No matter where you look, within the multitude of United Nations resolutions that address decolonization or within the U.S. Constitution, laws and legal precedent, you will find nothing that limits in any way — or even suggests — that the act and process of decolonization should exclude otherwise eligible resident citizens.
The United States Congress, federal courts and various administrations have made it abundantly clear — most explicitly during the 1997 guam commonwealth hearing — that voter discrimination will not be tolerated under the American flag. That position is well-established in the Organic Act of Guam, the 15th Constitutional Amendment and the U.S. Voting Rights Act. Our public officials nevertheless blithely proceed with their “ostrich approach” to an issue they know, or should know, is certain to blow up in their faces when legally challenged. They would presume to force upon us, under color of unconstitutional local legislation, precisely that which was so soundly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999. They will fail.
Protests and demonstrations by a vocal few of our residents receive far more media attention and political favor than warranted, and thus the more uninformed and impressionable come to believe much which is not true. Despite perennial pilgrimages to the United Nations by representatives of those radical few, espousing complaints of oppression and subjugation by the so-called “colonizer,” there have been no changes in the basic principles embodied in the U.N. Charter. Resolution 2625, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1970, clearly sets forth some of those goals and principles.
“To bring a speedy end to colonialism, having due regard to the freely expressed will of the peoples concerned”; “all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and every State has the duty to respect this right”; “the establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State, or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people. … The territory of a colony or other Non-Self-Governing Territory has, under the Charter, a status separate and distinct from the territory of the State administering it.”
And most significantly, Resolution 2625 addresses the “equal rights and self-determination of peoples as described above and thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction as to race, creed or color.”
Please note the reference to “the whole people belonging to the territory.” We find no reference to special dispensations for indigenous peoples, native inhabitants, white people, black people, brown people, or any ethnic distinction whatsoever. Neither is there anywhere the recognition or acceptance of the notion that some citizens are more qualified to vote on certain public issues than others. The United Nations, through resolution, specifies that voting take place through “universal adult suffrage.” If you know of exceptions, please tell us.
DAVE DAVIS
Yigo, Guam
