Marshall Islands: Rongelap Evacuation Changed Course Of History

Giff
Johnson, Editor, Marshall Islands Journal / RNZ
Pacific correspondent

Feature
– The late Member of Parliament Jeton Anjain and the people
of the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll changed the
course of the history of the Marshall Islands by using
Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship to evacuate their
radioactive home islands forty years ago.

They did
this by taking control of their own destiny after decades of
being at the mercy of the United States nuclear testing
program and its aftermath. In 1954, the US tested the Bravo
hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, spewing high-level
radioactive fallout on unsuspecting Rongelap Islanders
nearby. For years after the Bravo test, decisions by US
government doctors and scientists caused Rongelap Islanders
to be continuously exposed to additional
radiation.

The 40th anniversary of the dramatic
evacuation of Rongelap Atoll in 1985 by the Greenpeace
vessel Rainbow Warrior – a few weeks before French
secret agents bombed the ship in Auckland harbor – was
spotlighted this week in Majuro with the arrival of
Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior III to a warm
welcome combining top national government leaders, the
Rongelap Atoll Local Government and the Rongelap
community.

“We were displaced, our lives were
disrupted, and our voices ignored,” said MP Hilton Kendall,
who represents Rongelap in the Marshall Islands parliament,
at the welcome ceremony in Majuro earlier in the week. “In
our darkest time, Greenpeace stood with us.”

He said
the Rainbow Warrior “evacuated the people to safety”
in 1985. Greenpeace will “forever be remembered by the
people of Rongelap,” he added.

In 1984, Jeton Anjain –
like most Rongelap people who were living on the nuclear
test-affected atoll – knew that Rongelap was unsafe for
continued habitation. There was not a single scientist or
medical doctor among their community although Jeton was a
trained dentist, and they mainly depended on US Department
of Energy-provided doctors and scientists for health care
and environmental advice. They were always told not to worry
and that everything was fine.

But it wasn’t, as the
countless thyroid tumors, cancers, miscarriages and
surgeries confirmed.

As the desire of Rongelap people
to evacuate their homeland intensified in 1984, unbeknownst
to them Greenpeace was hatching a plan to dispatch the
Rainbow Warrior on a Pacific voyage the following
year to turn a spotlight on the nuclear test legacy in the
Marshall Islands and the ongoing French nuclear testing at
Moruroa in French Polynesia.

As I had friends in the
Greenpeace organisation, I was contacted early on in its
planning process with the question: How could a visit by the
Rainbow Warrior be of use to the Marshall
Islands?

Jeton and I were good friends by 1984, and
had worked together on advocacy for Rongelap since the late
1970s. I informed him that Greenpeace was planning a visit
and without hesitation he asked me if the ship could
facilitate the evacuation of Rongelap. At this time, Jeton
had already initiated discussions with Kwajalein traditional
leaders to locate an island that they could settle in that
atoll.

I conveyed Jeton’s interest in the visit to
Greenpeace, and Greenpeace International board member the
late Steve Sawyer, who coordinated the Pacific voyage of the
Rainbow Warrior, arranged a meeting for the three of us in
Seattle to discuss ideas.

Jeton and I flew to Seattle
and met Steve. After the usual preliminaries, Jeton asked
Steve if the Rainbow Warrior could assist Rongelap to
evacuate their community to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein
Atoll, a distance of about 250 kilometers. Steve responded
in classic Greenpeace campaign thinking, which is what
Greenpeace has proved effective in doing over many decades.
He said words to the effect that the Rainbow Warrior
could aid a “symbolic evacuation” by taking a small
group of islanders from Rongelap to Majuro or Ebeye and
holding a media conference publicizing their plight with
ongoing radiation exposure.

“No,” said Jeton firmly.
He wasn’t talking about a “symbolic” evacuation. He told
Steve: We want to evacuate Rongelap, the entire community
and the housing, too.

