The British High Commissioner's Valedictory Despatch 2004

A Valedictory Despatch that was too frank to be seen by the public?

David Snoxell was the British High Commissioner (BHC) to Mauritius for 4 years between 2000 and 2004. During this time, issues concerning the Chagos and its former inhabitants the Chagossians reached a critical stage, including the 2000 High Court decision (Bancoult 1) which allowed the Chagossians to return to the Outer Islands and the subsequent 2004 Orders-in-Council which reversed the court decision and banned them and removed their right of abode.

At the end of a diplomatic posting such as this, it was normal for the Head of Mission to send a Valedictory Despatch to the Foreign Secretary in London, as a farewell message. Such despatches often contained opinions that may be frank and forthright. In David Snoxell's case this was not only the end of his posting to Mauritius but also his retirement.

A Freedom of Information request to the Foreign Office in 2020 for a copy of the Valedictory Despatch telegram resulted in its release but in a heavily redacted form. The justification for the redactions were under Section 27(1)(a) and (c) [International Relations] of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. More specifically it was claimed that:

"The disclosure of information setting out the thoughts of an official on our relationship with various states could potentially damage the relationship between the UK and those states. The relationships are on-going and comments - even dating back some time - could be taken into account by those states. The disclosure of information detailing our relationship with the Mauritanian Government could potentially damage the bilateral relationship between the UK and Mauritius."

So what did the Valedictory Telegram report?

After complimentary remarks about Mauritius, Mr Snoxell reported that:

Anglo-Mauritian relations and a third of my time here, have been dogged by BIOT/Chagos issues. The last 6 months have been particularly intense with almost daily media coverage. I was Deputy Commissioner of BIOT from 95-97. It was coincidence, though Mauritians did not think so, that I returned as High Commissioner to the subject 3~ years later. This 39 year old dossier with its human rights, humanitarian, military, strategic, environmental, bilateral, regional and international dimensions is too complex to resume here.

[Note: BIOT = British Indian Ocean Territory = Chagos Archipelago]

We may guess that the large swathes that have been redacted contain references to the Chagos and these various issues, culminating in a short unredacted "But there is scope for agreement" which appears to relate to the known disagreements between the two countries.

An Interview for the British Diplomatic Oral History Project provides clues

It is of course hard to be certain what lies beneath the redactions, but not impossible. Three years after retiring, David Snoxell was interviewed for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme based at Churchill College, Cambridge University. The interview runs to 42 pages of which 10 are devoted to his time as the BHC to Mauritius. He also refers the interviewer to a lecture he had just given at Bristol University two weeks earlier which has since been published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Journal Page ).

In the interview he describes in some detail his involvement with the unfolding Chagos story (my highlighting added):

"So if I could stop explaining the background because I think it will just take too long, and just refer you now to that lecture. You will see how the various decisions came about when the Foreign Office decided to appeal to the House of Lords. I was involved on a daily basis with all the issues of Chagos. These issues include Defence of course. Diego Garcia is an important US base. The sovereignty claim of Mauritius, which we’ve always acknowledged come into it as do the environmental aspects of the most pristine uninhabited atolls left on the planet. And then there are the human rights and humanitarian aspects. I have described that as being one of the worst violations of fundamental human rights perpetrated by Britain in the 20th century. I had many meetings with the Chagossians. They naturally saw me as the face of the British government; the hard-hearted face of no compromise, who would always find an excuse; perfidious Albion. They demonstrated regularly against me. I had bottles smashed on my car. I had to be smuggled out of the High Commission on several occasions to avoid demonstrations, with decoy cars and so on. In 2001 I had a fifteen day demonstration against me with three hundred Chagossians camped outside the High Commission demanding in Creole, as they banged the crash barriers all round the High Commission, that I should come out and speak to them. It was a very difficult time. I felt the Mauritian government actually encouraged that demonstration to mount pressure on Britain, and what the Chagossians could never have known and only now know, is that I sympathised with their plight and I was doing my best with the Foreign Office to try to encourage them to find a way out of the situation, and to compromise. Let me just go back to the first High Court judgment of 4 November 2000 – I wrote to the Foreign Office on 8 November to Overseas Territories Department saying this High Court judgment gives us an opportunity to review our overall position on the Chagos Islands and I advocated that now was the golden opportunity to cede sovereignty over the Outer Islands to Mauritius, and in a sense, pass the responsibilities for the Chagossians to the Mauritian government. I argued in that letter that I hadn’t gone native, that I felt that this was something we should now with great urgency secure and take forward, and that it would in the long run save the taxpayer vast sums of money, and that it would respond to the humanitarian needs. I also said that we would need to compensate the Chagossians again. I never received a reply to that letter but I know that it is there in the files. On a visit back to London six weeks later, I had a meeting with Overseas Territories Department, a difficult meeting, in which I argued forcefully that we really ought to take the High Court judgment seriously and take this opportunity of seeing how we could transfer sovereignty. Of course the Whitehall argument was that the Americans wouldn’t allow us. I never believed that. I never believed that having a group of people living on the Outer Islands, 150 miles from the base, could in any way compromise the intelligence, security and defence role of the base, which was what was claimed by the FCO, and I did not myself feel that this was a serious argument. I never succeeded. One other area that I did try to persuade our Overseas Territories Department to pursue was that if we were to fund projects in Mauritius to help the Chagossian community become more established; that is, training skills, education, scholarships, community centres and so – if we were to spend, say, and I remember suggesting a figure of £50,000 a year, then we might very well persuade them that there was really nothing much to be gained from actually returning to the islands. After all they were into their second, indeed third generation, in Mauritius, and they had their community there and their way of life and the jobs, so why not help them to be more comfortable and be more educated in Mauritius? The Ilois were the least educated of all the people in Mauritius, rather akin to the Creoles, and they had been largely ignored, and marginalised, although they are indistinguishable from the Creole community in Mauritius, and speak the same Creole with a slightly different accent, but they are the same people. That request which I made several times was turned down by our Overseas Territories Department, and I was only talking about £50,000, which is trivial when compared with the likely bill for resettling the Chagossians.

