Sipadan – Paradise Lost

The unwillingness of the dive operators to provide divers with proper on-board amenities as well as obvious feelings of animosity at being evicted from their island led to their support of a building project led by the Chief –Minister of Sabah State Datuk Musa Aman to construct a $1.3million clubhouse. Encompassing toilets, staff quarters, restaurant, scuba shop and sewage facilities enough for 50-70,000 dive tourists per year.

Before and after.

On May 15th 2006 a flat-bottomed barge containing thousands of tons of building materials and equipment loosed it’s moorings in a high wind and carved its way up the beach decimating 372sq meters of coral reef. Reef that had taken centuries to create was reduced to limestone rubble in moments (see 1a.). It was as if someone had taken a scalpel to the cheek of the Mona Lisa.

At first it was reported that the Chief-Minister Musa had denied the project existed even blaming his deputy, the minister for tourism, culture and the environment. Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Chong Kah Kiat had publicly admitted what the materials were for and also said that the project was approved by the state government. Chief-Minister Musa went ahead with the project even after the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi told him not to. In a very public statement the Prime-Minister said “I was very angry with Musa, I told him not to build it…”. The project was stopped but then later allowed to continue as long as environmentally-friendly building materials were used. The new contractor would have to build the now much scaled down facilities of toilets, basic sewage treatment plant, staff-quarters showers and a divers rest area but also clean up after the previous contractor which involves the removal of rusting metal rods, planks and cement that the previous contractor had sent to the island.

We have broken this “piece of art”. In just fifteen years we have turned what should have been a world heritage site into a toilet. The once pearl in the Sulawesi sea has become a cess pit. Why do the divers need somewhere to rest between dives? What did they do? Swim the 22 miles to the island? The boats they came on are sufficient to rest, change tanks and have lunch and if not then Mabul and Kapalai are only fifteen minutes away. It’s the dive operators’ duty to obey the rules laid down on the numbers of divers entering the park each day. It’s in their interest to protect Sipadan for their own futures. No one will want to visit a cess pit on a concrete atoll in the middle of the ocean and that’s exactly what Sipadan will become if all work and all diving is not stopped right now. The place needs time to heal itself. Nature does not need our help to survive; it needs our absence.

The end.