US Senate passes $7.1b deal for Pacific nations, but past wrongs remain unresolved

Exactly one week after the Marshall Islands commemorated “Nuclear Victims' Day and Nuclear Survivors' Day”, the United States passed long-delayed funding under the Compact for Free Association (COFA) agreements.

Only President Joe Biden’s signature is needed to effect the legislation that releases US$7.1 billion to the three COFA nations of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands over the next 20 years - for the US to have exclusive military access to their territories.

It will likely be relief rather than joy that the Pacific administrations will be feeling after months of legislative jostling in the US about how the funding would be approved.

In the end, the COFA money was included in a last-ditch package on 8 March that was passed only hours before a midnight Friday deadline, to keep the federal government open for six more months.

For the US, the funding is part of a strategy to stop China exerting further influence in the region.

But on Nuclear Victims’ Day and Nuclear Survivors’ Day on 1 March, or Remembrance Day as it’s more diplomatically known, Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine wasn’t warning her nation about a Chinese threat.

Instead President Heine reminded the gathering about the "overwhelming repercussions and human rights violations inflicted upon the Marshall Islands and its people by the US Government’s Nuclear Weapons Testing Program that took place nearly eight decades ago”.

The COFA funding does not include nuclear compensation for the Marshall Islands.

'In the hands of God'

Following World War II, the Marshall Islands was under US control and the tiny Bikini atoll – a necklace of 23 islands surrounding a 600 km2 lagoon - was strategically selected for their nuclear bomb testing programme.

In 1946 the military governor was tasked with convincing the Marshallese population of about 160 people to relocate.

While the locals were understandably confused, their leader Chief Judah (see photo) is understood to have agreed, believing that "everything is in the hands of God".

Chief Judah, island magistrate from Rongerik Atoll, with one of his subchiefs, August 1947. Photo/ Wikipedia

Most of the families were relocated to an uninhabited atoll that was known to have inadequate water and food supplies, one–sixth of the size of Bikini.

The Bikini nuclear testing porgramme Operation Crossroads began on 1 July 1946 with Test Able. Test Baker followed three weeks later.

Few American beachgoers today will know that the atoll also became famous in 1946 as French clothing designer Louis Réard named his two-piece bikini swimsuits after the atoll, where the US detonated 23 nuclear devices, including 20 hydrogen bombs.

The Castle Bravo H-Bomb tested on 1 March 1954, the day the Marshall Islands commemorates annually with a national holiday to remember the victims and survivors of nuclear testing, was 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that decimated Nagasaki in 1945.

In total 67 nuclear weapons were detonated on Bikini and Enewetak atolls.

The Able nuclear test at Bikini atoll in 1946. Photo/ Wikipedia

And it was only in 2022 that it was revealed the US had dumped 130 tons of contaminated soil from their Nevada nuclear testing site in Enewetak Atoll during or after the nuclear test period.

President Heine asked the 500 who attended the official commemoration event in Majuro on 1 March: "What other secret experiments and activities took place that we have yet to be made aware of?"

Lance Posey, charge d'affaires of the US Embassy in the Marshall Islands, is reported to have delivered a speech ahead of Heine’s address, acknowledging that the US "made misguided decisions, or harmed the innocent" through the nuclear tests.

He said "the legacy that our Cold War-era nuclear testing has had on the people and lands of the Marshall Islands must never be forgotten or minimised".

But the US has never formally apologised or stumped up with full compensation.

In 1986, as part of the COFA deal, the US made what it called a “full and final” settlement of US$150 million, which was later revised to $600 million from US trust funds for resettled communities.

But a 1986 Nuclear Claims Tribunal determined that actual damages amounted to US$2.3 billion. The US has resisted all attempts by the Marshall Islands for extra compensation, arguing that the matter is closed.

But the matter is far from closed for the Marshall Islands.

'Big power, small power'

Like many Pacific island nations, the Marshall Islands is in what Professor Steven Ratuva of Canterbury University describes as a “big power, small power relationship”.

The Marshall Islands signed the COFA agreement in October last year without the full nuclear compensation it seeks, because it is so reliant on the COFA funding for its day-to-day operations.

But in her Remembrance Day address President Heine said that the Marshall Islands “must continue to seek what is owed to our people - past, present, and future in personal injuries and environmental damages”.

She said her people had endured the equivalent of nuclear war for 12 years from 1946 to 1958.

Heine told the gathering it had been 70 years since the islands were “completely vaporised, people’s culture deprived, and communities had been forcibly displaced, unable to move back to their contaminated homes for many generations to come”.

She said it was 70 years since the launch of human experimentations in which “we were the test subjects to study the effects of radiation exposure on human beings” and “exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation that eventually led to the many cases of miscarriages, stillbirths, and what we call jellyfish babies”.

Many victims of the nuclear fallout had already died, she said.

“Most of the people who had been forced to leave their home islands have passed on.

“Their remains are buried in some foreign soil within and outside the Marshall Islands and sadly, their spirits are gone, roaming the Pacific in exile.”