Diego Garcia

Diego Garcia is a coral atoll in the central Indian Ocean, the largest and southernmost of the atolls of the Chagos Archipelago. Its nearly continuous, V-shaped rim of land, about 64 kilometres (40 mi) long, almost encloses a lagoon of 124 square kilometres (48 sq mi) and holds more than half of the archipelago's land. Administered by the United Kingdom as part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), and claimed by Mauritius, it is the site of a joint British–American military base, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia; it has no permanent inhabitants, and around 2,000 military personnel, officials and contractors are ordinarily present. Known to Portuguese navigators from the early 16th century and claimed by France from 1769, the atoll was settled from the 1780s by planters from Île de France (Mauritius) with enslaved workers brought mainly from Madagascar and Mozambique. It passed to Britain with Mauritius in 1810–1814, and for 150 years its plantations at East Point, Pointe Marianne and Minni Minni produced coconut oil and copra; it was briefly a coaling station in the 1880s and a flying-boat base in the Second World War. The descendants of the plantation workers formed a community known as the Ilois, now generally called Chagossians. In 1965 the United Kingdom detached the archipelago from Mauritius to form the BIOT and, under the 1966 UK–US exchange of notes, made it available for the defence purposes of both governments. The inhabitants of Diego Garcia were removed in 1971, and the rest of the archipelago was emptied by 1973 (see Expulsion of the Chagossians). An American naval communications station built from 1971 was expanded under the Diego Garcia Agreement 1976 into a naval support facility, which has since been used for operations in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan; in 2008 the British government acknowledged that the island had been used for two American extraordinary rendition flights in 2002. The atoll is at the centre of the Chagos Archipelago sovereignty dispute: in 2019 the International Court of Justice advised that the United Kingdom should end its administration of the archipelago "as rapidly as possible". Under the treaty signed on 22 May 2025, the United Kingdom would accept that "Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago in its entirety, including Diego Garcia", and Mauritius would authorise it to exercise sovereign rights over Diego Garcia for an initial 99 years. After the position of the US president, Donald Trump, changed in 2026, the British government said that it could not ratify the treaty without American support, and as of October 2026 it had not entered into force. In March 2026, during the war between the United States, Israel and Iran, two Iranian ballistic missiles were launched towards the island; according to the British Defence Secretary, neither got close to it.

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