Illness remains from Marshalls' nuclear past
By Derrick DePledge
Advertiser Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Aruko Bobo was used to being evacuated from her home on Rongelap Atoll when the United States conducted nuclear tests nearby. But she was surprised one morning by a thunderous boom across the sky and the strange shower that followed.
"It was like snowflakes," she said through an interpreter, her hands lightly touching her hair and face to show how it fell. The powder soon burned and blistered her skin and, by the time U.S. officials moved people off the atoll a day later, she was horribly ill.
"We thought we were going to die," Bobo said.
As the United States fights a war against international terrorism and prepares for a possible military attack on Iraq, many people in the Marshall Islands remain preoccupied with a threat from a different era. U.S. nuclear tests in the 1940s and '50s left a trail of illness and contamination that has influenced a generation.
A 1986 compact between the Marshall Islands and the United States established a $150 million trust fund to repair some of the damage, including $2 million a year for healthcare. But the compact expired last year and there has been no additional federal money available for healthcare while the two governments negotiate a new agreement.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands has asked Congress and the White House for $4 million a year for healthcare outside the scope of the compact talks, which should end with a new agreement in the next year. In the meantime, the Marshall Islands is using part of the $17 million remaining in the trust to pay for healthcare.
Mattlan Zackhras, deputy chief of mission at the Embassy of the Republic of Marshall Islands, said people want to move on from the nuclear tests but are still dealing with the aftermath. An estimated 8,000 to 12,000 people qualify for federal healthcare aid because of the tests. Others are awaiting personal injury awards from the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which was created through the compact to weigh health complaints.
"Justice has not been done," he said. "The United States has not fulfilled its obligation in full."
Congressional sources said it might be difficult to obtain even $2 million for Marshall Islands healthcare because Congress is in the final stages of the annual budget process. The Hawai'i congressional delegation is working to secure the money.
The office of Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawai'i, invited a handful of people from the Marshall Islands to tell their stories to congressional staffers yesterday afternoon. In a small room at the base of the U.S. Capitol, survivors told of watching loved ones die or forced to leave their homes.
Letwan Talensa, of Majuro, said her mother must live in Hawai'i because she requires constant medical attention that she cannot receive at home. "My mother is very sick," she said tearfully, "but she cannot come home."
Bobo described how both her parents and her husband died from thyroid cancer and how the same fate probably awaits her. She is haunted by children born with birth defects. "Some of the babies that were born," she said, "their heads looked like an octopus, but their bodies were in human form."
When they were done speaking, one man began to sing and the others quickly joined him, their voices in soulful tune. An interpreter explained afterward that the song had great meaning and that everyone knew its words by heart.
It was their old national anthem.
