[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Conservation on USA's Diego Garcia and Chagos Islands: returnee rights?

[Patrick Bond]

Green.view
Ocean blues

Feb 9th 2009
 From Economist.com
A new conservation plan for the Chagos Islands

A GROUP of leading conservation organisations have hatched a plan to 
create one of the world’s largest marine reserves in British waters. The 
reserve is to be located in the pristine tropical waters of the Chagos 
Islands, part of Britain’s Indian Ocean Territory, and it would be 
comparable in size and quality to the Great Barrier Reef.

The Chagos Conservation Trust plans to launch the new proposal in early 
March at the Royal Society in London. The plan will be backed by leading 
conservation groups, including the Royal Society for the Protection of 
Birds, the Zoological Society, the Linnean Society and the Pew 
Environment Group, a powerful American charity.

The Pew successfully lobbied George Bush, a former American president, 
for several large new American marine reserves, and it wants to repeat 
that success globally. It has its sights set on the Chagos Islands, 
which include the world’s largest and most pristine coral atoll, as well 
as some of the cleanest seas on earth. It is a refuge for rare seabird 
colonies, turtles and diverse marine life.

William Marsden, chairman of the Chagos Conservation Trust, said this is 
“by far Britain’s richest area of marine biodiversity and would be in 
the big league” of world marine reserves. At about 250,000 square miles 
(647,500 square kilometres), it would be bigger than Pew’s most recent 
reserve in the Mariana Islands. He noted the reserve would be 
“compatible with defence and would also do something for the Chagossians”.

The Chagossians, however, live elsewhere. In the 1960s, Britain evicted 
the natives so America could put a military base on Diego Garcia, the 
biggest atoll in the Chagos archipelago. Chagossians have been fighting, 
unsuccessfully, to go home ever since; many believe that the case is 
likely to end up at the European Court of Human Rights.

Julian Hanford, a spokesman for the UK Chagos Support Association, said 
that the islands are of conservation value today because they were 
“swept clean and left pristine for 50 years.” He worries that plans for 
the Chagos are again being made without consulting the Chagossians, and 
the Foreign Office maintains that nobody has the right to live in the 
British Indian Ocean Territory.

Jeremy Corbyn, a Labour MP and chair of the recently formed Chagos 
Islands All Party Parliamentary Group, called the people of the island a 
“positive asset” to any conservation plans. Though he admires what the 
environmentalists want to do, he warned that “examples of conservation 
done against the wishes of local people are disastrous.”

Last year a report by John Howell, a former director of Britain’s 
Overseas Development Institute, and the Chagos Refugees Group, estimated 
that of the 800 families (5,000 people) considered eligible for 
resettlement to the islands, half wanted to return permanently. The 
report called for a small airport and development for “environmentally 
sensitive tourism”. The cost of this plan was put at £25m ($36.3m). But 
the Chagos Conservation Trust called proposals for commercially driven 
development “incompatible with conservation”.

In a letter to the Times last month, David Snoxell, the former British 
High Commissioner to Mauritius, argued that Chagossians would make 
“ideal conservation guardians” in an vast area currently patrolled by a 
single boat (and therefore prey to illegal overfishing). “Most 
scientists believe that human presence goes hand in hand with 
conservation. Local inhabitants, in a carefully controlled resettlement 
on two of the atolls, could enhance the protection of marine life, bird 
sanctuaries, coastal waters and the islands, not least eradication of 
invasive species.”

The UK Chagos Support Association says it would support conservation 
plans that allowed everyone who wanted to return to have a fair chance 
to do so and have an active part in it. Yet a complete marine reserve 
would be inherently incompatible with the return of the natives, as they 
would have to fish there.

Whether the various views of the future of these islands can be 
reconciled is unclear. Ultimately, the gorilla in the room will decide 
these islands’ future—that gorilla, of course, being the base on Diego 
Garcia. The Americans bought Diego Garcia on condition that the Chagos 
Islands were uninhabited. Mr Corbyn said that the Foreign Office said 
last month that American security concerns preclude the Chagossians’ 
return—a reason he called “complete bunkum.” He argues, sensibly, that 
the best way to allay those concerns is with a friendly population. For 
the sake of the Chagossians, the base and the nature in which both are 
set, one hopes that the British and American governments agree.