lives,” he told The Associated Press.
Mauritius had long contested Britain’s claim to the archipelago, and the United Nations and its top court had urged Britain to return the Chagos to Mauritius, around 2,100 kilometers (1,250 miles) southwest of the islands.
In a non-binding 2019 opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled that the U.K. had unlawfully carved up Mauritius when it agreed to end colonial rule in the late 1960s.
Pope Francis visited Mauritius in 2019 and met with a group of Chagossians in the Vatican in 2023. Francis told reporters en route home from Mauritius in 2019 that Britain should obey the U.N. and return the islands to Mauritius.
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