Marshall Islanders evacuating prior to the first US nuclear tests.
Photo credit: Carl Mydans, University of Hawai’i at Manoa Digital Collection.
On September 13, 2012, Mrs. Lemeyo Abon, a retired teacher and Marshallese elder, delivered the following statement about the impact of the US nuclear programme on her people to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. This statement was originally published on truth-out.org.
Madame President, Distinguished Delegates:
I want to thank Cultural Survival for sponsoring my participation at this forum. My name is Lemeyo Abon, and I speak today as the President of ERUB. The word erub means “damaged” or “broken,” and it is an apt name for an organization of Marshallese nuclear survivors.
On March 1st, 1954, I was 14 years old, living on the island of Eneaetok on Rongelap Atoll. This was the day I first experienced injustice. It was the day that deprived me of peace. The bomb by the code name ‘Bravo’ was exploded on Bikini Atoll just 180 km upwind from Rongelap. Unlike other nuclear weapons tested over the previous 8 years, there was no warning given to the people on Rongelap and other islands downwind of the blast. I was playing when the poisonous debris from the bomb fell on me. I didn’t know what it was but because it looked like snow, I began playing with it. But suddenly it burned my eyes and mouth. Later in the evening I was so sick. All the people on the island were very sick, especially the children. The next day my skin was torn up and covered with sores. I had skin burns so badly I was in pain. My hair started to fall off. After two days of drinking contaminated water, eating contaminated food and breathing the contaminated air, we were evacuated by the U.S.
One would think being rescued by a big military ship abandoning the poisonous atoll would end the injustice, but no, that was just the beginning. Much more inhumane treatment was yet to be bestowed upon us. After evacuation we became subjects of study in a top-secret research program that documented, but did not treat our injuries. The studies continued and expanded when were returned to home islands three years later, with twice-a year visits from scientists who probed, sampled and documented the changes in our bodies in a research effort that continued for decades.
In my community, we did not learn until the 1970s that our homeland was dangerously contaminated with nuclear fallout. Realizing our lives and future were being destroyed, we asked the US government to evacuate us again. They refused, and finally in 1985 we received the help of Greenpeace and we abandoned our home islands, our only possession.
This deeply disturbing history has immense and painful consequences. To this day women in the Marshall Islands give birth to jellyfish babies, or babies born with no bones in their bodies and translucent skin. Sometimes they are born alive and live for a few minutes or hours, and you can see the blood moving through their bodies before they die. We give birth to babies with missing limbs, or their organs and spinal cords on the outside of their bodies. We never experienced these types of births before the U.S. testing program. We have complained about these births for decades and we are always told by the U.S. Government that they are not the result of radiation exposure. Yet, our language, our history, our stories have no record of these births before the testing program. After the testing program we’ve had to create new words to describe the creatures we give birth to.
And for those that survive, we have few resources to provide a life with dignity. Today in the Marshall Islands there is no oncologist to treat the many cancers that have become too common in our lives. Chemotherapy or radiation treatment for cancer does not exist in the Marshall Islands so we have to leave the country for treatment. Because the US denies that our radiation exposures have affected the health of children and their children, only a few people are eligible for government-funded medical treatment for their radiogenic cancers, disease, and conditions.
We believe, like other indigenous nations, that it is our sacred duty to sustain the land and to take care of future generations so they can thrive, and given the many challenges of attending to health and welfare in a nation compromised by its service as a nuclear weapons proving ground, we welcome the assistance of the United States and the international community, especially if that assistance helps us to achieve adequate healthcare and a safe and secure environment.
We gave the world knowledge of the many ways that radiation can destroy a human being, yet today we see our cultural ways of life sorely affected by the loss of our beloved homes, and our people plagued by illness caused by radiation. Our experience is that nuclear fallout creates damages that endure and expand. Yet, U.S. assistance programs continue to contract and deny.
An island may be remediated, with radioactive soil, plants, and debris removed, but is it safe? In our culture we rely on the wealth of many islands to get access to the food, medicine, housing, water and other resources. A single coral island in the Marshall Islands cannot support a community, and a partial cleanup of one island is not the same as restoring our homelands.
The nuclear survivors of ERUB and the Marshall Islands applaud the investigation of the Special Rapporteur into the human rights violations connected to the U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands and we welcome his recommendations that the United States should fully fund the awards made through the RMI Nuclear Claims Tribunal, expand medical assistance programs, assist in building a national healthcare system that can attend to the legacies of nuclear testing, and help us to assess and restore our severely contaminated environment.
We have a saying jej bok non won ke jemake which means ‘if not us, who?’ We have to act now, we have to let peace prevail, this is our time for the future of our children and grandchildren. I urge this council and the members of the United Nations to take action to not only help us help ourselves, but to make sure that such miseries do not occur ever again.
Thank you.
