I have written twice to a petition site over this petition and had no reply, see if you can spot what’s wrong with it-
The Chagos Islands, located near the centre of the Indian Ocean, are a UK Overseas territory and by far the richest marine ecosystem under British jurisdiction. They are a very special and rare place, a relatively unpolluted and undisturbed part of the world, with reefs and oceans still teeming with life.
Yet marine life almost everywhere – including fish, invertebrates, mammals, seabirds and turtles – is suffering massive losses as a result of over-exploitation, bycatch and pollution. Combine these with the effects of acidification brought about from rising carbon dioxide emissions, and the very survival of many marine species is in doubt.
With your help, we can protect the reef and ocean ecosystem of the Chagos for present and future generations – but we only have until 12 February 2010 to convince the UK government! Please sign our petition urging the British government to declare the world’s largest marine protected area and give protection to one of the best coral reefs left on this planet.
Did you get it? Because the The Chagos Environment Network & Chagos Conservation Trust certainly don’t nor do Care2, no mention of the Chagos Islanders who were forcibly removed by the UK government so it could rent the islands (primarily the largest one Diego Garcia) to the US military that uses it to launch bombing raids on the Middle East and transit renditioned captives. Now call me weird but before I get all flustered trying to get a nature reserve established I would put my energies into righting the wrong of the dispossession of the Chagossians. The Independent has now caught onto this and makes the same point, very very powerful and successful environmental lobbying has superseded the rights of the islanders, which would rather suit both the UK & US as they get to hide a crime against humanity in a warm fuzzy- Ooh look we’re saving the planet. Short version -you can stuff your petition up your arse until the human rights of the Chagos Islanders are respected. While the Chagos Conservation Trust are careful to state when pushed (though good luck finding mention of the ethnic cleansing of the Chagossians on their site)-
The marine reserve proposal stresses the advantage of the islands being “uninhabited” and mentions the former residents only briefly and obliquely, saying that any decision would be “without prejudice” to the current court case in Europe, and adds: “This means that should circumstances change, all the options for a marine protected area may need to be reconsidered.”
I would ask you to do as I am and write to the Chagos Conservation Trust and the Foreign Office and tell them to stop laundering a historic ethnic cleansing under a Greenwash. After all the Chagossians are amenable to the idea, so stop writing them out of history-
Among those leading the criticism is a retired senior diplomat, David Snoxell, who is the co-ordinator of the Chagos Islands All-Party Parliamentary Group. “The consultation is extremely unfair to the Chagossians,” says Mr Snoxell. “It deliberately ignores them. People are running this campaign with the idea of keeping the islands uninhabited for time immemorial.” The Chagossians themselves would very much welcome a marine protected area, but they need to be part of it, Mr Snoxell says.
“We will support the project only if we are physically involved in it all the way, and our right of return to the Chagos Archipelago is not compromised,” said Roch Evenor, a spokesman for the islanders and secretary of the UK Chagos Support Association. “With the Chagossians living on Chagos we will be able to help the marine protected area, as our presence will be a deterrent factor for illegal fishermen who are fishing the sea cucumbers and sharks. We can co-exist – the Chagos archipelago could be something great if we all put our heads together and collaborate.”
The full Independent article-
A major conservation row is developing over proposals for Britain to establish the biggest and most unspoiled marine nature reserve in the world. The issue of the Chagos Islands raises the increasingly difficult question of how to weigh up the protection of the best remaining parts of nature, in a rapidly degrading world, against the needs and rights of people.
It concerns the Chagos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a group of isolated coral islands teeming with wildlife which is considered to be among the least polluted marine locations on Earth. Its seawater is the cleanest ever tested; its coral reefs are completely unspoiled; its whole ecosystem, with its countless seabirds, turtles, coconut-cracking crabs (the world’s largest), dolphins, sharks and nearly 1,000 other species of fish, is pristine.
Officially British Indian Ocean Territory, the islands are the subject of an ambitious plan by conservationists – backed by the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband – to keep them the way they are, by creating a marine protected area, where fishing and all other exploitation would be banned, of 210,000 square miles – more than twice the land surface of Great Britain. In an age when the oceans and their biodiversity are being ever more despoiled, it would be a supreme example of marine conservation and one of the wildlife wonders of the world – in effect, Britain’s Great Barrier Reef, or Britain’s Galapagos.
The plan excites many wildlife enthusiasts and has the formal support of several of Britain’s major conservation bodies, from the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew and the Zoological Society of London to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The backing of the Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary is significant. A public consultation on the plan ends on Friday.
But there is a notable omission from the plan. It takes no account of the wishes of the original inhabitants, the Chagossians – the 1,500 people living on the islands who, between 1967 and 1973, were deported wholesale by Britain, so that the largest island, Diego Garcia, could be used by the US as an airbase for strategic nuclear bombers.
When, in the 1990s, details emerged of the Chagossians’ enforced exile, which left them in poverty and unhappiness on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, it was widely seen as a substantial natural injustice; and in 2000 the then-Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, gave them permission to return.
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