Press Releases
President Heine delivers remarks on the Occasion of the Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day
On Friday, March 1, 2024, Her Excellency Hilda C. Heine, President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands attended the 36th Anniversary of the Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day. During the ceremony, President Heine delivered the Nation’s remarks as a Keynote Speaker. The full statement is below:
“On behalf of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and its people, I extend our warmest welcome to our visitors from afar – the Pacific Islands Forum, Japan, Australia, the US, and beyond – on this important yet difficult anniversary. We mark this day each year not because the nuclear legacy defines us, rather we come together to draw collective strength to navigate the ongoing challenges radiating from US Government activities in our islands during the Cold War.
It has been a long road to where we are today since the first nuclear bomb was detonated in the Marshall Islands in 1946. Most of the people who had been forced to leave their home islands have passed on. Their remains are buried in some foreign soil within and outside the Marshall Islands and sadly, their spirits are gone, roaming the Pacific in exile.
Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day serves as a solemn reminder of the overwhelming repercussions and human rights violations inflicted upon the Marshall Islands and its people by the US Government’s Nuclear Weapons Testing Program that took place nearly eight decades ago.
Today is a particularly noteworthy anniversary because it marks 70 years since March 1, 1954, when the US detonated its most destructive weapon, the Castle Bravo, which has cast a long shadow of challenges that persist to this day.
70 years since islands were completely vaporized, people’s culture deprived, and communities had been forcibly displaced, unable to move back to their contaminated homes for many generations to come
70 years since the launch of human experimentations in which we were the test subjects to study the effects of radiation exposure on human beings, categorized among a long list of other subjects including plants and animals
70 years since being exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation that eventually led to the many cases of miscarriages, stillbirths, and what we call “jellyfish babies”
70 years since we started losing loved ones too soon to what were defined as “radiation induced illnesses” by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal
70 years since classified activities had taken place in our home, downwind Mid-Range communities ignored in their home islands, transportation of 130 tons of Nevada highly radioactive soil dumped in our lagoon and sea, what other secret experiments and activities took place that we have yet to be made aware of?
70 years since our first petition to the United Nations Trusteeship Council in April of 1954, a few weeks after the Bravo test, and again in March of 1956 to put a stop to the nuclear testing which continued, despite our petitions, until 1958.
While the petitioners were unsuccessful in both instances, they nevertheless demonstrated to the world their love of the Marshall Islands and the wrong that was being visited upon them and their willingness to correct it.
The March 1956 petition to the United Nations reads as follows, “Land means a great deal to the Marshallese. It means more than just a place where you can plant your food crops and build your houses; or a place where you can bury your dead. It is the very life of the people. Take away their land and their spirits go also.”
Successive generations of Marshallese men and women have taken up the cause in pursuit of justice with the hope that the day will come when we can bring closure to this issue. Their actions exemplified the spirit of our ancestors who bravely sailed the vastness of the Pacific
Ocean in their quest to discover these islands for themselves and future generations of Marshallese. We owe them all a debt of gratitude.
Indeed, the RMI has a long history of advocacy for nuclear justice. RMI has argued in the International Court of Justice, and made clear to the United Nations and U.S. Congress, nuclear weapons are instruments of genocide, and the RMI wants no part in having its people or lands involved in perpetuating the use, or the threat of use of these weapons.
In solidarity with Native, Indigenous and other communities whose lands and people have been impacted by uranium mining, processing of plutonium, building or testing of weaponry, downwind exposure from releases, clean-up of contaminated areas, and storage and disposal of nuclear waste, we join collective solidarity to forcibly state, “NO MORE!”
We supported the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) short of ratifying it because it does not go far enough to address the impacts of nuclear weapons. Among other issues, the language in the Treaty on assistance and responsibility for cleanup may still be open to interpretation, where certain interpretations would be detrimental to the RMI’s interests.
Our people endured the equivalent of nuclear war for 12 years from 1946-1958. Our firsthand experiences with the insidious and ongoing intergenerational violence emerging from nuclear weapons serve as fuel for our international political leadership. We want no other people to experience the grief and anguish imported into our communities by the objectives of others.
“AṂAṂ EURŌK KŌJ”, our motto for this year’s commemoration is deep with meaning and filled with the wisdom of our ancestors that continue to guide us today. It is difficult to capture the full meaning of this phrase, but AṂAṂ EURŌK KŌJ means that as we endure hardship, and are left in a state of quandary about how to proceed, we look deep within ourselves to find the collective resolve and solutions that move us towards a different future.
In 2004, Concurrent Resolution No. 364 was adopted by the U. S. House of Representatives recognizing, “more than 5 decades of strategic partnership between the U. S. and the people of the Marshall Islands” and calls the 12 years of nuclear testing “the defining experience of the nuclear era for the people of the Marshall Islands.”
