A Manifesto for Micronesian Diasporas: Heeding Leaders’ Calls, Doing our Best to Assist Nation-Building at Home

Our leaders’ appeals at the United Nations this week

The 62^nd session of the United Nations General Assembly will end tomorrow (Sept 25-Oct 3, 2007), but the presidents of FSM and RMI and the vice president of Belau/Palau have all addressed the General Assembly. FSM President Emanuel Mori, RMI President Kessai Note, and Belau/Palau Vice President Elias Camsek Chin addressed the UN General Assembly on behalf of our governments (See leaders’ speeches here: http://www.un.org/webcast/ga/62/ )

I read their statements and am impressed with the points they have raised. As diaspora Micronesian communities, I think it is important for us to follow what is being done in terms of nation-building at home and to educate ourselves about what we can contribute to nation-building. Many of us, after all, have chosen to live outside of our island nations allegedly because of failures of nation-building. (By the way, “Diaspora” was a term used exclusively to refer to the dispersion of the Jewish communities around the world and their relationships to a supposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. In the late 20^th century, it has evolved broadly to encompass what is called “Diaspora studies,” as Wikipedia describes it, “an academic field devoted to studies of dispersed ethnic populations, which are often termed diaspora peoples. The use of the term diaspora carries the connotation of forced resettlement, due to expulsion, slavery, racism, or war, especially nationalist conflict” although for Micronesian diaspora communities our histories before and after the Compacts supplied ample justifications for our own dispersals abroad. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora ] The term has come to be used to represent all groups of people living away from their homelands, the study of forces driving out-migrations, migrants’ experiences in their adopted homes, as well as the enduring relationships migrants maintain with their homelands.)

What can we do?

As FAS leaders’ General Assembly speeches indicate, all three island nations are very concerned about global warming and are collaborating with UN agencies, other regional and international organizations as well as different nations to address global climate change, global warming, sea-level rise, protection of marine ecosystems and resources, etc, etc. What we can contribute to these efforts is to educate ourselves about these matters and to encourage young Micronesian students to undertake research on global warming or to take up college majors in scientific disciplines that would advance our understandings of global climate change and help to find appropriate solutions. We can do this, first, by learning about all of the UN and other international efforts to address climate change so that when opportunities present themselves, we can contribute meaningfully to elevating civil and political discourse in our island nations about all possible solutions, etc.

We can start, for instance, with learning about what the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is and what it seeks to do. And also, what are the other relevant international meetings and efforts to address global climate change and rising sea levels and their potential impacts in small island developing states like ours. Seventeen years ago at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the small island nations of the world banded together at the international level and argued for special vulnerabilities they face as they build their economies and engage in nation-building. Two years later, in 1994, these small island nations successfully shifted international attention to their issues and got the United Nations to host the first Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States. The Government of Barbados hosted the conference in Bridgetown, Barbados and out of this a Programme of Action was created and continues to inform sustainable development initiatives in small island developing states. “The Micronesian Challenge” is a similar initiative although it is specifically tailored to preserve and protect portions of Micronesia’s marine and terrestrial ecosystems and resources. It is a uniquely Micronesian effort, the first of its kind in the world that aims to protect and preserve significant amounts of marine and terrestrial resources. While Belau championed it, the three FAS nations have come to own it. President Mori describes the collaboration behind the Micronesian Challenge between the three island nations as one that “exemplifies the best of the Micronesian spirit of working together towards a common objective and shared concerns.” According to Willy Kostka, director of the Micronesia Conservation Trust in Pohnpei, “the success of the Micronesian Challenge will depend highly on the support of all Micronesia’s residents and the participation of key groups.” That must include Micronesian diaspora communities everywhere. Once again, we in the diaspora Micronesian communities should understand what this is about and contribute intellectually to the challenge Willy Kostka and the Micronesian Conservation Trust have issued.

I am thinking of the many newspapers and blog-pages inside and outside of our island nations that speak directly or indirectly to the issues we all face as small island nations. We can read and educate ourselves about the issues being reported on, discussed and debated in the newspapers at home by our respective civil societies and by our elected and community leaders and write letters to the editor that seek to elevate the nature of (political) discourse at home. We have countless opportunities to contribute in many ways. We, in Hawaii, have set in motion various innovative strategies and partnerships to empower fellow Micronesians with easier access to educational opportunities and economic security. These are resources we allegedly lacked at home and the reasons why many of us set out to broaden our (professional) horizons abroad. Now that we have access to them, we ought to find ways in which we can contribute our “expertise” to our home countries.

