Fears over Britain giving Indian Ocean air base to ally of Beijing

TENSIONS are growing between UK and US diplomats over the fate of a strategically vital air base – amid negotiations to hand the island where it is situated to an ally of China, it was reported yesterday.

Diego Garcia is the largest of the 60 Chagos Islands that make up the British Indian Ocean Territory and hosts a British air base which is leased to the US navy. It houses more than 3,000 military and civilian personnel.

The British Government has begun negotiations to transfer sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius after coming under international pressure since the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding ruling in 2019 that the British occupation of the islands was unlawful – and that the archipelago was part of Mauritius. The island nation signed a free trade agreement with Beijing in 2021. Foreign Secretary James Cleverley has said any deal will protect the US operation at Diego Garcia, which helped launch two invasions of Iraq and has hosted long-range stealth bombers.

But lawmakers and officials on both sides of the Atlantic fear a handover could lead to China building its own military facility on the archipelago.

The Mail on Sunday reported that the White House has expressed ‘serious concerns’ about the plans due to the concentration of military hardware at the naval support facility on the island, dubbed ‘the unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean’.

And Tory MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith, co-chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, urged the Government to draw up a new agreement with Mauritius to resolve the ‘strategic mess’.

He said the UK and US had to ‘ bring Mauritius on side with us, not with China’, adding: ‘ The Government have got to come up with another agreement with Mauritius which will be more expensive but strategically critical.’

Foreign Office lawyers have advised that the advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2019, which was later endorsed by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, means that a negotiated settlement will need to be found.

The Foreign Office said: ‘ The UK and Mauritius have held three rounds of constructive negotiations on the exercise of sovereignty over the BIOT.

‘Officials will meet again shortly to continue talks.’