Millennium Matters

Q. Might the millennium lead to war in the Pacific soon?

A. Very possibly yes. It's all to do with an intriguing feud between the inhabitants of the Chatham Islands and those of the close-by island group of Kiribati. It contains all the usual ingredients necessary for a good ol' scrap: national pride, tales of treachery and deceit and of course, rows about television rights.

It began a number of years back when the inhabitants of the Chatham Islands (which lie about 500 miles east of New Zealand) declared to one and all they would be the first inhabited land mass to witness the first dawn of next year. With just 750 inhabitants, this represented a sizeable tourism-generator for the islands and within days, hundreds of television companies from around the world were flying out to see them, trying to negotiate the rights to place their cameras on the island for the first snaps of next year.

With just one hotel and one hostel and not much in the way of anything else, the islanders set about building and renovating their facilities, expecting a deluge of people to arrive for the millennium. Everything was going to plan until a remarkable announcement from the inhabitants of the small South Pacific nation of Kiribati who suddenly and unilaterally announced that they were going to "move" themselves across the International Date Line, thus becoming the new first inhabited land mass to welcome in the new year.

In effect what they did was to move their group of islands from "yesterday" to "today" but their bold plan was quickly scorned by the scientific community. "The Kiribati dateline change lacks sensibility," said the Geographical Journal in a po-faced manner, "the arbitrary and unilateral moving of time zones or the International Date Line does not give rise to any level of credibility in the international navigation community". Or the community at large, it should be added. But you have to admire their sheer neck.

The Kiribatians quickly hit back by claiming (accurately, as far as anyone knows) that the Chatham islanders had themselves set their own time 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand and had got away with it. Insults were traded and threats issued. The Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich was dragged into the debacle and it firmly came down on the side of the Chatham Islanders:

"The international date-line has not been changed," it says, "although the time they are now keeping in Kiribati puts them on the west side of the dateline, for scientific purposes they're not on the other side of the dateline and it won't be recognised by scientists or navigators."

Quick to defend the Kiribatians though is Dr Roger Catchpole of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge, who says: "There are good administrative reasons why Kiribati put all of its islands on the same day" (previously they were scattered over the dateline, with the inhabited ones on the "wrong" side).

He, in turn, has been shouted down by Philip Blain of the Millennium Adventure Company who says that since the dateline was formulated in 1884, the Kiribatians have been quite happy, until now, being on the "other" side. It should be noted though that the Millennium Adventure Company has already snapped up the rights to film from the Chatham Islands and thus is hardly impartial.

The debate continues . . .