We owe it to them...

[Muckerheide <muckerheide@mediaone.net>]

...after all it was our dishonesty about radiation risks that kept
them from being able to return to their homes at conditions of much
lower exposure than in large areas of the world with high natural
radiation, and small fractions of routine medical exposures of
millions of people in the world.

Regards, Jim
muckerheide@mediaone.net
========================
May 9, 2000
 Marshall Islanders Awarded $341M

 Filed at 2:20 a.m. EDT
 By The Associated Press
 HONOLULU (AP) -- In 1947, some 145 people were relocated from their
homes on a Marshall Island atoll so that the U.S. military could blow
it to pieces. 
 When they returned to Enewetak Atoll in 1980, they found that some of
their land had been vaporized by 43 nuclear blasts, while the rest was
pockmarked by explosions or contaminated by radiation. 
 Twenty years later, a claims tribunal has awarded $341 million to
compensate the survivors and descendants for the lasting damage to
them and their once-lush homeland. 
 But collecting it may be the hardest part. 
 The Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal was created through a
1983 agreement in which the United States accepted responsibility for
losses, damages and health problems stemming from its 1946-1958
nuclear testing program in the Marshalls, about 2,500 miles southwest
of Hawaii. 
 The United States earmarked $150 million for compensation and for the
tribunal to pay claims as it saw fit. After previous personal injury
payments, only about $4.5 million is left. 
 The tribunal last month said the federal government should pay
islanders $199 million for loss of use of Enewetak, $108 million to
clean up and restore it and $34 million for their 33-year exile and
hardship. 
 ``The claimants have suffered damage beyond that which money can
compensate,'' the three-member tribunal ruled last month. ``While that
which was lost may be priceless, it does not mean it was without
value.'' 
 Enewetak residents said they plan to appeal to Congress next week for
more funding, said Davor Pevec, their Honolulu-based attorney. 
 If Congress doesn't pay the award, Enewetak's 1,500 residents said
they will sue in the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington. 
 ``We in the United States got clear benefits from the testing
program,'' Pevec said. ``The Marshall Islanders? They got burdened
with this residual contamination, with the destruction of their land,
with their forced relocation.'' 
 Enewetak Atoll consists of about 40 islands in the northwestern
corner of the Marshall Islands. From 1946 to 1958, the United States
conducted 67 atmospheric nuclear tests in the Marshalls. Two-thirds of
those tests, including the first hydrogen bomb blast in 1952, were in
Enewetak. 
 In 1947, the people of Enewetak were taken 125 miles southwest to
Ujelang Atoll -- a parched cluster of coral rubble one-fourth the size
of Enewetak -- and told they would be there no more than five years. 
 The group ``suffered grave privations, including periods of near
starvation,'' the U.S. Department of Interior wrote in 1976. They also
received little education and poor health care. 
 Resettlement occurred in 1980 after a three-year cleanup. Some
islands were gone, others were pocked with blast craters a mile wide
and 200 feet deep. 
 Clearcutting and soil removal lowered islands by several feet.
Once-productive fields were now a runway, while a 350-foot wide
concrete dome was built to cover radioactive material. 
 Both the tribunal and islanders acknowledge the atoll cannot be
restored to what it was 50 years ago. It should, however, be upgraded
for ``full and unrestricted use,'' Pevec said. 
 ``The United States itself made that promise and that promise is an
obligation.'' 
 ------ 
 On the Net: 
 The tribunal: http://www.tribunal-mh.org 
 Marshall Islands site: http://www.rmiembassyus.org
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