Caribbean, Castaways, Contention

Taffy and Bonnie Bufton don’t live here anymore.

Until a few months ago, the aging Welsh couple were the only residents of tiny Guiana Island--447 acres of cactus, thorn bush, mangrove and rocks. Their realm: two ramshackle houses, a 36-volt generator, 70 sheep, about 50 fallow deer, an ancient tractor and Taffy’s rusty 1953 British sedan.

For more than 30 years, the Buftons drank rainwater filtered through socks. The couple, now in their 70s, tended the deer and the sheep. And they reveled in the simplicity of their quirky isolation on a scruffy little island that no one else wanted.

Until last year.

Enter: Malaysian billionaire Dato Tan Kay Hock and his vision of Guiana, just 50 yards from the main island of Antigua, as the heart of Asian Village--one of the Caribbean’s biggest and most ambitious proposed tourism projects.

In what has become emblematic of the confrontation between small island states’ desperation for investment and the rich peculiarities that lurk in the islands’ histories, the controversial development plan has polarized this nation of 64,000.

Approved by the government of Antigua and Barbuda last year, the project calls for $600 million in private investment in at least two luxury Asian-style hotels, a casino, villas, marinas, a golf course, a shopping center and a conference facility on 1,500 acres that include Guiana Island and a small chunk of Antigua.

But the Buftons stood in the project’s way, and the government said they had to go.

Taffy and Bonnie said they’d die first. And then, police say, Taffy went and shot the prime minister’s brother. In a fit of desperation and fury in December, police say, the burly Taffy, 74, strode into Vere Bird Jr.’s office and ended up shooting himself in the hand and Bird in the mouth during a confrontation over the Guiana dispute.

At issue is not just the fate of the Buftons, who recently were resettled at government expense in a five-room, seafront home on four acres on Antigua. Their claim to Guiana Island, whose true ownership is in dispute, is pending in court, but the government, in what it calls a “humanitarian gesture,” is paying their rent, utilities and a $567-a-month stipend under a 1997 parliamentary act known as the Taffy and Bonnie Bufton Bill.

For most Antiguans, a larger issue is the land itself. Many challenge the government’s decision to sell an entire island to a little-known developer from half a world away for just $5 million.

Antigua’s main opposition party has sued to block the sale. A local court ruled in the government’s favor late last year, and an appellate court upheld that decision last week. The opposition has yet to announce whether it will appeal to the nation’s equivalent of a supreme court.

Labeling the project “the rawest of raw deals,” a local newspaper owned by opposition party member Tim Hector recently asserted that the government “is selling . . . its most sensitive ecological area, its most scenic spot left, not even for a string of beads, but for low-paying jobs, where a Malaysian will exploit Antiguan labor.”

“Our national patrimony is being alienated and becoming an ‘Asian Village,’ a settler colony, as it was in the beginning,” Hector said.

Developer’s Great Expectations

Meantime, developer Tan plans to break ground on Guiana Island on April 24 for a project that he and the Antiguan government insist will boost the island’s economy, create 4,000 jobs and make Antigua the premier Caribbean tourist destination after the Bahamas.

“It’s a fantastic project,” said Valerie Haydon, the British marketing and sales manager for Asian Village Antigua. “It’s not a theme park. It’s an experience. It’s combining all the cultures of the world. It’s the only concept of its kind in the world.”

The project’s first phase includes 100 thatched-roof luxury villas designed to mirror architecture on the Indonesian island of Bali and a 500-room hotel with a Malaysian motif. There’s also a Thai-style casino and commercial complex and a professional golf course.

When it is completed in late 1999 or early 2000, Haydon said, Asian Village will generate millions of dollars in new tourism business for Antigua.

Planning Minister Molwyn Joseph, the government’s point man on the project, insists that it should make all Antiguans proud: Of all the Caribbean island states, which compete fiercely for American and European tourist dollars, Tan picked theirs.

“To understand the size of this project: This man is going to invest $600 million here. That is equivalent to the gross domestic product for Antigua for an entire year,” he said.

“This government has to take advantage of whatever opportunity comes along for the improvement of this country. Tourism now accounts for 70% of our gross domestic product. We have to look into our future. We need to create five-star, up-market facilities, and this project gives us the opportunity to upgrade. It is the catalyst for the future of Antigua.”

That may be so, some critics say, provided it’s actually built. The island’s two feisty tabloid newspapers have questioned the Malaysian developer’s financial resources at a time when his country’s economy is seriously faltering. They have suggested that Tan could simply turn around and resell Guiana Island at a fantastic profit.

They also have hammered away at concessions given Tan, especially Prime Minister Lester Bird’s promise to remove the Buftons and sell Tan the island for a song.

“My answer to them is simple,” Joseph said. “You go anywhere in the Caribbean and you’ll see this is a normal pattern. Barbados even built a hotel with its own money and gave it to the Hilton chain to encourage tourism. The options available to these islands are not the best.”

Most Caribbean states do grant broad concessions to entice tourism development. But some projects have gone bad in the past. A half-built hotel shell on Dominica, for example, is an enduring reminder of a Taiwanese developer who ran out of cash.

