HONIARA (ABC) — A remote community in the Solomon Islands has scored a huge victory against a mining company, which had planned to dig an open-pit mine on their tiny island.
Wagina Island is just 78 square kilometres in size, and residents argued the open-pit bauxite mine the company had been given approval for would affect 60 per cent of the island, damaging land, rivers and the sea.
It’s been a seven-year battle for the island’s residents, who first took Solomon Bauxite Limited — a company owned by two Hong Kong-listed businesses — to court over its mining plan back in 2014.
The complaint was heard by the country’s Environmental Advisory Committee (EAC), which last year revoked the development consent given to the mining company by the Solomon Islands Ministry of Environment.
The committee said the company had failed to follow the law by not getting community consent for its planned mine, and that it failed to provide residents with copies of its environmental impact statement.
That decision was thrown into doubt after Solomon Bauxite Limited appealed, but the country’s Minister of Environment has now rejected the appeal.
Wagina Island resident Samao Biribo told the ABC the decision to reject the company’s appeal was a huge relief for those living on the island.
“It just makes me want to cry about how hard we fought in court, it’s really unfair for us.”
The Wagina Island situation was far from a simple environmental case, as it also involved land rights and the troubled history of colonialism that persists in parts of the Pacific.
Most of the roughly 2,000 people who call Wagina Island home can trace their history back to islands that now make up the Pacific nation of Kiribati — due to drought, they were resettled in Solomon Islands in the late 1950s by the British colonial government, which controlled much of the region.
This was no small move: their home islands in Kiribati were around 3,300 kilometres away from Wagina Island, or around the same distance as the crow flies between Perth and Sydney.
This also wasn’t the first time colonial powers had moved the islanders. They had previously been evacuated from other islands in Kiribati two decades earlier in the 1930s, again due to drought.
As a result, the residents of Wagina have a completely different culture to the communities on nearby islands in Solomon Islands.
And while the colonial administration considered Wagina Island to be uninhabited at the time of the resettlement, tribal groups in Solomon Islands have since contested its ownership.
Biribo said the Minister of Environment’s decision to reject the appeal has affirmed her people’s right to live on the island.
“If the Government can continue to recognise us, give us political equality and land rights for us as minority group here.”
Biribo said the Minister of Environment’s decision to reject the appeal has affirmed her people’s right to live on the island.
“If the Government can continue to recognise us, give us political equality and land rights for us as minority group here,” Biribo said…. PACNEWS