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sgarland 6 days ago

If I were Mauritius, I would be hitting tech companies left and right to secure a permanent income stream.

You guys want to kick indigenous people off their land for military bases? Enjoy your new bill for .io domains.

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barry-cotter 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The Chagossians are not by any meaningful standards indigenous. The land was uninhabited when George Washington was rebelling against the British. If the Chagossians are indigenous so are old stock white Americans.

And Mauritius have treated the Chagossians like dirt for decades, with no signs of that changing.

None of this is to deny the Chagossians were extremely ill treated by the British, but the idea that the Mauritanians have any interest in the welfare of the Chagossians is ridiculous.

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Y_Y 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have some sympathy for your position, but I'll add that the prevailing moral opinion seems to be "whoever got there first is the rightful owner". Of course you have to allow for armchair ethnologists not being particularly good at distinguishing between similar groups and later revisionism.

A lot of Pacific islands territories have complicated histories like this (e.g. Hawaii, New Zealand), but the focus usually ends up on whatever bastards most recently took over from the previous bastards (relative levels of bastardy notwithstanding).

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Sunspark 6 days ago | parent [-]

Absolutely. For example, the Maoris are not the original indigenous. What happened to them you may ask? They became literal dinner for the Maoris. This has happened elsewhere too. True original indigenous are rare.

The thing with the island of Diego Garcia is quite strange and I strongly suspect there is corruption involved. The UK wishes to divest itself? Instead of holding an auction where the rest of the planet can bid on purchasing the territory, the UK decided that Mauritius would take it (who doesn't really want it) and to entice them, the UK is going to PAY Mauritius to take the territory and leave the base alone. The amount is £90 million annually, adjusted for inflation for 99 years.

This is a lot of money, why not just NOT turn it over and not have to give away £90 million a year for a century? So, it begs the question.. is someone from the UK side benefiting from this no-bid deal?

Give the island to me, and I won't charge the UK to have the base.

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chris1993 4 days ago | parent [-]

Māori were the first settlers of NZ. There’s no record of any earlier population being “dinner” for anyone.

	▲	Y_Y 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Citation needed! As I understand it there were no Maori before NZ was settled, that culture formed there from the Polynesian"moa-hunters". Some descendants of those settlers became the Maori, but that a different claim. Furthermore, there are just generally very few records so I think it's very difficult to make definite claims like you or GP do.

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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bigstrat2003 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hopefully that doesn't happen as not everyone who uses a .io is a tech company. I've been using a .io domain for my personal email for something like a decade now, when I just thought "oh that's a cool TLD" and had no idea it was even a country TLD. I don't much relish the idea of getting soaked for money to stick it to the man when I haven't done anything morally wrong.