Meeting the Chagos islanders of Crawley

00:00 06:46

Max Jeffery has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In 2002, Tony Blair gave everyone from the Chagos Islands British citizenship, permitting 10,000 Chagossians to live wherever they liked in the UK. About 3,500 have chosen Crawley. And what a weird thing to do. They took a 6,000-mile Air Mauritius flight to Gatwick airport to start a new life, then settled just a mile from the runway. Why so close?

I was visiting Crawley to meet these people I didn’t understand, to find out what they made of our government handing over their islands to Mauritius. On the train I clicked through a few Facebook groups and found a man named Maxwell Evenor who said he was around to talk. Maxwell is part of Chagossian Voices, a campaign group which says it ‘takes the Chagossian voice to the highest levels of decision-making’. I asked him to meet me at a picnic table in Crawley Memorial Gardens.

The Chagossian people were expelled to Mauritius in 1968 by Harold Wilson’s government. The islands were then a British colony, and the US Navy requested to use the largest one, Diego Garcia, as a military base. Wilson wanted to please his American friends, so his government asked the Chagossians to leave. When they wouldn’t, it restricted shipments of food and gassed their pet dogs in sheds. The Chagossians fled, and the Mauritian government was paid £3 million to look after them.

Maxwell brought his friend Jemmy along to our meeting. ‘I like Crawley,’ Jemmy said. The local Asda stocks Chagossian snacks such as Apollo instant noodles, and there’s a good Chagossian takeaway called Island Kitchen nearby.