Diego Garcia Island

About Diego Garcia:

• It is a coral atoll, the largest and southernmost member of the Chagos Archipelago, in the central Indian Ocean.
• It is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and accounts for more than half the land area.
• Occupying an area of 44 sq.km, it consists of a V-shaped, sand-fringed cay about 24 km in length with a maximum width of about 11 km; its lagoon is open at the north end.
• Discovered by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, it was for most of its history a dependency of Mauritius. 
• In 1965 it was separated from Mauritius as part of the newly created BIOT. 
• In 1966, the UK leased Diego Garcia to the US to create an air and naval base. For constructing the defence installation, the inhabitants of the island were forcibly removed.
• Diego Garcia is the United States’ major geostrategic and logistics support base in the Indian Ocean. 
• In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled in an advisory opinion that Britain’s decolonization of Mauritius was not lawful because of continued Chagossian claims.
• A non-binding 2019 UN General Assembly vote demanded that Britain end its “colonial administration” of the Chagos Archipelago and that it be returned to Mauritius. 

Q1: Does anyone live in Diego Garcia?

There is no permanent population on Diego Garcia, although some 4,000 U.S. and British military and contract civilian personnel are stationed on the atoll.

Source: TH

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