It was also in 2004 that the U. S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) issued one of the most significant reports about the nuclear test legacy in the Marshall Islands. The report predicted that the Marshallese will experience hundreds of future cancer cases linked to the US nuclear testing program. The report also confirms that many of these cancers would occur in people from islands the U. S. government claimed are “unexposed.” Indeed this “defining experience” …. alluded to by the U. S. Congress has left a devastating footprint on the health, well-being and rights of the Marshallese people.
Today, the Marshall Islands is at a crossroads. As you all are well aware, the US and RMI signed a new agreement to continue our free association relationship. The US Congress has failed to pass legislation that would allow the funding that is a critical part of the agreement we signed with the US government, including funds allocated to address nuclear related issues. So when we are told that there is “wide bipartisan praise” for the agreement, yet the United States Congress fails to pass the legislation necessary to turn on the funding taps linked to our agreement, and instead goes on vacation for the next two weeks, leaving us high and dry, it begs the question whether we are now at the crossroads with our relationship with the US. At some point, our nation needs to seriously consider other options available to us if the U. S. is unable or unwilling to keep its commitments to us. Our nation has been a steadfast ally of the United States, but that should not be taken for granted. [I have to insert a footnote here and was told this morning that the US Congress has found a way to include the COFA agreement in a legislation that would be going forward that supposedly would be passed during the second week in March. I don’t want to count our chickens before they hatched, but that is the news I want to share and hope and look forward to that being a reality.]
As a living example of our motto, we can see decades of Marshallese leadership that emerged from the necessity to address the impacts of nuclear weapons, but continues into additional, intersecting areas, like climate change, human rights, and environmental justice.
Today’s motto asks us, as Marshallese people, to tap into our innovation and creativity and to design responses that center and align with our own values. This work cannot be done by outsiders. We need a cadre of Marshallese leaders who will draw on their cultural and community-shaped strengths to harness the brilliance and deep respect for one another and our natural world that is at the core of who we are.
The support we need from the United States, and outsiders interested in nuclear justice, is to help build our national and regional capacity and structures that allow Marshallese leaders to develop and represent the needs of our communities. We need ongoing investments in our young and future Marshallese scientists, health practitioners, artists, engineers, politicians, navigators, economists, and more so we can draw from as much creative and intellectual talent as possible to lead us on our path forward.
In this respect I am encouraged by the youth led and youth participation levels at this week’s nuclear commemorative events around Majuro and beyond.
I thank and celebrate the many champions of nuclear justice in all the places where you strive for more equitable and safer futures for all – this includes our communities who endure so much of the hardship, our displaced communities, communities that were subjected to Project 4.1, the Marshallese clean-up workers, our cancer patients and their families on distant shores because we have no cancer care facility in the RMI.
To the many loved ones who have left our home to seek medical attention, who are today in Hawai’i, Washington, Arkansas, Oregon, California, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, the Philippines, and beyond, we carry you in our hearts and channel our collective strengths to you as we deepen our resolve to create better structures for the healthcare our communities need, including the massive healthcare and environmental burdens we inherited from the nuclear legacy.
We must move forward. Our quest to better understand how, and in what shape or form moving forward would look like, we must draw on each other’s strength, knowledge, and experiences. For me, moving forward meant I had to start at the very beginning in the Four Atolls where people have experienced firsthand radiation exposure and the many ravages of the nuclear weapons testing programs.
Since taking office in the middle of January of this year I have visited three of the four nuclear-affected communities – Kili, Mejatto and Enewetak – to gain firsthand knowledge and to better understand the conditions under which these communities now live. I will visit Utrik in the near future after I have made arrangements with their leadership.
These visits have taught me that while these nuclear-affected communities continue to survive, thanks to the resilience of the people, they are not necessarily thriving. There is much that needs to be done to create opportunities for these communities to thrive and to be productive. These visits have given me a new resolve to continue to seek justice for these communities, and for all of Marshall Islands.
Moving forward means we must continue to seek what is owed to our people – past, present, and future-in-personal injuries and environmental damages.
Today we honor our ancestors, we honor the depth of reserve and creativity that exists in ourselves to find solutions, and we honor our commitment to the next generation, to peace and everlasting justice.
Thank you all and may God bless each one of us, and may God bless the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
High-level dignitaries, including the Cabinet Members, Nitijela (Parliament) Members, Diplomatic Corps, Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna, Judiciary Members, and Mayors and Local Governments from Majuro and the four (4) atolls (Bikini, Rongelap, Enewetak and Utrik), Communities from the four atolls, students of all levels (primary, secondary, and tertiary) and many others attended the 36th Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day and 70th Memorial Anniversary of Castle Bravo that was held at College of the Marshall Islands Sgt Solomon Court.
ENDS//
