by RICKY JORDAN

AN ONGOING LEGAL battle over beach access in a neighbouring island could turn into a bloodbath, predicts one clergyman.

Pastor David Hunt, a Barbadian-based preacher and artisan who is a native of the southern Grenadine island of Canouan, is warning that the younger generation will not take the foreign control of their island as peacefully as the older folk have for over a decade.

"I see imminent danger. The young generation is not as peaceful or God-fearing as we are . . . . Somebody will take up arms and blood will be shed if nothing changes," said the pastor popularly known as "The Battering Ram".

Hunt, who recently returned here from St Vincent, has been following the ongoing tension between Canouan citizens and American and Italian hotel developers over access to beaches on the north of the island.

He also noted that Terrence Bynoe, leader of the Canouan Progressive Movement, who had been arrested and banned by the legal authorities from all resorts on the island, was still fighting for his rights in the law courts.

Describing the developers as "land sharks" who now owned over 1 200 acres of the 1 800-acre island and wanted to buy more, Hunt said developers had first been given control via a 99-year lease signed in 1994 by the former Sir James Mitchell administration.

"That land, which contains some of the world's most beautiful beaches, is completely barricaded. And the locals, except they work at the Carenage Bay beach resorts, can't get in there," he told the WEEKEND NATION.

"Visitors to Canouan have been saying that it's now being advertised as a 'private island'. Terry Bynoe is a refugee in his own country. I'm not saying the investors should be chased out or their property confiscated, but I'm calling on Vincentians at home and abroad to speak out and for the government
to do something," he said.

He also called for a lifting of an injunction against Bynoe, which was granted to the developers in 2001 by a Vincentian judge, barring Bynoe from basically being able to walk or drive on "three-quarters of the island".

Subsequently, Bynoe claimed the gates, which barred access to the beaches in Canouan's north were in direct breach of an agreement signed by the management of Carenage Bay resort, then prime minister Sir James and himself.

"I hope the same energy which Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves used to get the $150 million debt relief for the Otley Hall marina and to get back the 100 acres of land in Union Island, he will also use to win the Canouan people their democratic and historical rights."

Hunte added that the island of three square miles had produced three regional leaders: the late St Lucian prime minister Sir John Compton, St Lucia's
Prime Minister Stephenson King and Sir James.