The Indian Ocean islanders who were pummeled by history—and now by Trump, too

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.TOMBEAU BAY, Mauritius—Over centuries, the people of the remote Chagos Archipelago have been battered by forces beyond their control. Slavery.

Colonialism. The Cold War.Now they can add President Trump’s whims to the list.The Chagossians have lived in limbo since being evicted from the Indian Ocean islands in the 1960s and 1970s to create a buffer around the secret U.S.-U.K.

military base on Diego Garcia.Then last year the exiles thought they had finally caught a break: Britain struck a deal that would see the U.K. cede the islands to Mauritius and lease back the Diego Garcia base, providing some much needed cash for both Mauritius and the Chagossians, and perhaps allow the exiles to go home.Trump was all for it.Then he was against it.For it.Against it.In the end he seems to have decided to kill it.“It will be heartbreaking, but what can we do?” says 70-year-old Lyndsay Victor, who left the Chagos with his grandmother in 1973 and found himself dumped on a pier in Mauritius, more than 1,000 miles from home.“We have no choice,” says Victor.

“We’ve had no choice for 50 years.”Trump’s changes of mind have left hundreds of Chagossian exiles worried they have lost their last shot at the happiness that came with a life, as much gauzy myth as concrete reality, of fishing, friends and family on picture-postcard islands.“How could you treat people like this?” says Louis Olivier Bancoult, who left the archipelago at age 4 and now heads the Chagos Refugees Group in Mauritius. “What does he want?”France ruled the Chagos starting in 1715, bringing in slaves to harvest coconut meat.

The archipelago switched to British control in the 1814 Treaty of Paris, which briefly paused the Napoleonic Wars. After