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Q&A

”Guam Remains Functionally a US Colony”

Interview with Julian Aguon, Chamoru activist

MELBOURNE, Jul 21, 2008 (IPS) – The tiny island of Guam – officially an unincorporated territory of the United States – is soon to be inundated with thousands more U.S. military personnel as the world’s superpower realigns its forces. In this first of a two-part interview, indigenous Guamanian activist Julian Aguon spoke with IPS on issues surrounding the build-up.

Located in the western Pacific Ocean, Guam has a long history of being invaded. Spain first claimed the island in 1565, but it was not until a century later that colonisation began. During this time the indigenous Chamoru were decimated, declining from an estimated 150,000 to 3,000 people, 100 years after settlement.

The U.S. wrested control of Guam from Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War. After being occupied by Japan during the Second World War – the U.S. re-took the island in 1944 – Guam became an unincorporated territory of the U.S in 1950.

Now, with military bases already taking up one-third of the island – currently around 14,000 defence personnel, including dependents, call Guam home – 8,000 U.S. marines are to be transferred from the Japanese island of Okinawa to Guam as the island becomes a rapid response platform.

The U.S. also intends to add to its air surveillance capabilities and set-up a ballistic missile defence taskforce on Guam, as well as upgrade its docking facilities so that the island is able to host nuclear aircraft carriers.

While some among Guam’s population of 170,000 are excited about the economic opportunities they hope will accompany the build-up – it is anticipated that some 20,000 extra construction workers will also be required – others, such as Julian Aguon, are actively campaigning against it.

Aguon spoke with IPS writer, Stephen de Tarczynski, when he visited Australia on a month-long speaking tour.

IPS: What is the current situation with the military build-up on Guam?

Julian Aguon: In 2005 the governments of the United States and Japan made a bilateral agreement to relocate some 8,000 U.S. marines from Okinawa to Guam, as well as their dependents, and support staff and their dependents. And it’s more recently been announced that the true outside population being relocated to Guam from elsewhere in Asia, most notably from Okinawa, is actually 55,000 people. That, of course, has lots of human rights considerations, given the fact that Guam remains one of only 16 non-self governing territories – that’s a fancy way of saying internationally recognised colonies – in the world.

We have an inherent and still-unexercised human right to self-determination. We remain functionally a colony of the United States, and that’s highlighted by the way the military build-up of Guam right now is actually happening. It’s unilateral and for all intents and purposes, non-transparent. The U.S. government basically decided to flood our ancient homeland with this many people, this many nuclear submarines, all of this destruction basically, without one bona fide public meeting, without any semblance of true consultation of the entire indigenous population of Guam. And the fact that there is an internationally recognised resistance movement among the indigenous Chamoru people [means the lack of consultation] is just so insulting, so vulgar, so depraved and so illegal under basic human rights tenets.

IPS: But Guamanians have representation in the U.S. congress, right?

JA: Kind of correct. Just to be precise, the people of Guam are considered U.S. citizens, but we’re second-class U.S. citizens, if not third-class U.S. citizens, because we actually cannot vote for the U.S. president. In addition, we have representation in the U.S. congress. However, that representation is misleading because we only get one non-voting representative to congress. So, even our congressional representative is without a meaningful vote.

IPS: How does that make you feel?

JA: More important than that, because of course it makes us feel wronged and violated, it also helps. Especially [we] activists always remain clear that what is happening – I mean that whole system – is nothing more than an illusion of inclusion because we don’t much matter to the United States, and that much is very clear.

IPS: What is it that you want? Do you want independence for Guam?

JA: We want to exercise the supposedly most fundamental of all human freedoms, and that is self-determination. We’re not even saying ‘we want to be independent’. Of course, a lot of us want independence, not everybody, but independence is actually only one of the internationally recognised options for decolonisation. We can choose even U.S. statehood if we wanted to, but we could also choose a sort of interim status known as free association.

But that’s the key. The Chamoru people of Guam, our people, are non-entities. So, of course, we can’t even be at the table. We’re non-persons at that table. The military build-up has at least done a wonderful job of making that point very clear, that we aren’t people to even be negotiated with.

We want accountability, we want transparency. We want the U.S. military – the same military now expanding its presence in Guam exponentially – to clean up the widespread contamination of our island.

IPS: Why is Guam contaminated?

JA: We actually are still reeling from radiation exposure from the U.S. nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands. Between 1946 and 1958, the US dropped 67 hydrogen and nuclear weapons on the people of the Marshall Islands, and Guam, being 1200 miles from the Marshall Islands chain, is directly in the downwind patterns. We have been exposed to radiation there and that’s already proven.

We actually have proof that the U.S. aircraft and ships that were used to clean up the radiation contaminants in the Marshall Islands were actually re-routed to Guam and flushed out. It’s a depraved situation because the U.S. military is still convinced that it can convince the people of Guam that it has our best interests at heart. And I think that’s a sobering reality and it’s so lamentably far from the truth.

IPS: Can you tell me how you regard such terms as “the tip of the spear” and “the unsinkable aircraft carrier”, which some people in the U.S. military are using to describe Guam?

JA: I think that phraseology is very important because it demonstrates the lack of visibility of people. An unsinkable aircraft carrier, the tip of the spear [are] wonderful phrases because they don’t bring to human consciousness that there are people on that landmass, and that’s the problem.

In my personal opinion, the situation on Guam perhaps serves one of the greatest indictments to U.S. democratic legitimacy. It in fact mocks the idea of U.S. democratic legitimacy. And yet, it hasn’t made the radar. It hasn’t even really become a blip in the radar because people don’t conceive that there are people on Guam – let alone an indigenous people that are heirs to a civilisation born two thousand years before Jesus – and that we’ve been actively struggling at the UN decolonisation level to exercise self-determination. And of course, that’s by design. Dominant media, even in the U.S., are participators in this. The politics of distraction [are] alive and well in the United States. Even American citizens, of course, don’t know much about Guam. Guam is actually conceived of as nothing but a military base or military outpost.