| Issue #1 - March 30, 2007 |
ISLAND GETS IMPORTANT, 2 COUNTRIES CLAIM IT
By Dan Rattiner
Sometime around 1970, diplomats from Canada and Denmark got together to decide on a boundary line that would run down the Nares Strait, which separated the two countries. You might wonder how these two countries, set thousands of miles apart from one another, could be discussing a boundary between them, but you have to realize that Denmark owns Greenland, and Greenland is right across the water from Canada — separated by the Nares Strait — so it does make a certain amount of sense.
Anyway, it was no big deal back then. The strait may have been five hundred miles long, but it was just three miles wide, and ten months of the year it was completely icebound. Just run the boundary line down the center of the strait, they decided.
Right at the entrance to the strait, however, almost exactly equidistant from the two shorelines, is a tiny island known as Hans Island. At that time, it was just a half-mile wide, circular in shape, and about 1/7th the size of New York’s Central Park. At various times before 1970, hikers from both Greenland and Canada trekked around on this little ice-covered island and various unofficial claims were made for it — including one where some Danes half-buried a bottle of brandy and attached a small Danish flag to it — but none of it seemed very important. The diplomats in 1973 decided that, rather than give the island to either one side or the other, they’d leave the problem of its ownership on the table to be decided upon later.
This, as it has turned out, was a very big mistake.
34 years later, there is now both a Danish flag (bigger than the one before) and a Canadian flag planted on Hans Island, and warships from both countries have swung by to lend some muscle to the diplomacy over its ownership.
In 1999, Denmark made an official claim to Hans Island at the United Nations, after which a member of the Danish Senate named Tom Hoeyem paid a visit to the island, arriving on a helicopter that had been brought to the area aboard a Danish Warship, planting a larger flag and a sign reading WELCOME TO DENMARK. And then, in 2005, the Canadian Minister of Defense, Bill Graham, went there while on a tour of Canadian military outposts. A week before his arrival, Canadian troops had come to Hans Island to build an Inuit Hut out of boulders — a poor, but nevertheless serviceable, military outpost. Graham arrived to review it. He said it was fine.
The Danish government filed a protest over Graham’s visit. “We consider Hans Island to be part of Danish territory and deplore the Canadian minister’s unannounced visit,” they proclaimed.
The Canadians fired back with a note of their own, written by the director of the Canadian Office of Foreign Affairs. “Canada does not need to inform Denmark of its’ intention to visit Canadian soil,” he wrote.
If you think all this is unimportant, think again. Rob Huebert, a political scientist with the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, said that Mr. Graham’s visit “indicates that we are drawing a line in the sand.”
And that’s the point. The island was covered with ice in 1973. Today, due to global warming, it’s been fully revealed as rock, lichen and sand. You could easily drill there for oil and gas. It guards the entrance to the Strait. And the Strait is now open water. Last year, for the first time, a ship that was not an icebreaker, the Russian freighter Akademik Fyodorov, sailed across the North Pole and down the Denmark Strait to Canada. This is the fabled Northwest Passage. And as a commercial route from Asia to the Americas, it is 60% shorter than the route through the Panama Canal. Whoever controls Hans Island controls the strait.
As the dispute between Canada and Denmark has widened, other countries have stepped into the picture. For example, the United States says the strait qualifies now as an International Waterway. Hans Island has to be a free port. The Canadians responded — some say indelicately — by saying that they will, if necessary, send warships to Hans Island to enforce their claim of sovereignty.
Interestingly, as the various parties have had further discussions about Hans Island — Norway and Russia have since joined the discussions — there is now a sort of code phrase involved in explaining what this is all about. The code phrase is “fishing rights.” It’s all about “fishing rights.” It is about oil and gas, control of transportation, iron and diamonds.
It is also about polar bears, seals and wolves. And it’s about the Inuits.
“We mustn’t forget that people live there,” said Tristan Pearce, a research associate at the University of Guelph’s Global Environmental Change Group in Canada. “The indigenous people have always been there and they have a major role to play.”
Ultimately, as the polar ice melts and the seas rise, Hans Island, which is just a few feet above sea level at its highest point, will disappear below the surface of the sea. But that’s another story, for another time.
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