Steve was taken aback by what
Jeton wanted. Steve simply hadn’t considered the idea of
evacuating the entire community. But we could see him
mulling over this new idea and within minutes, as his mind
clicked through the significant logistics hurdles for
evacuation of the community – including that it would take
three-to-four trips by the Rainbow Warrior between Rongelap
and Mejatto to accomplish it – Steve said it was
possible.

And from that meeting, planning for the 1985
Marshall Islands visit began in earnest. I offer this
background because when the evacuation began in early May
1985, various officials from the United States government
sharply criticized Rongelap people for evacuating their
atoll, saying there was no radiological hazard to justify
the move and that they were being manipulated by Greenpeace
for its own anti-nuclear agenda.

This
condescending American government response suggested
Rongelap people did not have the brain power to make
important decisions for themselves. But it also showed the
US government’s lack of understanding of the gravity of the
situation in which Rongelap Islanders lived day in and day
out in a highly radioactive environment.

The Bravo
hydrogen bomb test blasted Rongelap and nearby islands with
snow-like radioactive fallout on 1 March 1954. The 82
Rongelap people were first evacuated to the US Navy base at
Kwajalein for emergency medical treatment and the start of
long-term studies by US government doctors.

A few
months later, they were resettled on Ejit Island in Majuro,
the capital atoll, until 1957 when, with no radiological
cleanup conducted, the US government said it was safe to
return to Rongelap and moved the people back.

“Even
though the radioactive contamination of Rongelap Island is
considered perfectly safe for human habitation, the levels
of activity are higher than those found in other inhabited
locations in the world,” said a Brookhaven National
Laboratory report commenting on the return of Rongelap
Islanders to their contaminated islands in 1957.

It
then stated plainly why the people were moved back: “The
habitation of these people on the island will afford most
valuable ecological radiation data on human
beings.”

And for 28 years, Rongelap people lived in
one of the world’s most radioactive environments, consuming
radioactivity through the food chain and by living an island
life.

Proving the US narrative of safety to be false,
the 1985 evacuation forced the US Congress to respond by
funding new radiological studies of Rongelap. Thanks to the
determination of the soft-spoken but persistent leadership
of Jeton, he ensured that a scientist chosen by Rongelap
would be included in the study. And the new study did indeed
identify health hazards, particularly for children, of
living on Rongelap. The US Congress responded by
appropriating $45 million to a Rongelap Resettlement Trust
Fund.

But while all of this was important – it both
showed that islanders with a PhD in subsistence atoll life
understood more about their situation than the US
government’s university educated PhDs and medical doctors
who showed up from time-to-time to study them, provide
medical treatment, and tell them everything was fine on
their atoll, and it produced a $45 million fund from the US
government – it is only a fraction of the story as to why
the Rongelap evacuation in 1985 forever changed the US
narrative and control of its nuclear test legacy in this
country.

Rongelap
is the most affected population from the US hydrogen bomb
testing program in the 1950s. By living on Rongelap, the
community confirmed the US government’s narrative that all
was good and the nuclear test legacy was largely a relic of
the past.

The 1985 evacuation was a demonstration of
the Rongelap community exerting control over their life
after 31 years of dictates by US government doctors,
scientists and officials.

It was difficult building a
new community on Mejatto Island, which was uninhabited and
barren in 1985. Make no mistake, Rongelap people living on
Mejatto suffered hardship and privation, especially in the
first years after the 1985 resettlement.

Their
perseverance, however, defined the larger ramification of
the move to Mejatto: It changed the course of nuclear legacy
history by people taking control of their future that forced
a response from the US government to the benefit of the
Rongelap community. Forty years later, the displacement of
Rongelap Islanders on Mejatto and in other locations, unable
to return to nuclear test contaminated Rongelap Atoll
demonstrates clearly that the US nuclear testing legacy
remains unresolved – unfinished business that is in need of
a long-term, fair and just response from the US
government.

The Rainbow Warrior will be in
Majuro until next week when it will depart for Mejatto
Island to mark the 40th anniversary of the resettlement, and
then voyage to other nuclear test-affected atolls around the
Marshall
Islands.

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