Supporting the Democratic Desire for Peace
Last weekend nearly 100,000 people on the Japanese island of Okinawa — close to 10% of its population — participated in a protest that publicly called for the closure of the most controversial of 33 U.S. military bases there. The Okinawan governor and most of its mayors were there, and solidarity protests occurred in several Japanese cities, as well as in Washington and Korea.
The immediate conflict centers on Futenma, a U.S. Marine base with a busy airport located in downtown Ginowan, and the base of soldiers who raped a 12-year-old girl in 1995, leading eventually to an agreement to close the base — and move its operations to Henoko, in another part of Okinawa. But since Henoko’s citizens, especially its elders, mounted a civil disobedience campaign to stop construction of the new base, which would destroy coral reefs and fisheries, the military has not been able to carry out the plan. When a new Japanese government was elected last year, for the first time Japan proposed re-negotiating the plan in a manner that could be acceptable to Okinawa’s citizens.
This, apparently, was anathema to U.S. officials, including President Obama, who reportedly spoke harshly to Prime Minister Hatoyama in a 10-minute meeting on April 12, saying the two countries were “running out of time” and asking the prime minister if he could be trusted.
But Hatoyama is merely responding to his democratic mandate and the wishes of the vast majority of Okinawans, 90 percent of whom say they want no new bases.
Now, a new network in the United States has formed, with FOR’s participation, to urge the definitive closure of the Futenma base with no new base in Japan. Network for Okinawa published a full-page ad in the Washington Post on Wednesday, is issuing solidarity statements and circulating a petition, and has fired up an excellent web site.
“I want all the military bases on Okinawa be closed and moved to the United States,” Tadashi Nakamura, 67, of the Okinawan city of Naha, told Stars and Stripes. “It’s not just a matter of where to move the Futenma operations. All the military bases should be immediately closed.”
What happens to the U.S. troops and operations carried out from Okinawa, however, presents a whole additional problem, as 12,000 Marines are scheduled to be moved to the Pacific island of Guam, at a cost of $6 billion, by 2013. As articulated compellingly by Koohan Paik in The Nation, Guam faces an overwhelming onslaught of military buildup, with 80,000 additional residents expected to crowd in with the current population of 178,000. One third of the island, which is a U.S. colony, is already occupied by the military, whose activities have generated a major Superfund site. The patriotic Guahan people have — to the surprise of some — become fiercely critical of the expansion, which threatens to devastate drinking water, fisheries, and land access and has been undertaken with little consultation of residents.
And what are all these bases for — do we remember? They’re not designed to address climate change or fix health care or even resolve international tensions, but to “prevail” against other nations, in the sterile language used to describe war. Increasingly, the communities pushing back against these sites for projecting war are finding allies in the U.S. itself. We should join them.
