Congress asked for atoll cash

Press, 3 May 1984, Page 10

Congress asked for atoll cash

NZPA-AP Washington Accusing the Reagan Administration of continuing “a long tradition of hollow statements and unkept promises,” the exiled people of Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean asked the United States Congress yesterday to clean up their island so that they can return home. The Bikinians, testifying before a House of Representatives appropriations committee, asked Congress to commit itself to rehabilitating their isolated Pacific island, the site of 23 nuclear bomb tests from 1946 to 1958. The House Interior Committee has recommended that Congress begin spending SUSIO million a year until Bikini is cleaned of radioactive residue. It is

up to the appropriations committee to provide the money. The Bikinians left their homes in 1946 at the request of American military officials, who said that their island was needed “temporarily.” Although it now is clean of almost all radiation, food grown in Bikini soil contains dangerous levels of radioactive Cesium 137. Cleaning the soil could cost SUSIOO million or more, but Jonathan Weisgall, the islanders’ lawyer, said that that was only a small fraction of the SUS2O billion the United States spent on nuclear testing through 1954. He said that paying the clean-up costs would fulfil the United

States Government’s commitment to return the islanders to their homeland. The Bikinians told the subcommittee that the Administration seemed prepared to keep them on tiny Kili, in the Marshall Islands chain — an island that they say they regard as a prison — ana let their claims against the United States lapse in an international compact granting the Marshalls independent sovereignty. The international compact would end all claims against the United States arising from the nuclear testing, but would include no funds for cleaning up Bikini atoll. The Reagan Administration supports the compact.

Mr Weisgall said that the prospect the compact would be approved had forced the Bikinians to file a lawsuit in the United States District Court in Honolulu, seeking an injunction requiring the Administration to clean up the atoll. “Just last week, President Reagan stated at the Guam airport that the United States has ‘a natural interest in the progress of all the island peoples of the Pacific,’ and he added: ‘with our partnership, much can and will be accomplished’,” Mr Weisgall said. “That statement, applied to Bikini, continues a long tradition of hollow statements and unkept promises from the Executive branch of the Government.”