Building partnerships, developing coalitions in our new communities

The FAS leaders at the UN called on international partners to assist our governments with access to the resources and finances needed to build institutional capacity as well as to eradicate poverty in all sectors of our societies. In this regard, FSM President Emanuel Mori spoke of “the critical role that Information and Communication Technologies” (ICT) play in the economies of small island nations and talked about regional and international efforts to build small islands’ ICT capacity and “to bring broadband connectivity to the islands.” We need to rise to the challenge either in educating our people about learning about the importance of ICT or encouraging young Micronesian students to take on high school and college majors in ICT and related technologies.

President Mori also spoke of our role as “custodians of [our] vast ocean area” and our dependence on the resources of the seas and referred to the role played by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in preserving and protecting marine resources. We need to educate ourselves on this and many international conventions addressing the preservation and protection of marine resources. We also should encourage young Micronesian students to take up college majors in disciplines in these areas.

I was impressed by RMI President Kessai Note’s call for collaboration with RMI’s efforts to address the lingering effects of US atomic tests as well as his call to the UN to support RMI’s “Changed Circumstances Petition” submitted to the US Congress in 2000. President Note’s call is practical and matter-of-fact, untainted with allusion to victimization as an instrument of advocacy. Nowadays, not too many around the Pacific and the world are unaware or uninformed about what took place in the Marshall Islands when the US tested its atomic bombs. People can remain ignorant or choose to remain unconscious of the effects of the atomic tests. The most progressive way to get these people to care about and to be involved in finding solutions is acknowledge the wrongs committed in their names and collaborate together in finding answers we all want to see. We shouldn’t make them feel guilty or anger them with constant diatribe about what the US did or did not do when they ruled over Micronesia.

There are more effective ways to work with Americans and making them feel guilty or angering them is not one of them. We ought therefore to heed the spirit of President Note’s call by building effective partnerships with Americans and others around the world in exploring constructive ways to addressing these serious issues of survival. We the Micronesians who live in the United States are in the most opportune positions to help in these situations.

Among other things, the three FAS leaders spoke of our islands’ relationships with other nations and the collaborations we have with them in working to realize the Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals were created during the 2000 UN Millennium Development Summit. There are eight goals and they include: eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education for all boys and girls, promoting gender equality and empowerment of women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS and other major diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing global partnerships for development. Our island nations are engaged in a multitude of partnerships aimed at reaching these Millennium Development Goals. We should educate ourselves about each of these goals, what our island governments are doing to achieve them, and seek training ourselves to assist them in achieving each goal.

These are the reasons why our leaders travel to and from the United Nations. They engage or seek to engage in international partnerships to build our island nations’ institutional capacities to eradicate extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education for all young people, and acquire the expertise and tools to preserve and protect our environment, among other things. But they will continue to seek the expertise of foreigners if we DO NOT obtain the educational training to be the experts ourselves. This is what it means to be self-sufficient and self-reliant island societies. Nations without trained citizens are but nations in name only.

All of our leaders’ declarations and proclamations regarding collaborations with the United Nations, other nations, and international organizations reflect our governments’ priority issues and report on what they are doing to build sustainable island economies, in partnerships with others. More importantly, our increasing international involvements can only be carried out successfully with the full support of the peoples that our governments represent. These peoples, as political philosophy teaches us, collectively form the Civil Societies in our island nations. Everything else we do must first and foremost acknowledge the importance of the relationships we form at these levels of society. All governmental leaders speak on behalf their respective civil societies. Democratically, civil societies extend the rights and obligations to political leaders to speak on our behalf. Thus, we must begin and end our advocacies for and on behalf of our respective civil societies. Nation-building is a collective effort aimed at empowering civil society by building the capacity of our public and private institutions and the capacities of each citizen. Many of us complain that it is precisely because of the failures of nation-building that we have chosen to live away from home.

