What happened to the Chagos Archipelago in 1965?

In 1965, the British government detached the Chagos Archipelago from the colony of Mauritius to incorporate it into the newly established British Indian Ocean Territory.123

This action was taken through an agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States during the Cold War to facilitate the construction of defense and communications infrastructure in the region. Following this administrative change, the archipelago's inhabitants—the Ilois or Chagossians—were forcibly removed between 1967 and 1973 to make way for a major joint military facility on Diego Garcia.123

The separation of the archipelago from Mauritius has been a subject of significant international dispute, with the International Court of Justice later finding the decolonization process to be illegal.12