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APRIL 2, 2010
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| High speed Internet goes live Thursday The Marshall Islands goes “live” with the new fiber optic cable on Thursday this week, which coincidently is April Fool’s Day. But NTA General Manager confirms that this is no April Fool’s joke. “The April commercial launch is on schedule as planned,” he said. “We implement our broadband plan on April Fool’s Day.” An official dedication ceremony will be held on Friday April 16. Kendall: Betel nut still flowing Majuro Senator Wilfred I. Kendall wants to know why the new law banning importation and sale of betelnut is not being enforced. Speaker Alvin Jacklick confirmed to the Journal earlier this week that he has signed the bill, passed at the recently concluded Nitijela session, into law. Kendall wants to know why there is no action from the Ministry of Finance’s Customs office to halt importation of betelnut that the new law says can no longer be imported or sold. Disaster aid moves to new level The transition from FEMA to the US Agency for International Development (AID) Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has brought a change in more than the US agencies that respond to disasters and mitigation issues in the RMI. USAID, with its partner the International Organization for Migration (IOM), is focused on pre-planning in advance of possible disasters, has stationed people on-island and will be warehousing a modest supply of disaster response supplies, according to USAID official Bart Deemer, who works at the US Embassy. Mike: Atoll still not safe Senator and Rongelap traditional leader Iroij Mike Kabua has added his voice to growing concern about a resettlement of the nuclear test-affected northern atoll. “I cannot agree to returning people to contaminated lands and waters,” Kabua said in a letter to President Jurelang Zedkaia in mid-March. Kabua said he is “placing this matter in your hands and requesting you to take into account the position of the people of Rongelap in the matter of resettlement. “The people want to go home but not to a land where the future of their children will be placed in jeopardy (and) where they themselves cannot be assured of safety and security.” Second chance for dropouts Marshallese dropouts are being given a second chance to aim high by the National Training Council (NTC). The goal is to strengthen their educational skills and help them earn an equivalent high school diploma, explained Sereima Lumelume at a career fair Monday this week. According to out-of-schools program Director Lumelume, there are 25 students attending the program now. |
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| outer islands has been their focus. To celebrate this final windup of their presence, Maryknoll President Sr. Janice McLaughlin, MM, and Vice President Sr. Rebecca Macugay, MM, visited Majuro last week from their headquarters in Maryknoll, New York. “We came to say thank you to them (the sisters) and to the people and church that have supported them for many years,” said Sr. Janice. Only two sisters are still here: Sr. Rose Patrick and Sr. Carolyn White, MM. They leave Majuro in 10 days after working for the past several years with the Ministry of Education and local administrators and teachers to take over management of outer islands schools they have supervised and supported until recently. Sr. Rebecca said the sisters have shared their educational gifts with the Marshall Islands for many years, but “once people are ready to take the lead,” then it is time for the sisters to move on. She also noted the “reality of diminishing numbers” of sisters and changing priority areas where Maryknoll is devoting its resources as factors in the departure. Sr. Janice noted that over the years, at least 20 Maryknoll sisters have worked in the Marshall Islands. The St. Paul and St. Thomas schools, on Wotje and Tinak, Arno, respectively, have been taken over by the Ministry of Education over the past year, said Sr. Carolyn. “We started working with the Ministry of Education two years ago because we didn’t want to lose momentum in the outer islands schools,” she said. Last school year, the Ministry assumed responsibility for the teachers and the schools, she said. “It’s a boost for the teachers, as they get more pay and the parents don’t have to pay tuition,” she added. The challenge at both schools was that they do not have church communities as support systems. Coupled with the difficult economic times, collecting tuition is especially difficult for outer island private schools, Sr. Carolyn said. St. Joseph’s at Jabor, Jaluit will remain as a Catholic-run institution, having a church community to back it up. “The community wants to keep it a Catholic school,” she said, adding that a management committee that includes Ministry of Education staff will assist operations of the school. “I think it will go well.” Meanwhile, public schools that the sisters have supported for years at Likiep and Woja and Buoj, Ailinglaplap have been visited over the past several years by the sisters who explained that they could no longer work with them. “We’ve been planning this phase out for the past four years,” she said. