Skip to main content

Report from Hawaii - Darkness in Paradise

Dave Webb, Chair of CND, sent this eyewitness report on the increasing militarisation of Hawaii.

Been here a couple of days now – it’s an amazing place. A range of volcanic islands and a holiday paradise that is also one of the many military oppressed islands in the Pacific Region. The political and military importance of this region is not escaping the islanders. President Obama’s moves to escalate the US military presence here is threatening even further the lives and livelihoods of the people. It is unlikely that holidaymakers will be aware of the history of the Islands and the past and present domination of the US military industrial complex there – which exercises a cynical and arrogant display of power.

We are staying on Oahu, one of the Hawaii chain and the Island that includes Honolulu and Pearl Harbour and yesterday we had a 10-hour tour (known as the De-Tour) of the militarization of Oahu. Kyle Kajihiro, former director of the American Friends Services Committee peace program, is a long-time and dedicated peace worker who knows just about everything that is happening on this island. It’s strange that the national flag of Hawaii has a Union Jack in the top left corner and yet Hawaii was never a British colony. This apparently dates back to when the Islanders were trying to resist the US empire and wanted to develop friendly relations with Britain, even asking them to intervene. The US did of course eventually colonise the Islands and then encompassed them further as the 50th state in 1959.

Over 20% of the Island of Oahu is militarized and that figure is continually growing and set to grow exponentially in the near future. The trip was full of stories of how the Islanders have been lied to, tricked and generally downtrodden and abused and their environment polluted and destroyed over the years by the military. We drove past the High School attended by President Obama, it is a huge, well resourced campus, in direct contrast with conditions that so many indigenous families live in. Forced out of their houses for various reasons (take overs by the military or financial difficulties), many live in makeshift shanty towns on our near the beach. They are being threatened with being moved on yet again further away from the eyes of the well housed and well off US middle classes. They are known locally as the “houseless” rather than homeless - as the island is their home but they are not allowed or not able to be properly housed there. Their numbers are likely to increase further as Obama’s "pivotal shift" to the Asia-Pacific means that the US Pacific Command (PACOM) headquarters here will grow and its "area of responsibility" will become increasingly more important - and its mission much more aggressive. This can only be bad news for Hawaii and for the people of the Pacific.

On the tour we visited the Pearl Harbour Memorial (a US National Monument) which is a huge area overlooking the harbour (where a nuclear powered submarine and a nuclear powered aircraft carrier were on proud display with flags flying). Kyle showed us the little corner of the park that has been given over to the abbreviated and censored story of the indigenous people. It reminded me of the small corner of the Royal Armouries in Leeds given over to the Peace Museum. We also went past the NSA’s Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center (KRSOC). This is a secured, bomb-proof, underground installation established in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is a sister establishment to Menwith Hill and Kyle told us that the whole thing is due to be moved to the NSA’s Central Security Service's Hawaii Regional Security Operations Center currently being constructed near Whitmore Village not too far away on Oahu, at the former site of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Pacific, or NCTAMS PAC.

We were joined on our trip yesterday by two activists from another Hawaiian Island – Kauai. This is the home of “Barking Sands”, the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF - the world's largest missile testing and training range. In around two years time the PMRF will see a new missile testing complex – the “Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex” which is due to be built on two locations at the Westside base on the Island as a test and evaluation centre as one of the developments of the 2nd phase of President Obama’s “Phased Adaptive Approach” to Missile Defense.

We will be going there on Tuesday – see the image with this post.

Today (Monday 20th February) we are part of a mini-conference with about 20 people from key campaigns on at least three of Hawaiian islands. More from that later.

Dave

(Dave is currently travelling in the Pacific Region with Bruce Gagnon from the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space and others)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i
58 comments
Read more

'Not as dumb as he looks' - Muhammad Ali on Bertrand Russell

In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story , Muhammad Ali recounts how Bertrand Russell got in contact with him, and their ensuing correspondence: *** For days I was talking to people from a whole new world. People who were not even interested in sports, especially prizefighting. One in particular I will never forget: a remarkable man, seventy years older than me but with a fresh outlook which seemed fairer than that of any white man I had ever met in America. My brother Rahaman had handed me the phone, saying, ‘Operator says a Mr. Bertrand Russell is calling Mr. Muhammad Ali.’ I took it and heard the crisp accent of an Englishman: ‘Is this Muhammad Ali?’ When I said it was, he asked if I had been quoted correctly. I acknowledged that I had been, but wondered out loud, ‘Why does everyone want to know what I think about Viet Nam? I’m no politician, no leader. I’m just an athlete.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a war more barbaric than others, and because a mystique is built up
25 comments
Read more

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91. In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas . He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface. Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No Mor e Hiroshimas . At the station exit, my bundle in hand, Early the winter afternoon's wet snow Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun. I had forgotten to remember where I was. Looking about, I see it might be anywhere - A station, a town like any other in Japan, Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store; Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons, Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs o
Post a Comment
Read more