American Samoa Delegate Eni Faleomavaega, who chairs the U.S. House Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment, joined an interfaith assembly Sunday afternoon attended by about 400 Marshall Islanders, including President Litokwa Tomeing and U.S. Ambassador Clyde Bishop, to mark Nuclear Survivors Remembrance Day.
On March 1, 1954, the U.S. tested Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb that spewed radioactive fallout on unsuspecting islanders living on downwind atolls, causing an epidemic of thyroid tumors and cancer. A U.S. National Cancer Institute study in 2004 said the U.S. nuclear tests would cause 530 cancers among Marshall Islanders exposed in the 1950s, more than half of which had not yet developed.
Bravo day is now a national holiday in the Marshall Islands and a government-sponsored commemoration program is planned for Monday.
Fifty-five years after Bravo, the Marshall Islands claims Washington is denying this western Pacific nation adequate compensation and medical funding, while the U.S. government says a $150 million fund it provided 23 years ago satisfied American obligations for compensation to nuclear test victims.
Speaking to Marshall Islands officials after the religious service Sunday, Faleomavaega said it’s time for America to make good on its obligations to Marshall Islanders.
“They said the tests were ‘for the good of mankind,’ ” the Democratic congressman said. “But how about cleaning up the mess?”
He called the lack of resolution of the American government’s nuclear test legacy “sad.”
“I hope President Barack Obama will pay more attention” (to nuclear test-related problems in the Marshall Islands),” he said.
Faleomavaega, who held two days of oversight hearings last April in Majuro to hear testimony on nuclear test issues, is scheduled to speak at Monday’s ceremonies marking the Bravo test anniversary.
