By Patrick Thibodeau, from The Guam Blog
December 12, 2009
Guam and the Bikini Atoll share an awful lot, with one exception. The U.S.
used this Marshall Islands atoll for nuclear testing, vaporizing part of it and
irradiating whatever was left and then leaving it uninhabitable. The U.S.
committed a great wrong on Bikini and to its people but what happened to Bikini
is very relevant to what the U.S. is doing to Guam today. It is far more
relevant and timely than you may realize.
In October – this October, 2009 -- the “People of Bikini” asked the
U.S. Supreme Court to hear its case for reparations. The U.S. is fighting them.
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear this case, the travesty of U.S. colonial
actions on Bikini and in the Pacific will get a national stage. And anyone who
wants to see whether the U.S. has really changed how it treats Pacific islanders
only has to look to Guam to find out that it hasn't changed at all.
The first similarity is this: There is nothing that Guam can do about the
U.S. military build-up other than trying to mitigate the impact, which is
exactly the position the Bikini islander’s faced. Its 167 inhabitants
“believed themselves powerless to resist the United States decision,”
according to the 2006 lawsuit by the Bikini people that is now the underpinning
of the recent Supreme Court filing. [The case
history is on BikiniAtoll.com]
Guam has no choice in the build-up. The interests of the people of Guam are
secondary to U.S. strategic needs. The people of Bikini lost their entire
island. Guam’s people have lost a third of their island to the military and
stand to lose more. Disfranchised from voting and out of mind in Washington,
Guam has no more voice in the build-up than the Bikini islanders did.
The second similarity is this: The Draft
Environment Impact Statement (DEIS) wasn’t written to protect Guam. It was
written to protect the U.S. government from criticism once things go wrong on
Guam. Bikini’s history illustrates how this will happen.
Bikini’s islanders were relocated to Rongerik, an uninhabited and unlivable
atoll. It was made up of a ring of 17 small islands totaling .65 square
miles, with a lagoon that covered about 55 square miles. Bikini, in contrast,
had 23 islands covering 3.4 square miles and a nearly 300 square mile lagoon.
The planning for Bikini had failed. Rongerik was inadequate to meet the needs of
the Bikini people. “The islanders soon discovered that the coconut trees and
other local food crops produced very few fruits when compared to the yield of
the trees on Bikini,” wrote Jack Niedenthal, a historian and author about the
island, and Trust Liaison for the People of
Bikini Atoll. The islanders were soon starving.
Instead of acknowledging this mistake, the government shifted its
responsibility. In a 1947 press statement, U.S. officials wrote:
“… the natives selected Rongerik themselves. We built them houses, schools and watersheds on that island and they were perfectly happy initially. Later it developed that the island was not as productive as originally expected and we had to augment their food supply by bringing in food for them. Last summer they had a disastrous fire on the island which destroyed about one third of their palm trees.” [New York Times, Oct. 26, 1947.]The U.S. will respond in similar fashion to any problems caused by Guam’s build-up, just as they did in 1947 when they wrote that, “the natives selected Rongerik themselves.” That was not the truth. The natives never wanted to leave.
“… we have been trying since April to find a place for them to live and we took [King] Judah and a number of the leading natives to various islands for them to look over. We could not get them, however, to make a decision as to where they wanted to go. They continued to make the statement that they wanted to go back to Bikini.”
From the U.S. perspective, the problem was that the “leading natives” of
Bikini could not make a decision. That’s the story that the U.S. wanted to
world to know. The perspective of the people on Bikini was certainly different.
They had been uprooted from their homes, and evidently believed that returning
– at some point – was possible. (Where did they get that idea?) The
islanders could see the repeated flashes of nuclear explosions destroying their
homes, and their new home, Rongerik, had proved disastrous. They wanted to
return to Bikini and couldn’t. Did the Bikini people have any reason left to
trust the U.S.? Did anyone hear their side of the story?
Here’s the third and last similarity I want to draw. A
1947 column by a newspaper reporter, Harold Ickes, carried a report on the
starvation underway on Rongerik that was read in Washington. “We Fought the
Navy and Won,” a book about Guam under U.S. Navy rule by Doloris Cogan, includes
an account of what happened.
Ickes had detailed information about the lack of food and agonizing conditions
on Rongerik. When the report
came out, a U.S. Navy official responded in a Washington newspaper, where Ickes
column evidently appeared, and said the charges were untrue. But, perhaps
unknown to the letter writer, the Navy had just released a report by Dr. Howard
MacMillan, an agricultural specialist working for a company that delivered food,
“and it corroborated all of Ickes’ statements,” wrote Cogan.
Ickes' column helped to bring attention to the terrible conditions facing the
Bikini islanders, as well as expose the military’s immediate denial as a
falsehood.