Conservation plan would keep islanders in exile

Fred Pearce, New Scientist 23 Feb 09;

ECO-IMPERIALISM is stalking the high seas. Conservationists in the US and UK stand accused of trying to grab waters that their governments have no right to.

The Pew Environment Group, a US organisation, has joined forces with UK conservationists to protect the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean. While the push to protect the environment looks like a laudable goal, especially given the environmental damage to Diego Garcia, the largest island and home to a US military base, the plan could permanently exile thousands of Chagossians.

This is despite a British promise to hand the area, currently the British Indian Ocean Territory, to Mauritius once Diego Garcia is no longer needed as a US base. The inhabitants of the islands were removed by the UK in the late 1960s to make way for the base. Today, most Chagossians live in Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK. Polls show half of them still want to return to the islands.

Last year, the islanders published detailed proposals for resettlement. But the Chagos Conservation Trust, chaired by William Marsden, a former senior British diplomat, objected. It said the proposed airport and tourist facilities were "incompatible with conservation".

Next month the trust, advised by Charles Sheppard, a marine scientist at the University of Warwick, UK, and the Pew Environment Group, will publish its own proposals. The Pew group bankrolled and was key in promoting one of George W. Bush's last acts as US president. Despite protests from local island leaders, Bush declared the Mariana trench in the Pacific Ocean a national monument, even though it extends 80 kilometres beyond US territorial waters.

Sheppard hopes the British government will back the Chagos plan and that Pew will fund it. He says the coral atolls are among the planet's most pristine marine ecosystems. "Britain is sitting on an extraordinary site," he says.

If successful, the plan is likely to ban all construction, prevent ships anchoring in coral-rich areas, and keep out fishing boats that currently take sea cucumbers and sharks. Diego Garcia will be outside the conservation zone and left to the Americans.

Peter Sand of the Institute of International Law in Munich, Germany, sees the plan as part of a "new wave of unilaterally declared environmental protection zones in oceans beyond national territorial waters".

The Chagos Conservation Trust justifies the plan because, it says, the islands "belong" to the UK. But, as Sand told New Scientist, "since 1983, the UK government has repeatedly and solemnly declared" that the islands will be "ceded" to Mauritius. "Needless to say, neither the Chagos islanders nor the Mauritians have been asked what they think," he says.

Last month, Sand claimed that the US military is responsible for environmental damage around Diego Garcia, including "large-scale coral mining, the introduction of alien plant species, continuous transit of nuclear material and unreported major fuel spills" (Journal of Environmental Law, DOI: 10.1093/jel/eqn034).