No surprise there. That’s the way it’s been for decades — lots of smoke and no fire.
I’ve never heard anyone argue that Guam’s Chamorros should not exercise their right of self-determination. I believe we can all agree on that.
Political status is an entirely different issue, however, much as the activists would like you to believe otherwise. A favorite complaint from the activist camp has to do with what they say the United Nations thinks should happen on Guam, and every now and then they dispatch an emissary to New York to whine to the Decolonization Committee about oppression and subjugation visited upon “the people of Guam” by the evil colonizer.
The U.N. Charter and various resolutions over the years have clearly set forth the U.N. position on decolonization. What you’ll find therein is quite different from what you’ll hear from the local “Chamorro Only” cadre. Scattered throughout that voluminous material you’ll find multiple references to “people” or “peoples” of the so-called “colonies,” but nowhere will you find those terms preceded by an adjective. Nowhere will you find “native peoples,” or “original peoples,” or “indigenous peoples,” or “Native Inhabitants” or for that matter “Chamorro peoples” in a decolonization context. There are one or two adjectival references in a self-determination context, but that’s not the same thing at all.
Charles Troutman, who passed away several years ago, was a long-term resident of Guam and a talented and highly respected attorney. He held several government jobs including consumer advocate, compiler of laws and deputy attorney general. It was he who wrote the well-reasoned nine-page legal opinion on Chamorro Land Trust Commission constitutionality, solicited by the CLTC executive director in mid-2005 when the CLTC was threatened with a discrimination lawsuit over the planned Chinese development at Oka Point. That opinion was delivered to the governor and the Legislature, and subsequently “withdraw”’ through political pressure on the attorney general because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. It remains on file with the AG and you can find it if you look. I did. The development scheme was abandoned because of the threatened constitutional challenge.
Here’s some of what Charles wrote in letters to the editor and elsewhere. It should provide some insight to why the draft Commonwealth Act failed so miserably. He wrote: “I drafted the first draft of the commonwealth bill before the ‘kitchen sink’ was added by the political forces. No political leader or group on Guam could or can state with clarity what it is that they want in a new status. If you don’t know what you really want, and can’t convey it to the people, most likely you won’t get it.”
As you can see, little has changed over three decades. A local talk show host asks, “Tell me what you want, and show me how it’s better than what you now have.” So far there’s been no lucid response to that question.
DAVE DAVIS
Yigo, Guam
