Fortress Conservation Trumps Human Rights?

Marine scientists and environmental organizations have long called for the creation of a global system of marine protected areas (MPAs) well beyond national territorial waters. At the Curitiba Conference of the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2006, governments made commitments to conserve at least 10% of each of the world’s marine and coastal ecological regions by 2012 (Spalding, Wood, Fitzgerald, & Gjerde, 2010)—a target since criticized as “insufficient” in preparatory documents for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), for example by the Pew Environment Group.

So when the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office in April 2010 declared “a marine reserve to be known as the Marine Protected Area” in the Chagos Archipelago (British Indian Ocean Territory [BIOT]) covering 544,000 sq. km (i.e., twice the size of the United Kingdom), the decision to ban fishing in the area was acclaimed by conservationists as creating the world’s largest nature reserve, in a region considered exceptionally rich in biodiversity (Nelson & Bradner, 2010).

By coincidence, the 200 nautical miles “green zone” now surrounding BIOT also encloses one of the strategically most important U.S. bases overseas, the coral atoll of Diego Garcia. Curiously, though, the island of Diego Garcia itself (the only current pollution source in the archipelago) and its 3-mile territorial waters are to be exempted from the marine protected area so as not to impede military operations. Under a 1966 UK–US bilateral agreement and a military construction program totalling more than US$3 billion since 1971, Diego Garcia boasts the world’s longest slipform-paved airport runway built on crushed coral, which served as the principal launch-pad for the bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan. Its Pearl Harbor-size lagoon has been deep dredged to accommodate aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and a large fleet of forward supply vessels (Sand, 2009a), even though it is also listed since 2001 as part of an internationally protected nature reserve under the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (No. 1077, 2UK001). The Diego Garcia naval port is not subjected to inspection under the new 2010 US-Russian Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Article IV, para. 11), and in the view of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia, the base is outside the purview of the “Pelindaba Treaty” on the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone,—an interpretation contested by all member states of the African Union (Sand, 2009b).

The real problems with the BIOT “marine protected area,” however, arise from its unilateral enactment (by cabinet decision without parliamentary approval, under ancient colonial lawmaking powers by “royal prerogative”), disregarding the legitimate interests both of other states and of the people directly concerned, that is, the indigenous Chagos islanders.

BIOT is one of the last born of Britain’s colonial territories, excised in 1965 from the former crown colony of Mauritius for the sole purpose of accommodating a U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean, in exchange for US$14 million “detachment costs” provided from a secret Pentagon fund, and in open defiance of several UN General Assembly Resolutions on decolonization (Vine, 2011). Mauritius never formally abandoned its sovereignty claim to the Chagos islands, has enacted national legislation since 1984 for a 12-mile territorial sea and a 200-mile exclusive economic zone around the archipelago, and in December 2010 initiated arbitration proceedings under the UN Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) against the proclamation of a “BIOT marine protected area.” The Maldives in turn claim part of the northern section, which overlaps with their own exclusive economic zone. Consequently, in the absence of an agreed geographical delimitation, the new British marine reserve remains unenforceable under UNCLOS article 73.

The small indigenous population of the archipelago (about 1,500 native Îlois) had been deported in 1968-1973 to make way for the base, under circumstances described as “one of the worst violations of fundamental human rights perpetrated by Britain in the 20th century” (Snoxell, 2011, p. 5).1 The exiled Chagossians—most of whom now live in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom—instituted legal action for their right to return and full compensation in both British and U.S. federal courts, albeit unsuccessfully, with an ultimate appeal now pending in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (Allen, 2011). According to confidential UK–US diplomatic documents disclosed by Wikileaks in December 2010, the ulterior motive for the establishment of a BIOT “marine protected area” by the U.K. Foreign Office—anticipating the outcome of the litigation—was “to prevent any of the Chagos Islands” former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT (Roberts, 2009).

One of the pseudo-environmental pretexts for denying the islanders a right of return has been the dire prediction that sea-level rise caused by global warming would soon make the islands uninhabitable (Rammell, 2004)—a claim disproved by recent data for this particular area (Dunne, Barbosa, & Woodworth, 2012), and which in any event does not seem to deter the United States from further long-term investment in its Diego Garcia base (Erickson, Ladwig, & Mikolay, 2010). The more fundamental and more Machiavellian side of this greenwash, however, is a hegemonic form of “fortress conservation” (Brockington, Duffy, & Igoe, 2008; De Santo, Jones, & Miller, 2010) which places nature before people, pretending that human resettlement would jeopardize the “pristine” condition of the Chagos marine environment. It may well be, as noted by the BIOT’s conservation advisor, that “the present uninhabited nature of most of these islands is the main reason for the richness and unimpacted nature of the marine habitat” (Sheppard, 2000, p. 221). Yet, this arguable de facto assertion can hardly be turned into a rationale for the continued de jure exclusion of the exiled islanders from their homeland. Protected areas can sustain people, and vice versa. It is to be hoped that the U.K. Foreign Office, regardless of the outcome of the Strasbourg case, will (a) undertake consultations with other states concerned as required under UNCLOS articles 56(2), 74, and 211(6) to legitimize its enclosure of ocean space internationally; and (b) integrate the Chagossians in any future governance arrangements for this unique marine region, which unquestionably deserves recognition and protection as global natural heritage.