To just go back to the sovereignty issues, I now want to talk about things that are not in my lecture. I think Valerie Amos, then the Minister responsible for Africa in the Foreign Office and Jack Straw, were taken with the idea that we really ought to try to negotiate a settlement with Mauritius, which would include the handing back of the Outer Islands, but of course not the base. I got the Deputy Prime Minister, Paul Bérenger, over to the Foreign Office and he had a good discussion with Jack Straw in about January 2002, who undertook to consult the Americans about this. That was all we heard for quite some time. Eventually I was instructed to deliver a letter to Bérenger from, I think, Jack Straw in which he said he had consulted the Americans, but they wanted to leave the situation as it was. He was very sorry he couldn’t help. My own feeling was that whilst the Foreign Secretary and the Minister for Africa saw the merit in going down this road and agreed with it, there were officials in our Overseas Territories Department who did not, and I think it is very easy in the Foreign Office, when the Foreign Secretary gives instructions to consult country ‘x’ about subject ‘y’, for officials to go to an ally like the US, and put the question in such a way as to get the answer that they want. Not surprisingly our Overseas Territories Department were closely in touch with the Counsellor of the US Embassy in London and a lot of things would be cross-checked there first. So it would not surprise me to learn that officials ventriloquised the answer from the Americans that they wanted. I think that was a huge mistake. We had an opportunity and we lost it, but Jack Straw was taken up with so many vital issues following the 9/11 events that this could not really feature very much on his agenda. I believe that had we approached the Americans in the right way; had Ministers themselves personally taken it up, we might very well have persuaded them that the only sensible solution to this clutch of issues was in fact to cede sovereignty of the Outer Islands. I think we could have easily convinced them that they actually didn’t need those islands for defence purposes, if they ever believed they did. I’m not sure that they did, or that we asked the Americans to help their old ally out. Britain had been extremely helpful to the US, and was about to be helpful over the Iraq War, and Britain was in a jam.

Personally I believe that it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for negotiations to have resulted in the cession of the sovereignty of the Outer Islands to Mauritius. As I say, that would have meant that Mauritius would have had the problem of what to do about the Chagossians.

I should perhaps say something about the Orders in Council of June 2004 which overturned the High Court judgement, Robin Cook’s decision and by-passed Parliament. When I first got wind of this stratagem I strongly advised against, for reasons set out in several telegrams. Officials were very cross with me for opposing their scheme but in the end I was instructed to inform the Mauritian Government. I did however persuade OTD to give me a short stay of execution. The Orders were signed by the Queen on 10 June which was a Thursday. That evening I had my last QBP and I didn’t really want that sabotaged by having to make such an announcement on that day. This would have meant that none of the Government of Mauritius would have been able to attend. So as far as I remember OTD agreed to keep it secret and announce it to Parliament the following Tuesday. Now the lawyers today have questioned how an Order in Council could have been held over or not announced to Parliament for five days. The actual reason was in order not to sabotage my final QBP, which was nice of them. And then I continued to fight a rear-guard action up until retirement, and still do so. I set it all out in my valedictory despatch as well.

The interviewer then asked about his Valedictory Despatch:

"Well FCO told me that a Reuters journalist asked under the Freedom of Information Act for a copy of it, and that was refused by the Foreign Office on the grounds that it would be prejudicial to both Anglo-Mauritian and Anglo-American relations, so therefore I’m not assuming – I don’t suppose that my valedictory will be available until 2034 when I propose to give my next lecture on this subject."

All of this, and David Snoxell's tireless efforts since his retirement [1] and to the present day to seek to resolve the Chagos impasse and to allow the Chagossians to return, suggest anything other than a diplomat in post who was forcefully arguing against the course of action which the FCO in London was pursuing in 2000-2004. The inevitable conclusion is that the redacted content of his Valedictory Despatch, far from potentially damaging the bilateral relationship between Britain and Mauritius, is in fact harsh criticism of his own Government's behaviour which still sticks like a craw in the throats of those officials and which serves to embarrass the FCO to this day.

[1] In 2008 David Snoxell assisted in the setting up of an All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Chagos Islands (BIOT) and becoming the group's Co-ordinator. The purpose of the APPG is "to help bring about a resolution of the issues concerning the future of the Chagos Island (BIOT) and the Chagossians". For the last 16 years he has also given lectures and written articles for learned journals and books about the Chagos, as well as numerous articles in the Mauritian Press. His most recent contribution is a chapter entitled "Prospect of the Chagos Advisory Opinion and the Subsequent UN General Assembly Resolution Helping to Resolve the Future of the Chagos Archipelago and Its Former Inhabitants: A Political Perspective" due to appear early next year in the book "The International Court of Justice and Decolonisation: New Directions from the Chagos Advisory Opinion", published by Cambridge University Press (CUP link ).