By Deirdre Griswold
Honolulu

Visitors to Hawai`i's famed Waikiki Beach were reminded Sept. 3 that tests of humanity's most awesome and destructive weapons are once again threatening the peoples of the South Pacific.

Many tourists cheered and some, particularly Japanese, joined a 1,500-strong column of anti-nuclear marchers as it passed Honolulu's luxury beachfront hotels. The protesters wound their way from Ala Moana Park to Kapi`olani Park, where President Bill Clinton was speaking.

Some marchers were from Tahiti and other islands of Polynesia where French imperialism rules with colonial arrogance. At the time of the protest, France had announced its intention to explode seven or eight nuclear bombs at Mururoa Atoll beginning some time in September.

The first bomb was detonated on Sept. 5.

Sovereignty and no nukes

Kanahele refuses to accept U.S. government jurisdiction over the Hawai`ian people.

Other sovereignty groups were also present. The Pro-Kanaka Maoli Independence Working Group distributed a special newsletter devoted to stopping nuclear explosions in the Pacific.

Many slogans and chants linked the anti-nuclear struggle with the national rights of the Pacific island peoples.

The march was called by the Hawai`i Coalition Against Nuclear Testing and was endorsed by 46 organizations across the political spectrum. Coalition leaders wanted to focus only on the French testing and hoped to get a friendly audience with Clinton, who was speaking at the Waikiki Shell at a V-J Day Commemoration.

National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, saying "there was apparently a mixup" that prevented the president from meeting a delegation from the coalition, spoke briefly instead with several elected officials. Lake said he would "pass on their concerns" about the French testing to Clinton.

But the Honolulu Advertiser of Sept. 4 had to admit that the shouts of the demonstrators "turned the heads of many audience members while Clinton spoke."

Clinton's trip to Hawai`i was accompanied by an orgy of events glorifying the U.S. military--which occupies a big percentage of Hawai`ian land and stores nuclear weapons and waste at Pearl Harbor, right next to the metropolis of Honolulu.

U.S. nuclear threat

A statement to the demonstration by Sane Nuclear Freeze Hawai`i restored some balance on where the main nuclear threat comes from.

After supporting the struggle against the French testing, it went on to point out: "But today, the occasion of Bill Clinton's visit to Hawai`i, we must face the fact that France is really just a minor supporting actor in this very real theater of nuclear terror which has haunted humanity throughout the last half of the 20th century.

"The main character, the `star of the show,' is and always has been the United States."

The vast Pentagon nuclear arsenal and the development of new weapons systems, the statement said, "has continued under both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses." This "encourages other countries, especially those in competition with the U.S. for overseas markets and resources, or those most immediately threatened by the U.S. quest for global military and economic hegemony, to build and maintain their own arsenals."

Yoon Bok-Dong of the U.S. Out of Korea Committee and one of the organizers of the march also pointed out in a statement that "the United States opened the nuclear era in the Pacific with the bombs dropped on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its nuclear testing at Bikini atoll, and the threats by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to drop the bomb on Korea during the U.S. war against that country."

Yoon called for "U.S. troops and nukes out of Korea and Hawai`i!"

Both groups also strongly supported the struggle for Hawai`ian sovereignty.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com.)

Return to the Hawaiian Independence Home Page or the News Articles Index