“The purpose you suggest falls outside of the uses of sector grant funds and would not be an acceptable proposal to be approved by the Joint Economic Management and Financial Accountability Committee,” Nikolao Pula, director of Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs, told the president in a Dec. 1 letter released Thursday.
But president’s office officials said the rejection letter from the Interior Department doesn’t change the reality on the ground in the Marshall Islands that a resolution to long-stalled nuclear test compensation payments is increasingly urgent. “It’s a humanitarian issue,” said one president’s office official.
The U.S. tested 67 nuclear weapons at Bikini and Enewetak atolls from 1946 to 1958. But the U.S. State Department said last year that there is no legal obligation for the U.S. to provide additional compensation.
Tomeing met with Pula’s boss, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, in Hawaii in September and discussed the need to continue compensation payments for islanders with approved awards for personal injuries from the Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal. He followed up with a letter to Kempthorne on October 21, saying “the longer we delay acting decisively on this crucial matter, the longer we deprive the victims of their right to lead a satisfactory and meaningful livelihood.”
Tomeing recommended reallocating $1.2 million of U.S. grants each year starting in 2009 as an interim way to continue to pay off personal injury awards. He pointed out that this is now the third consecutive year in which the Nuclear Claims Tribunal has been unable to issue any payments for awards already approved for lack of funds. More than $22 million remains unpaid for personal injury awards, and about $2 billion is outstanding for land damage awards made by the Tribunal. About half of the 2,000 islanders who received personal injury awards have died without receiving full compensation.
But Pula rejected the suggestion in two sentences, noting that the “amended Compact of Free Association describes in some detail the agreed upon and allowable uses of Compact sector grant funds” — and nuclear awards are not one of them. Grant funding under the Compact is tightly controlled by the U.S. and is focused mainly on education and health.
“The president’s recent statement in the Nitijela (parliament) that he would seek funding for nuclear victims was not contingent on U.S. approval or support, but was based on the suffering of nuclear victims,” the president’s office official said. “The government cannot just sit back and say, ‘We didn’t cause this problem and we’re sorry folks, but we can’t help you.’ ”
The official said the president is going to ask the cabinet to look to Marshall Islands sources of funding to provide interim compensation payments to the extent possible. “If he has to act alone,” the official said of President Tomeing, “he will do so.”
