NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Testimony to the Fourth Committee of the United Nations From Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Ph.D. Co-Chairperson, Independence for Guam Task Force October 3, 2017 Buenas yan håfa adai todus hamyo ko’lo’ña si Maga’taotao Rafael Ramirez Carreño i gehilo’ para i kumuiten Mina’Kuåtro, gi este na gefpå’go na ha’åni. Magof hu na gaige yu’ guini på’go para bai hu kuentusi hamyo yan kuentusiyi i taotao Guåhan put i halacha na sinisedi gi islan-måmi. (Hello to all of you on this beautiful day. I am grateful to be here now so that I can speak to you, in particular H.E. Rafael Ramirez Carreño, Chair of the C24, and speak on behalf of the people of Guam about recent events that transpired in our island home.) My name is Michael Lujan Bevacqua and I am a professor of Chamorro Studies at the University of Guam. I am also the co-chair for the Independence for Guam Task Force, a community outreach organization tasked with educating our island about the possibilities should

 I'm excited this summer because I'll be a visiting scholar in Japan at Kobe University. I'll be teaching a course on transnational relations that focuses on militarization and militarism in the Asia-Pacific region. I'll be using two books for the course Militarized Currents edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho and The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Catherine Lutz has been a friend of Micronesia for a very long time and last came through Guam a few years ago. Here work is very important in terms of giving a structure to militarization and militarism and not just letting them be things taken for granted as natural parts of life, but being able to drawn them out of the background here and force them to become objects of analysis and critique. Her work when she came through Guam and gave several presentations and even testified in front of the Guam Legislature was very eye-opening to people about the nature of military bases and how they affect the c

Guam is on the edge of another large buildup of forces. The political stumbling blocks that existed in Washington D.C. for several years, stalling and slowing the US military buildup are now disappearing. The buildup isn't the psychotic, frenetic, diplomatic-cocaine-fueled nightmare that it was almost ten years ago when it was first announced and proposed. It is somewhat smaller and will take place over a longer period. At that time, the focus was on Pagat. Now, new locations have been mixed in, Fena, Litekyan, Pagan and Tinian. These sites were always there on the map of American militarization in the Marianas. There are maps that link them together. There are study documents that discuss and theorize them in tandem. There are lists of resources or assets in the regions that connect them. In some ways, when the US military and its analysts and its decision-makers look at the region, they do a much better job linking locations together than many activists or even average people

The Militarized Pacific: An Anniversary Without End Wednesday, 14 May 2014 10:13 By Jon Letman , Truthout | Op-Ed Marshallese children swim and play amongst a junk heap on the shore of tiny Ebeye island, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Some 11-12,000 people are packed onto the 80 acre island. (Photo by Richard Ross)   March 1, the 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo test - a nuclear detonation over a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima - has come and gone. Predictably, major decadal events, like a 15-megaton explosion over a Micronesian atoll, garner fleeting attention, but it's all the days between the anniversaries that tell the real story of those who live with the impacts. For the people of the Marshall Islands, where Enewetak, Bikini and neighboring atolls were irradiated and rendered uninhabitable by 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, the brief anniv

Published on Thursday, October 3, 2013 by TomDispatch.com The Italian Job: The Pentagon Goes on a Spending Spree How the Pentagon Is Using Your Tax Dollars to Turn Italy into a Launching Pad for the Wars of Today and Tomorrow by David Vine The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for U.S. military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. At bases in Naples, Aviano, Sicily, Pisa, and Vicenza, among others, the militar

Last year anthropologist David Vine visited Guam as part of a research trip where he visited areas around the world where communities were protesting (in various ways) the presence of US bases near them. While this is his most current research project, he is best known for his work on chronicling the plight of the Chagos Islanders, who come from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. If you are in the military you have most likely heard about the base there. If you are a fan of the live-action Transformers films then you might remember it being featured as a secure location where a sliver of the infamous all-spark is kept safe. If you are someone, who like me keeps lists of the not-so-great-things that have been done by the US over its history, than Diego Garcia is a particularly gross and recent atrocity. Through postwar collusion between the US and British governments, the people living in Diego Garcia were first tricked into leaving their island and barred from returning