The Earl of Leicester (Con)

I want to add to my noble friend’s words. I will not read the whole letter, but this is a copy of the letter to the Minister from the Chagossian people. They write that the Minister’s words “cut deeply. They erase our history, our dignity, and the truth of who we are. They echo the very language used to justify our people’s deportation between 1968 and 1973. And they are demonstrably false … For more than a century before our exile, the Chagos Islands were home to a multigenerational, settled population. This is not our opinion. It is documented in church registers of births, marriages, and burials across Peros Banhos, Salomon and Diego Garcia; colonial-era records describing communities with homes, chapels, gardens and workplaces; judgments of the UK High Court in the Bancoult cases; the International Court of Justice; United Nations resolutions; academic research stretching across decades. We were not transient workers. We were a Creole-speaking people, rooted in our islands, with our own traditions, our own culture, and our own community life. To say that our homeland had ‘no permanent population’ is simply untrue … You also stated the islands had ‘never been self-governing’. Chagossians have never claimed to have operated a Westminster-style system. But for generations, in the long absence of resident British administrators, our islands were organised and cared for by local leaders from within our own community”. This has been confirmed in academic work. Misley Mandarin, who lives here in London now with his family, finishes, “We ask you not for sympathy, but for recognition. Not for pity, but for accuracy. Not for charity, but for truth. We deserve self-determination. We want to stay British and return to our islands as British citizens”.