Member

“In order to appreciate the acute moral failure attending the present Government’s policy, it is important to consider what happened to another British colony that also comprised two sets of islands, separated by a great distance, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands … The parallels are striking … While the distance between what were then called the Gilbert and Ellice Islands was just over 800 miles, the islands were populated by peoples of different dominant ethnicities, one set of island Polynesian, the other Micronesian, and the population of the former far greater than the latter, the distance between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands was 1,339 miles, the dominant ethnicity of the former Indian, while the latter is Black African, and the ‘numbers disparity’ even more profound, the Mauritians greatly outnumbering the Chagossians … When the British Government talked to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands about decolonisation the representatives of the Ellice Islands said that they were nervous about the idea of being part of a sovereign independent state comprising both the Ellice Islands and the Gilbert Islands, not simply because they constituted different nations, separated by great distances, but also because they were concerned that their voice would necessarily be lost in a polity dominated by the far larger number of residents of the Gilbert Islands. The UK responded by providing a self-determination referendum for the people of the Ellice Islands giving them the option to freely choose either to be part of the same unit as the Gilbert Islands or to separate. They voted to separate from the Gilbert Islands, 3,799 votes to 293. The UK honoured this by making provision for the colony to first be divided into two new colonies and then, two years later, for the Ellice Islands to become the independent monarchy of Tuvalu, while the following year the Gilbert Islands became the independent Republic of Kiribati”.