Wind Shifts in the Pacific

America's neglected South Sea empire struggles for change

To most Americans, the South Sea islands far beyond Hawaii are no more than idyllic images. To Washington, they are an extraterritorial headache. The U.S. has responsibility for more than 2,200 of them, sweeping in a 4,000-mile arc from American Samoa to Guam, with a 2,000-mile lurch northward to include the naval battleground of Midway. Many were the sites of bitter, bloody victories in World War II: Saipan, Tinian, Kwajalein, Truk.

The problem, in this anticolonial age, is what to do with them and the 260,000 people living on them. For decades the U.S. has had no real policy toward most of its oceanic charges, and few officials have felt the need for one. Now that situation is changing.

President Carter has taken a personal interest in the vast U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which is made up of 2,141 Micronesian islands spread over an area as large as the U.S. itself. He has declared that the 115,000 people of the area, administered by Washington as a "strategic trust," should have the right of self-determination. Talks toward that end between U.S. officials and island representatives have been going on for six years, but now the full prestige of the Oval

Office is behind them. Reflecting Carter's concern, his son Jeff and daughter-in-law Annette visited the islands last week. They attended the inauguration of Peter Tali Coleman, first native-elected Governor of American Samoa, then flew to Saipan, the trust territory capital, where Carlos Camacho will be sworn in this week as the first native-elected Governor of the Northern Marianas.

The Micronesian trust territory is made up of the Marshall, the Caroline and the Mariana islands, except for Guam (see map). Those islands were handed over to Japan by the League of Nations in 1919 and held until Japan's defeat in World War II. In 1947, the United Nations transferred them to U.S. stewardship under an agreement that will expire in 1981. Carter insists that a change of status be negotiated by then with the trust territory islands. His Administration is willing to consider a range of options, from free association with the U.S., to commonwealth status, to independence. In 1975, the Northern Mariana Islands voted to leave the territory and become a U.S. commonwealth. They will achieve that status this week, retaining U.S. protection and many benefits but adding a far larger measure of self-government.

Carter's interest stands in contrast to U.S. attitudes during most of the 31 years of American trusteeship. From 1947 to 1960, the U.S. neglected Micronesia almost entirely. Then, stung by a strongly critical U.N. report, Washington began pouring in money, mostly for education and social welfare. To date, the U.S. has invested more than $250 million in the islands, spawning a huge bureaucracy.

Checkbook administration, however, has torn apart the subsistence economy of the territory and contributed to an environment of distorted development and social despair. Indeed, most of the same problems afflict the South Pacific islands held by the U.S. independent of any U.N. sanction. These include:

>> Guam (pop. 100,000), a 209-sq.-mi. island 1,500 miles north of New Guinea, taken as a prize of the Spanish-American War. It has a nonvoting representative in Congress.

>> American Samoa (pop. 31,000), a cluster of seven islands 2,200 miles southwest of Hawaii, annexed by the U.S. after an 1899 treaty with Britain and Germany divided influence over all the Samoas. American Samoa has no formal representation in Washington.

>> Other sparsely populated American military installations flung widely across the Pacific, notably Midway (pop. 2,300), Johnston (pop. 1,000) and Wake (pop. 1,600), claimed outright by the U.S. at the turn of the century.

Farming, once a basic livelihood, has virtually disappeared from all the American-held islands. Indigenous private enterprise is almost nonexistent: there are no local entrepreneurs, for example, exploiting the lush timberlands of some of the Carolines. Unemployment runs at 13% in the trust territory, 9% on Guam, 15% on American Samoa.

Federal misspending is partly to blame. U.S. aid to American Samoa goes to, among other places, an academic high school that does not teach enough skills useful on the island. Of its 600 graduates a year, 400 leave the island to find jobs. As a result, more American Samoans live in Honolulu and Los Angeles than in the South Pacific. Micronesia's annual suicide rate is 20 per 100,000 people, nearly double that of the U.S.

One of the most abrasive issues between the islands and Washington is sea law. The trust territory wants to license tuna fishing in its waters and adopt a 200-mile limit. The U.S. argues that tuna are migratory and can be caught without restrictions anywhere. That is good for California tuna men and for the Japanese, who sweep 40,000 tons of tuna annually from Micronesian waters. But the islanders lament that they are losing millions of dollars in licensing fees.

A change in political status would help the islanders stand on their own feet, and in 1972 Washington began talks with the Micronesians toward that goal. In 1976 both sides initialed a draft compact calling for a "free association" in which the islands would gain much independence and the U.S. would oversee their defense and foreign relations. Then everything fell apart because individual island groups, proud of their separate identities, wanted to strike individual deals with the U.S. The 26,000 residents of the Marshalls voted in a referendum to negotiate separately from the territory as a whole for a change in status. Now the island of Palau (pop. 13,000) wants to do the same.

The whole idea of Micronesian unity was invented and fostered by the U.S.," explains Peter Rosenblatt, President Carter's representative at the talks. "We take every opportunity that we can to foster the idea, but the Marshallese and Palauan leaders will not accept it."

The negotiations have become affairs of Rube Goldberg complexity. Washington now talks to territorial representatives (including ones from the Marshalls and Palau) as if they were still a united entity. At the same table, U.S. officials negotiate with the two dissident groups as if their separate-but-equal bargaining status were achieved. What all the Micronesians agree upon is that they want to remain associated with the U.S. but gain greater control over their own local governments. More independence, more discriminating federal subsidy, is long overdue in beautiful but troubled Micronesia. Given Jimmy Carter's determination, both may arrive soon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.