Natives of Guam Decry U.S. Expansion Plan

Tweet "Activists believe the redeployment [to Guam] will result in a total influx of approximately 35,000 people, a number they say will overwhelm their small island, which has a population of just 168,000 people. The southernmost island in the Western Pacific Mariana chain, Guam has been a U.S. territory since the United States won the Spanish-American War in 1898.

"Guam has basically no say," said writer Michael Lujan Bevacqua, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. "So the U.S. has the right to bring in whatever they want and there is no framework that Guam can make demands or negotiate with the U.S. military. The Pentagon and the United States Congress are the sovereign owners and they act like that. There is no relationship that says we have to listen to your feedback or we have to listen to your demands."

"Bevacqua noted that the Pentagon's decision to redeploy to Guam comes after large-scale protests against the United States military presence in South Korea and the Japanese island of Okinawa. In both countries, the U.S. military operates under rules negotiated between governments called a "Status of Forces Agreement", or SOFA. But because Guam is a U.S. territory, no SOFA is required.

"Indeed, the Japanese government is so keen to have the Marines leave Okinawa -- where a number of U.S. servicemen have made headlines by raping local women -- that Tokyo is underwriting most of the estimated 10-billion-dollar cost of the redeployment.

"Japan and South Korea make noises, the people there antagonise the U.S. military, so the U.S. responds," Bevacqua told IPS. "They say you don't want us there, we'll go to a place where people have no say over what we do, and that place is Guam."

From InterPress Newservice by Aaron Glantz