« Historical issues | Main | Community defense »
August 13, 2005
Hans Island
To file in the "Dispute Over Barren Rocks" Folder (which, incidentally, is not as sparse as one might think):
Hans Island is a tiny,barren spot between Greenland and Canada's far north-east, lying about 1,100km from the North Pole. Like others in the frigid region, the island, a desolate patch measuring just 1.6 sq km, has "no strategic or practical value", in the estimation of David Rudd, president of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies.
Yet the island in recent weeks has become a flashpoint that highlights Canada's sovereignty problems in the Arctic. Canada and Denmark both claim Hans Island, an unlikely disputed claim left unresolved since a 1973 treaty. Both countries occasionally seek to buttress their position by landing there. This summer, it was Bill Graham, Canada's defence minister. Denmark complained and dispatched an icebreaker to reinforce its own claim. The two governments agreed to meet in September to discuss the island's status.
This story has been brewing for the past few weeks, but the FT piece provides the best overview I've seen thus far. As with many other disputes in the aforementioned "Barren Rocks" Folder, this one is actually rather interesting, in a petty sort of way. Like most other spats of this kind, the value of the Hans Island dispute isn't so much in its specifics as it is in the more relevant issues the dispute highlights. In this case, those issues are the growing importance of the fabled Northwest Passage -- in the context of both a booming China as well as global warming -- and Canada's increasing inability to exert sovereignty over the passage. Plus, a quant shadow of colonialism is cast over the whole dispute; that Denmark even has a claim to Hans Island stems from the fact that nearby Greenland is a Danish overseas dependency.
In any event, Hans Island isn't big news, and it shouldn't be. That doesn't make it uninteresting, however, or even completely irrelevant.
Posted by Daniel Widome at 11:44 PM to Americas