Dispersal of island communities (Diaspora communities)

Like other groups of peoples, we have been dispersed all over the world by the myriad forces of colonialism and globalization. To fully appreciate the nature of the global forces that have torn us from our homes and dispersed us all over the world, we need to understand our histories. And to do that means we have to essentially decolonize our minds whether we live at home or abroad. One of the most important things we have to do is to dissociate from the lies told about us. In the last few centuries of our colonial relationships with various nations, particularly in the past 60plus years as we were increasingly ushered into the modern world, we heard so many lies told about us and or about our inability to achieve the highest of our potential. These were all a bunch of lies! But they can only become “useful” lies that other people tell about us or they can become self-fulfilling prophecies ONLY if we accept and internalize them as if they were facts! This is important; it tells us that genuine empowerment takes place only when we acknowledge the lies about us for what they are, and to commit ourselves to think and behave otherwise! That is the beginning of a journey toward our empowered selves and toward a better image of our collective existence. Our survival as island peoples depends, first and foremost, on a revolutionary act of discovering who we really are and what we are capable of. Micronesians helped instill and infuse pride in a dying Hawaiian culture by teaching them how to recognize and travel the open expanse of Oceania via an intimacy with the heavens and the stars. Knowledge of and use of these heavenly bodies to guide our way (Celestial Navigation) is a guide, a pathway, toward our better selves. This is instructive as well because more importantly, looking to the Heavens (and Deity perhaps) to guide us in our journeyings toward self-determination and nationhood reflects the beliefs of many throughout Micronesia nowadays.

Manifesto for Micronesian diaspora communities

“Manifesto,” as used in the title of this piece, does not suggest anything so sweeping as to be so revolutionary such as in the ambitions of Karl Marx and company. Manifesto, in this case, can be a proposal, an agenda for work unlike any we’ve done before. It can be an invitation to reciprocate in ways that support nation-building at home even when we live far from home. It implies seeing our place in the “universe” of our history and destiny in radically new ways: that we are where we are as a result of our colonial history and that the choices we made to live away from our island nations are individual choices, that they are collectively influenced, and that they are historically-informed as well. The successes and failures of Micronesian nation-building are the operative words, so to speak, in influencing our decisions to migrate to places away from home. And Manifesto can collectively demonstrate our “will-to-power” in terms of positively influencing our leaders to govern democratically; it can be a plea for unifying our diverse voices into coherent Diaspora voices. Pushing democratic reform agendas at home should be included on the top of our Manifesto as a priority agenda.

Many of us live in a country replete with the resources and opportunities lacking in our islands. Therefore, theoretically, we are in the most fitting position to reciprocate with the range of expertise at our disposal and the resources we can marshal.

Micronesian Friends in Diaspora: listen to and heed the words of our Freely Associated States (FAS) leaders. Our island nations are in desperate times, if you follow the findings of the US

Government Accountability Office.

(See, for example, these US GAO Reports: “Compact of Free Association: Implementation Activities Have Progressed, but the Marshall Islands Faces Challenges to Achieving Long-Term Compact Goals” (July 2007) http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071115t.pdf

“Development Prospects Remain Limited for Micronesia and Marshall Islands” (June 2006)

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06590.pdf )

In 1965, the Congress of Micronesia was created, in part, by our early leaders to begin our journey toward nationhood. They also set in motion forces that resulted ultimately in the break-up of the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and leading to political negotiations with the USA that ultimately gave us our Compacts of Free Association. We each went our separate ways but the original inspirations for the early Congress of Micronesia were to form independent and or at least self-reliant nation-states. The last twenty years have been rough. And today, we witness mass out migrations of Micronesians into Guam, CNMI, Hawaii and the US mainland. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We who live elsewhere, holding on to passports of nations-states far away, are the result of failed nation-building! But we are not helpless…

We are in the best positions to assist with nation-building. Living far from home does not have to limit what we can do and say. We ought to open the lines of communication therefore between ourselves and the home islands if we haven’t done it already. We can write letters to newspaper editors, post messages on blog pages, and or to our elected officials and community leaders on all matters relating to nation-building. And if we do not reciprocate directly, we should at least contribute to elevating the level of public discourse at home so that intelligent dialogue can become the norm. Successful nation-building is a product of many forces constantly at work, one of which is the continuous renewal and advancement of the intellectual nature of public discourse. At the United Nations this week, our FAS leaders have described some of the more urgent challenges we face as small island developing states. We should rise to the challenge, and do our best at it.

By Richard N. Salvador

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Richard N. Salvador is a citizen of the Republic of Belau/Palau. He lives in Honolulu and works as a Hawaii Department of Education teacher. He served as the first chairperson of the Micronesian Community Network and, currently, as the Network’s Education Committee chair. He is a member of the newly-created Hawaii State Compact of Free Association Task Force, called for by a Hawaii Senate Resolution in the 2007 Hawaii Legislative Session

(See http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/sessioncurrent/Bills/SR142_SD1_.htm ).

Email him at: richardnsalvador@gmail.com