Island Voices
Militarism sank Ehime Maru
By Kyle Kajihiro
Program director of the American Friends Service Committee — Hawai'i Area Program
I was honored to participate in a beautiful and powerful Hawaiian ceremony at Maunalua on March 4 to send blessing to the nine victims of the Ehime Maru incident and to extend our aloha and friendship to their families.
Although the people of Hawai'i cannot change the events of Feb. 9, we bear some responsibility for the consequences of militarism in our Islands. And we must work for changes in U.S. security policy to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening in the future.
U.S. officials have portrayed the sinking of the Ehime Maru and the loss of nine lives as an isolated accident, the tragic combination of human error and circumstance. However, far from being the exception, the sinking of the Ehime Maru is but one in a string of military tragedies.
On June 14, 1960, while docked at Pearl Harbor, the nuclear sub USS Sargo exploded and burned so fiercely that the ship had to be flooded to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. In 1981, the USS George Washington rammed and sunk the Japanese freighter Nissho Maru, killing two. In 1995, three U.S. military servicemen gang-raped a 12-year old Okinawan girl. Feb. 3, 1998, a Marine jet severed a gondola cable in Italy, plunging 20 to their deaths. April 19, 1999, a civilian worker was killed by a bombing accident on Vieques, Puerto Rico, sparking massive protests.
Thousands of Marshall Islanders have died or suffered from radiation sickness due to 67 nuclear tests on their islands.
Greenpeace reported that in the 1980s alone, the U.S. Navy had almost 1,600 accidents, and that as of 1996, the United States had 380 nuclear weapons accidents. I shudder to think what might have happened if the USS Greeneville disaster had been a nuclear one.
The people of Hawai'i, like peoples in other militarized and colonized areas of the world, such as Okinawa, the Philippines, the Marshall Islands and Vieques, subsidized the costs of militarism. The illegal U.S. takeover of Hawai'i in 1898 was driven by military interests to control the Pacific and gain the military advantage in the Philippines.
Today, as a result, 22.4 percent of the land on O'ahu is controlled by the military, most of it land taken from the Hawai'ian Kingdom. The bombing of Kaho'olawe, Waikane, Pohakuloa and Makua have destroyed areas rich in cultural and natural resources and ruined the lives of former inhabitants.
Military operations have seriously contaminated numerous sites, including Pearl Harbor, Lualualei, Makua, Nohili, Barbers Point, Bellows and Mililani, with lead, petroleum PCBs, organic solvents and unexploded ordnance as a few of the leading contaminants. High cancer rates among Wai'anae residents may be linked to this contamination.
The Navy Court of Inquiry may shed light on how the sub rammed the Ehime Maru. But ultimately, it avoids another, perhaps more important "inquiry": the critical analysis about the larger military defense structure of the United States that has been in place for more than a century.
National priorities are perverted. The United States spends 54 cents on every dollar for military-related expenses, but only 3 cents on education. If the Navy didn't buy 30 attack subs, Honolulu could repair half of its deteriorated schools with the $90.8 million saved.
The arrogance of U.S. military power and its love affair with the defense contractors put the USS Greeneville on a collision course with the Ehime Maru long before it set sail on Feb. 9.
In the long run, militarism makes the world less secure. We must redefine the concept of "security" to mean human and environmental security because one way or another, people, military as well as civilian, pay the price of militarism.
