New bill would compensate Marshall Islanders

A Long Island congressman is co-sponsoring new legislation designed to get the U.S. government to pay more than $1 billion in compensation to Marshall Island residents impacted by radiation from nuclear arms testing during the Cold War.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Eni F.H. Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa), with Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Roslyn Heights) as a co-sponsor, stems from a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing last May that heard testimony about hundreds of Marshallese who were exposed to radiation from 67 bombs tested from 1946 to 1958, and later had their health monitored by the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The hearing was prompted by a 2009 Newsday project that examined the controversy surrounding BNL's 43-year history in the Pacific.

In 2007, the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal - established by the United States and the tiny Pacific nation in 1988 to assess damages from nuclear tests - ruled that residents of Rongelap Atoll were owed $1 billion because of radioactive fallout that contaminated the island and sickened residents. The new legislation is intended to get the United States to honor that compensation judgment.

"This is an issue that cries out for justice," Ackerman said, "even if it is justice delayed."

Ackerman pointed to the tribunal's finding that the BNL doctors returned the residents to Rongelap and surrounding islands in June 1957 after a three-year absence even though they knew it was highly contaminated, and they failed to share that knowledge with the islanders. They didn't adequately warn Rongelap's people about eating local foods polluted by atomic fallout.

Instead, BNL used residents' return as a chance to study the flow of radioactive toxins through the body. As the tribunal wrote in its April 2007 ruling, the islanders "came to feel like guinea pigs, and their continuing to live on contaminated islands "supported scientific research and military defense concerns."

Current BNL officials have declined to comment about the tribunal's findings, but U.S. Energy Department officials have disputed the Marshallese complaints, saying the lab's actions were always appropriate and never endangered Marshallese health.

Ackerman said the measure would be reintroduced next year if no action wastaken this year.