Republic of Marshall Islands seeks refuge in USA for its climate (and nuclear) victims

A ground zero forgotten, WP, Dan Zak, 29 Nov 15 “……Last year the RMI filed lawsuits against the United States and the eight other nuclear-armed nations, alleging noncompliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The news caught most Marshallese, including RMI officials, by surprise. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in California engineered the lawsuits in collaboration with deBrum, who has been their cheerleader. The suits were filed in U.S. District Court in San Franciscoand to the International Court of Justice.

The U.S. Justice Department, in its motion to dismiss, implied that the lawsuit is a stunt that has no business in the court system. A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the suit in February (the RMI appealed), and it’s a nonissue in the international court, since the U.S. government does not recognize that court’s jurisdiction.

No matter, deBrum says. It’s the principle of the thing, particularly in this year of the 70th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with next year’s 70th anniversary of the first atomic test in the Marshalls.

He comes to the country he’s suing a couple of times a year, to preach about the connection he sees between a nuclear past and a climate-change future. Just 45 minutes away from Majuro by air, 500 Bikinians are struggling on Kili, a rocky island without a lagoon where their elders were exiled. A ship bearing food and diesel arrives every three months, if the weather behaves. In February, the yearly king tide washed completely over the island, fouling freshwater reservoirs.

DeBrum is lobbying Congress to amend U.S. law to definitively allow Bikinians to use their resettlement funds to relocate to the United States.

“How can you separate nuclear from climate with Bikini and Kili?” deBrum says during a reception last month in the Rayburn House Office Building, where anti-nuclear nonprofit groups gave him an award for his work. “It’s the classic case of one meeting the other. You have nuclear refugees on an island affected by climate change.”…….

The U.S. Embassy considers the Marshall Islands to be on the front line of climate change, which manifests most dramatically during late-winter king tides. In March of last year, 1,000 people evacuated Majuro as the surge pulled homes into the ocean.

“Climate change is my nuclear experience,” says Mark Stege, 37, who grew up in Majuro, studied at Columbia University and is now director of the Marshall Islands Conservation Society. “I can see a lot of connections at the emotional level, and the community level, at the individual family level. The same questions are relevant in both situations. There’s this really deep sense of loss.”….http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/27/a-ground-zero-forgotten/