Haydon brushed aside financial concerns about this developer. She said that Johan Holdings Group, the company run by Tan, is a diversified conglomerate with subsidiaries that are traded on the stock exchanges in Singapore, London and the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

The 50-year-old Tan, a British-educated lawyer, presides over a multibillion-dollar empire involved in manufacturing, real estate, tourism and luxury car distributorships, according to Haydon and Johan Holdings’ official annual reports. Haydon asserted that Tan’s operations are global, beyond the reach of Southeast Asia’s financial crisis. “This is an extremely genuine and well-heeled company,” Haydon said.

Local environmentalists, who backed the Buftons’ bid to stay on the island, also have opposed the project. They cite an Organization of American States study done in the 1980s recommending that Guiana Island become an official nature preserve. Under that plan, eco-tourists would have visited its rare fallow deer, which would have remained in the Buftons’ care.

Resort’s Water Needs Raise Red Flag

Many Antiguans also question the vast water requirements of Tan’s resort and golf course in a bone-dry nation that relies on a single desalination plant. Even now, the plant’s 3.2-million-gallon-a-day supply for the entire country falls short of Antigua’s 4-million-gallon demand.

Planning Minister Joseph said Tan has promised either to finance the plant’s expansion or to build his own facility for the resort. He added that the nature-preserve plan was abandoned because there were no takers for the broader development needed to complement it.

“We waited for more than seven years for an investor to come and develop this area, and nobody came,” Joseph said.

As for the Buftons, Joseph said, their age and seeming vulnerability have thrust onto center stage what should have been an easily resolved sideshow. The couple, he said, have presented no evidence to back their claim to ownership of all of Guiana Island, and their removal was only a matter of time.

Predictably, the Buftons see the matter differently.

Born Cyril Thomas Bufton in the Welsh village of Brecon, the man known universally here as Taffy moved to Guiana Island 34 years ago with Bonnie, whose real name is Lona Eileen Bufton. When Englishman Alexander Hamilton-Hill offered the couple a job managing a cotton farm on the island, they were fresh from a similar job in Zambia.

Hamilton-Hill, who owned Guiana outright, died in 1972 and left it to his wife in England, although the Buftons’ contract gave them exclusive rights to five acres of the island for 99 years at no cost.

The owner’s widow died in 1984; several years later, the Buftons filed court papers claiming ownership of the entire island through the British-law equivalent of squatters’ rights.

Ownership Question Typical Among Islands

The Buftons’ claim was contested by two Antiguan brothers, who insist that they bought the property from Hamilton-Hill’s widow. Joseph said he doubts the Buftons’ claim will hold up in court. But he added that the government will pay fair-market value to whoever the judge decides owns the island before selling it to Tan.

The twisted ownership case is typical of the former British colonies of the Caribbean, which are awash with colonial-era characters such as the Buftons living on properties whose titles often went unrecorded.

The case was pending in court late last year when Bird’s government moved to oust the Buftons. But the Buftons, who refused government orders to leave the island, believed that they had a good lawyer: Vere Bird Jr., a member of Antigua’s Parliament and the prime minister’s elder brother.

On the morning of Dec. 16, another Bird brother, Curtis, crossed Guiana Island’s narrows to present the couple with the proposed Bufton resettlement bill. He urged them to listen to the parliamentary debate on the legislation that evening.

“Curtis told us to listen to the radio because Vere was going to play havoc in Parliament on our behalf,” Taffy recalled recently over a cup of tea in his new home. “We listened, and, as it turned out, he voted for our eviction.

“Well, I decided I would take a .38 [caliber pistol] and I would frighten . . . Vere. That’s all I meant to do. The last thing I remember is I walked in his office, he was sitting at his desk, and I blacked out. When I came to, Curtis had my hand holding the gun in his hands. My left hand was bleeding and Vere was shot.”

Police rushed Bufton and Bird to the hospital. They charged Bufton with attempted murder and sent a squad for Bonnie, 72.

“They lied to me,” she said. “They told me Taffy had attempted suicide and that I’d better rush to the hospital. They didn’t even give me time for a cup of tea or to clean my teeth. When I got to Taffy, I realized they’d tricked me off the island.”

The government and most Antiguans reckon that the Buftons got a good deal. So do the developers, who view the dispute as a bizarre price of doing business in the Caribbean.

“It’s just like when you buy a house and there’s a previous tenant in it,” Haydon said. “We have inherited this problem.

“But our perception is Mr. and Mrs. Bufton have a very good deal [from the government]. . . . They also get a very good income from the government. I believe a lot of care and attention have been paid to them.”

The Buftons scoff at such logic. They say the experience alone has so traumatized them that they often pause in conversations with a stranger, look at each other in search of a word, then apologize. “I’m sorry. We’ve lost our minds,” Taffy said.

Newfound Luxury Lost on Outcasts

Besides, they say, their home is under 24-hour police guard--both to protect the couple and to keep tabs on them, officials say. In any event, the Buftons’ newfound luxury is lost on them after 34 years of basic survival in solitude.

“We’d been living a very backward existence on the island. That is true,” said Bufton, who is out on $10,000 bail. “But we were used to it because we’d roughed it in the bush of Africa. We don’t like this new life here one little bit.

“When they took us from Guiana Island, you see, they destroyed our lives. The deer thought we were deer. The sheep thought we were sheep. The ducks thought we were ducks. Here, well, we’re just lost.”