Chagos – When Propaganda Dresses as Journalism

International Relations

A campaign of insinuation—from an unverified claim about a police shooting to proposals to bargain over Diego Garcia—is distorting the Chagos debate and testing the elementary duties of journalism

By Vijay Makhan

There comes a point when one must stop treating every loud assertion as a serious contribution to debate. The Chagos question is once again being used to confuse audiences, inflame opinion and dress political advocacy as journalism.

The latest example is deeply troubling. Élodie Thomas, a young Mauritian woman, was shot by a police officer in the wake of protests. She had nothing to do with the protests. She was being driven to her home from work.  Available reporting says the protests began over water shortages and that the shooting intensified the unrest. The circumstances of the shooting remain under investigation.

The Great British Political Action Committee (Great British PAC) then placed the incident within its campaign against the UK–Mauritius agreement. Its article asks whether Thomas is Chagossian, while acknowledging that this has not been independently verified. But that qualification comes after a headline invoking “fears for Chagossian safety” and an opening that frames the incident around the future of Chagos. The article invites readers to connect a police shooting, the Chagos agreement and the safety of Chagossians before evidence has established that connection. It offers no evidence that Thomas was targeted because of her ancestry, or that the shooting had anything to do with Chagos.

GB News — a British free-to-air television and radio news channel — should be named in this discussion. The channel has given a platform to claims advanced by those campaigning against the agreement. If, as in its recent coverage, an unverified claim about Thomas’s heritage is presented in a way that blurs its uncertain status, that is not a minor lapse. A broadcaster has a duty to distinguish what is established from what remains speculation. The PAC is entitled to campaign; viewers are entitled to know when they are hearing a campaign’s case rather than verified reporting.

The PAC’s own website makes clear that it opposes the proposed transfer and supports legal proceedings concerning Chagos. That is its position, and it is entitled to advance it. But when a campaign’s claims are given the authority of a news studio without adequate testing, advocacy begins to pass as fact.

We have seen this method before. I wrote earlier about Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who portrayed Mauritius as closely tied to China and claimed that China would hack Mauritian security as soon as the Chagos agreement was made. His own office published those remarks. Such claims are assertions, not evidence. They are designed to make a small state appear an imminent security threat without demonstrating how that threat would arise.

Now Nigel Farage offers his own transactional approach. He said he would guarantee the United States use of Diego Garcia in perpetuity in return for Donald Trump keeping quiet about the Falklands. Farage later insisted he meant use of the base, not a transfer of sovereignty over the islands to the United States. Kemi Badenoch called the proposal humiliating. She was right to object to treating territory and security arrangements as bargaining counters for political silence. Yet her own declaration that “the Chagos Islands are British” does not settle the matter.

The spectacle did not end there. On 19 October, Sir Edward Leigh — the Father of the House of Commons — asked why Britain should not simply sell the Diego Garcia base to President Trump for £6 billion, on territory the UK has no lawful right to retain, and use the proceeds to help fund higher defence spending. Now, is this not the extraordinary case of a squatter proposing to sell to its tenant a property that belongs to a third party?

Diego Garcia is not a piece of British real estate to be traded at Westminster’s convenience. The International Court of Justice (February 25, 2019) found that Mauritius’s decolonisation had not been lawfully completed following the archipelago’s separation, and the United Nations (May 22, 2019) subsequently called on Britain to end its administration within six months. The UK- Mauritius Agreement was signed (May 25, 2025) after protracted negotiations (13 rounds) initiated in November 2022. Ratification is paused. However, none of this is erased by declaring, in a partisan studio or in the U.K. Parliament, that the islands are British. The history and law should not have to compete with television or House theatrics.

There are, moreover, legitimate questions about the financial and political networks surrounding the Chagos campaign. Farage is subject to a parliamentary standards inquiry over a £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne. Farage says it was a personal gift and did not need to be declared; the inquiry is yet to deliver its findings. Separately, the Financial Times reported that Harborne paid for the boat used by the Chagossians who landed without permission on Île du Coin. The Guardian reported links between Harborne, and aircraft used to transport Farage to the Maldives and campaigners to Sri Lanka. These reports make transparency essential when the operation is presented as an unaided expression of Chagossian will.

There is room for rigorous debate about the agreement, the rights and aspirations of Chagossians, the future of Diego Garcia and Mauritius’s stewardship of the archipelago. There is no room for invented history, unsupported claims about Mauritius’s allegiance, or insinuations that turn an unresolved allegation into a geopolitical plot.

The public deserves to know what is established, what is contested and what remains unknown. When broadcasters fail to draw those lines—when they invite voices to repeat partisan claims without testing their premises and let suggestion do the work of proof—they abandon the discipline journalism demands.

I have spent much of my life in diplomacy, where facts matter precisely because emotion and political interest can so easily distort them. This campaign deserves a clear name — propaganda by insinuation. When that insinuation is packaged as news, it is gutter journalism.

21 October 2026

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 23 October 2026