at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
Marine biologist John Mussington is chair of the Barbuda Council’s agriculture and fisheries division. “Barbuda was not uninhabitable after the hurricane. This was furthest from the truth,” he says. “Neither was it 95% ‘destroyed’. The UN development project damage assessment said that it was 95% ‘damaged’. There is a difference between destroyed and damaged.
CLNP is a formidable bulwark, exemplified during Hurricane Irma, when the lagoon acted as a shield against coastal erosion., a conservation treaty signed by nearly 90% of UN member states, including, since 2005, Antigua and Barbuda. But critics claim the agreement is not being upheld. Mussington is among Barbudans who allege that the Antigua and Barbudan government saw Hurricane Irma as such an opportunity to acquire prime land for developers, and that connecting water and electricity were deliberately delayed to keep Barbudans from returning.
The Barbuda Land Act of 2007, enacted by Baldwin Spencer’s United Progressive party government, was seen as historic legislation to protect people’s rights and communal land ownership. Barbuda’s national parks manager, Kelly Burton, says: “The Local Government Act is entrenched in the constitution, and that was where the Land Act was formed from. That [Local Government Act] was not repealed because they cannot change the constitution without a two-thirds majority.
Jackie Frank, a former chair of the Barbuda Council, whose father was an MP on the committee that devised the original Land Act, believes the prime minister has a different view [of tourism]. Pointing to a derelict building, he adds: “It has been going on for six years and that is the police headquarters, the seat of law and order on the island, a public building, and that remains just how the hurricane left it. So what was the priority?”