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Features I. Victoria, Seychelles When Olivier Bancoult boarded the ship that was to take him 1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos Archipelago - his childhood home, from which he and his fellow islanders had been expelled 50 years earlier - he carried five wrought-iron crosses. Bancoult pointed to where the Chagossians on the ship, all now living in Mauritius, had been born. Uprooted and desperately poor, the Chagossians formed small communities in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom, with little support from any of those countries. The government argued that Britain had no standing to create the marine protected area; Chagos had been illegally detached from Mauritius, and Britain was therefore not the relevant "coastal state.". [Extracted from the article]