Republic of the Marshall Islands and United States officials met in Honolulu in mid-October to renew a third Compact of Free Association – COFA for short. Previous compacts have allowed the United States to maintain a strategic Pacific military base on the Marshall Islands. In exchange the U.S. provides economic assistance to the RMI and allows islanders to freely move to the U.S. whenever and wherever they wish, without a visa.
After the first compact was signed in 1986, Marshallese natives began to migrate to northwest Arkansas to work in the poultry industry, enroll their children in public school and obtain much-needed health care. Today, more than 12,000 have settled in Benton, Washington, Carroll and Madison Counties. Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese, headquartered in Springdale, provides assistance to islanders migrants. Chief Executive Officer Melisa Laelan participated in Compact III negotiations both in person and virtually.
“Arkansas has the largest Marshallese population outside of the country, so rightfully so we felt that we should have been part of this negotiations," Laelan said.
The Biden administration views the RMI Compact as a cornerstone agreement to counter rising foreign aggression towards the U.S. in the Pacific. That relationship first formed in 1946, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Agency used the islands as a Cold War test site, detonating 67 atomic and thermonuclear weapons over the span of a decade.
The U.S. has long claimed the RMI has long been fully compensated for nuclear weapons test damages. The new third Compact will deliver $2.3 billion in grant assistance and trust fund contributions. But when no specific nuclear damages dollars, as requested by RMI officials, were included, compact talks broke down, Laelan said.
“Which created a lot of frantic emotions," she said among Marshallese migrants. "A lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty of what's going to happen next."
An estimated 34,000 Marshallese compact migrants currently reside in the U.S., most in Hawai’i, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Outmigration is triggered by high unemployment, lack of adequate health care, and looming climate change, with rising tides inundating certain low-lying atolls.
“Actually Marshallese is the sixth largest Pacific Islander ethnic group living in the United States,” Laelan said. "When the fate of freely associated Marshallese migrants was imperiled by stalled compact talks, Laelan took action.
“Not just Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese," she said, "we also had sister units from 16 other states."
Marshallese advocates met virtually and in person on Capitol Hill with U.S. State Department officials and federal lawmakers. A sticking point was including additional compensation for lingering Cold War nuclear test damages in the new agreement. Previously, the U.S. government provided more than $600 million for environmental cleanup, restoration and resettlement, as well as targeted health and medical programs. The RMI, however, claims the U.S. owes more than an additional $3 billion to cover uncompensated damages. COFA III only includes a $700 million trust fund, a portion of which can be spent on nuclear damages.
“Our community members were not happy with that," Laelan said, "because a lot of our people thought that there should be an item explicitly listed as nuclear damages support.”
Michelle Pedro is the policy director and communications specialist with the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese. She said stalled compact negotiations especially worried Ozark Marshallese migrants.
“When it was signed, a lot of relief," she said. "Some people have come into the office saying you know, even though we don't agree with some of the terms, we're still happy it went through.”
Benetick Kabua Maddison is the executive director of the nonprofit Marshallese Educational Initiative based in Springdale. He travels extensively, raising awareness about his homeland’s nuclear legacy – including delivering speeches at United Nations gatherings.
“After the U.S. nuclear testing program ended in 1958," Maddison said, "the following year, in 1959 the U.S. began testing ICBMs or intercontinental ballistic missiles," which continues. "And so the Marshall Islands is important strategically given its location, in the central North Pacific between the United States and of course North Korea, Russia, China — countries that the U.S. views as a threat.”
Maddison has traveled the globe, sharing the message that he wants all nuclear weapons of mass destruction destroyed and his indigenous land base fully restored.
“Although nuclear weapons testing ended in ’58, we’re still experiencing health issues, we're still experiencing displacement, we're still experiencing cultural consequences as in people leaving their homelands, you know, forcefully removed from their homelands, so that the U.S. could use these islands many decades ago for nuclear development.”
The new Compact, Maddison said, fails to addressexisting damage wrought by a decade of atomic and thermonuclear atmospheric weapons tests, including a leaking U.S. nuclear waste dump.
“You know, although we may have signed and accepted this $2.3 billion that will be provided to the Marshall Islands under the new agreement, that money is not going to do anything to get rid of the nuclear waste," Maddison said. "It is not going to reverse the environmental impact that nuclear weapons testing has and continues to have on the environment. And it's certainly not going to return people to their ancestral homelands, to their rightful homelands that have been theirs for centuries, because of radiation destruction.”
Embedded in the new U.S./RMI Compact of Free Association, however, is the “Compact Impact Fairness Act” that, if approved by federal lawmakers, will restore critically needed social welfare entitlements, including much-needed health care benefits to Marshallese migrants, erased in 1996 under U.S. federal welfare reform.
“I mean you're talking about the loss of loved ones to cancer and other nuclear related illnesses," Maddison said. "You're talking about elders who have not seen their homelands in a very long time. And they are at this point where they are dying on lands that don’t belong to their people. And then of course you're also talking about these intergenerational health issues, that just doesn’t impact the older generation, it impacts generations down the road. Generations that are not even born yet. That is the legacy of nuclear weapons.”
U.S. Congressional and RMI Parliament approval will be needed before COFA III is allowed to take full effect.
The Marshall Islands were named in 1788 by British Naval Captain John William Marshall, who sailed through the area with convicts bound for New South Wales, historical records show. But many islanders, Maddison said, prefer to call their beautiful Pacific archipelago Aelon Kein Ad, which means “our atolls.”
