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The new government of Mauritius has raised concerns about UK plans to secure a key US military base after giving up sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, people familiar with its thinking said.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is seeking to finalise a long-term lease over the Diego Garcia base on the Indian Ocean islands after a deal to relinquish control was agreed with the previous Mauritian leader last month.
However, since then the Mauritian opposition party has won power in a landslide election, forming a new government led by Navin Ramgoolam, who previously called the deal “high treason”.
The new administration is set to debate concerns about the deal — including the length of the 99-year lease, and the UK’s right to renew it — in the coming weeks, the people said.
Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, flew to Mauritius this week to meet Ramgoolam and discuss the deal, which the UK is preparing to ratify as a treaty.
After meeting Powell, Ramgoolam said he needed more time to study the details of the agreement struck by his predecessor Pravind Jugnauth with legal advisers.
These include the financial settlement Britain is offering Mauritius, which has not been made public, and the exact nature of the “sovereignty” Mauritius would have over Diego Garcia and other islands in the archipelago, the people said.
In addition, some Mauritian officials have privately raised disquiet about what they feel is pressure from Britain to rush the deal through before Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office on January 20.
Senior lieutenants of Trump have been vocally sceptical about the agreement. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, has claimed the deal could “provide an opportunity for communist China to gain valuable intelligence on our naval support facility”.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a friend of Trump, has also been critical of the deal and said it would be greeted with “outright hostility” by the incoming Republican administration.
Powell is set to travel to Washington for talks, although British officials said these would go beyond the Chagos Islands deal and encompass his broader remit as the incoming UK national security adviser.
The agreement drawn up last month came after half a century of wrangling over the remote but strategically important archipelago of 58 islands, which lie roughly halfway between east Africa and Indonesia.
The UK carved out the islands — which it called the British Indian Ocean Territory — as a separate region before Mauritius won independence from Britain in 1968.
The Mauritian government has yet to agree a formal position on the proposed agreement, with its cabinet due to meet for the first time on Friday.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy on Wednesday defended the “broad arrangements” of the proposed accord as a “good deal” for all parties.
He said Ramgoolam had indicated in an exchange of letters that he was “open to this deal”, and Lammy added the UK government was content to “give him time” to examine the details.
“I’m very, very confident that this is a deal that the Mauritians will see in a cross-party sense as a good deal for them,” Lammy told House of Commons foreign affairs committee.
He added the US intelligence agencies, state department, Pentagon and White House had welcomed the deal, arguing there was support for it among officials at every level beyond Democratic politicians.
Outgoing US President Joe Biden has praised the “historic agreement” which he said “secures the effective operation of the joint facility on Diego Garcia into the next century”.
Number 10 officials dismissed any suggestion the deal could collapse. The UK Foreign Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
