Comments on: A Celebration of the Chagos Marine Protected Area http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/2010/12/01/a-celebration-of-the-chagos-marine-protected-area/ Advancing ecology and making it count Tue, 14 May 2013 07:10:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Malika Devi http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/2010/12/01/a-celebration-of-the-chagos-marine-protected-area/#comment-2592 Malika Devi Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:54:56 +0000 http://britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/?p=1587#comment-2592 Now things are clearer: Wikileaks reveals that the Chagos Marine Protected Area was just a cynical ploy by the UK government to keep Chagossians out of the Chagos. (See New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/12/mauritius-british-chagos and The Guradian http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-cables-diego-garcia-uk).
Curiously, there is not one word in this article about the US military base situated in the Chagos. This is a permanent threat to all living organisms in the area. This has been highlighted bu environmentalists. For those who are interested, read Peter H. Sand’s article in the Journal of Environmental Law entitled “Diego Garcia: British-American Legal Black Hole in the Indian Ocean”. Apart from the brutal depopulation of the Chagos by the UK State in the early 1970′s to make way for the US military base form which Iraq and Afghanistan were bombed, on Diego Garcia, one of the islands forming part of the Chagos archipelago, there has been increasing nuclearisation of the base (the USS Emory, a nuclear submarine supply ship,recently docked there), there has been large scale coral destruction (euphemistically referred to as “coral harvesting” by the US), there has been invasive alien plant species introduction, and numerous fuel spills over the years.
How on earth did the British Ecological Society got taken in? There is a need to understand how this happened so that this kind of terrible mistake does not happen again.

]]> By: Angie http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/2010/12/01/a-celebration-of-the-chagos-marine-protected-area/#comment-2591 Angie Fri, 03 Dec 2010 01:14:16 +0000 http://britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/?p=1587#comment-2591 I am saddened to see a reputable organisation like yours “celebrating” this move by the British government which was so clearly designed as a ploy to stop the Chagossians from returning to their rightful home. Are you not aware of the information that has just been leaked?

http://www.nimbee.com/update/us-embassy-cables-foreign-office-does-not-regret-evicting-chagos-islanders/

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