Global Courant
After the Allied victory, the entire Japanese empire in the Pacific was placed in a trust of about 100 inhabited islands, spread over an area the size of the contiguous United States, under the administration of Washington, which was charged with “the development of the citizens of the Trust Territory towards self-government or independence.” (This included today’s Northern Mariana Islands, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.) Saipan eventually became the headquarters of the Trust, which was administered first by the Navy and then by the Department of the Interior, arbitrarily dividing the islands into six districts , with each voting to decide their fate.
The founding fathers of the Commonwealth, as the group of legislators are known, wrote the Covenant, a government document that outlined the archipelago’s right to control its internal affairs while preserving the sovereignty of the U.S. federal government over the foreign affairs and defense of the Northern Marianas granted. The Covenant specified which articles of the United States Constitution applied, and fundamental changes to the document can only be made by mutual agreement between the Northern Mariana Islands and Congress. The Northern Mariana Islands have the right to enter into direct negotiations with the federal government on specific issues. This arrangement has been made possible by the Insular Cases.
In 1975, 75 percent of the inhabitants of the Northern Mariana Islands voted to approve the document. (They also repeatedly voted to integrate with Guam, but Guam rejected the proposal.) Residents of the Northern Mariana Islands are now US citizens without federal voting rights. They serve in the United States Armed Forces, but do not have their own VA office.
As part of the negotiations, the US government leased two-thirds of the land on Tinian for 50 years to build a military base, saying it would boost the economy, and also pledged to build a school and provide medical services to provide. Residents are still waiting. Today, the 40-square-mile island, home to 2,000 people, has no hospital or dentist, one gas station, one semi-functional ATM, and a few small supermarkets. The main employer is the mayor’s office. In a 2010 census, 44 percent of households on Tinian fell below the poverty line.
When the US Army took Tinian from the Japanese during World War II, they built roads the same way Manhattan did – with Broadway, Wall Street, 86th, 42nd and so on. That morning, Fleming took me to North Field, where American military personnel built the largest airport in the world at the time, from which planes took off every three minutes during the last year of the war. We drove up Broadway to the two bombing bays used to load nuclear weapons onto airplanes, now encased in glass like a mausoleum of the grotesque. Nuclear Bomb Pit No. 1 loaded the five-ton uranium bomb, Little Boy, which killed more than 100,000 people in a single morning explosion. Atomic Bomb Pit No. 2 contained the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, which killed 40,000 people instantly in Nagasaki. As I stood before the glass, the duality of past destruction – blanketed in the prospect of the future decimation that would necessitate the use of the Diversion Airfield – felt like vertigo.