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| GIFF JOHNSON Marshall Islands nuclear test victims are making their last stand, holding on by the fingernails of one hand to the slimmest of hopes that the United States Supreme Court will accept their cases for review. It is a one in 100 chance that the Supreme Court will agree to consider the Bikini and Enewetak appeals of lower court rejections, and as any Las Vegas bookie will tell you, these are seriously unfavorable odds. What is more, in a 25-page brief, the US government attempts to nail shut every possible avenue for appeal that the legal teams assembled to represent Bikini and Enewetak islanders have put forth. To be sure, the nuclear test atolls have good arguments. But are they enough to sway the nine Supreme Court justices to accept the cases? “We should have a decision by mid-April,” said Bikini attorney Jonathan Weisgall. The US legal brief, block by block, puts up an apparently insurmountable wall around the appeals. “In Section 177 of the Compact … the government of the Marshall Islands espoused the claims of its citizens and agreed to settle them,” the US Justice Department said. “To effectuate the settlement, the Compact itself, the Compact Act, and the Section 177 Agreement all provided that the settlement would serve as the final and |
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| unreviewable resolution of any claim that the people of the Marshall Islands might have against the United States.” Attorneys for Enewetak say, however, that the RMI government was under the control of the US at the time the Compact’s Section 177 was negotiated. “Although the Marshall Isalnds had a popularly elected government at that time that was competent to enter into agreements with the United States it remained under the control of the US as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, for which ‘all executive, legislative and judicial authority’ was ‘vested in such person or persons and…exercised…through such agency or agencies as the President of the United States may direct or authorize.” The issue, said Enewetak, “is whether the courts must accept the (US) government’s assertion that the constitutional claims of private individuals can be validly ‘settled’ not by the claimants themselves but by an entity that is not sovereign, but is under US government control.” “Unreviewable,” “full and final,” “claims terminated,” and “claims barred” are phrases that are repeated throughout the US brief to the Supreme Court. But Bikini and Enewetak say that the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment requires that just compensation be paid for the taking of property. “The central problem with all of the (US) government’s arguments is that nowhere in its brief in opposition or in any other brief filed in this case has it explained how, if the Fifth Amendment reserves rights in individuals and thereby withholds that very power from the federal government, the federal government has the power to legislate or contract those rights away without those individuals’ consent,” the Bikinians said. But the US told the Supreme Court the compensation matter was completely resolved on a government-to-government basis. “The United States and the Marshall Islands settled all claims including the takings claims, and as part of that settlement agreed to preclude further review of those claims in any federal court,” the US said, adding that the lower court’s ruling “does not warrant further review.” The Bikinians challenge this in their response: “If the (US’s) foreign or domestic political ends are served by taking individual property, the Constitution says the price for that public use is just compensation. If Congress can escape that command simply by passing a law or contracting with another governmental entity, as the Federal Circuit (court) held, then the Fifth Amendment has become an empty promise not just for petitioners, but for any and all property owners.” The US counters this, saying the US Congressional command that “no court of the US shall have jurisdiction to entertain such claims” is completely clear, leaving no room for court review of these nuclear test claims. Although the Compact’s Section 177 established the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, the US brief to the Supreme Court says that the “Congress did not create the Claims Tribunal or agree to pay its awards in full,” and the US did not participate in the Tribunal’s proceedings. “The RMI’s Claims Tribunal therefore cannot plausibly be regarded as a forum for exhausting claims against the United States, as simply one step before a return to the Court of Federal Claims for a suit under the Tucker Act,” the US said. Attorneys for Enewetak said the US position is that it “may deprive persons of their property for decades and then get away without paying compensation by foisting the problem onto another government that has no money to pay and that supposedly waived the property owners’ right to sue the United States in court.” In relation to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Enewetak said “now that the Tribunal has ruled that petitioners are entitled to compensation, the (US) government says that actually paying is someone else’s problem, and that, when it created the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the government of the United States effectively washed its hands of the whole affair.” But the US Justice Department maintains that the US government satisfied its nuclear test compensation obligation by providing $150 million to the Marshall Islands in the Section 177 agreement. The US brief to the Supreme Court concludes: “The Compact withdraws federal jurisdiction in clear terms and, instead, authorizes the independent government of the RMI to petition Congress for additional relief on behalf of its citizens. The RMI has done so, and its request is pending before Congress.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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