Compromise

built into mandates

By Ian Williams

THE Trusteeship concept had its origins after the First World War, when the colonial territories of the defeated powers, Germany and Turkey, were distributed between the victors as “mandates”.

The mandates were a legal compro mise between the self-determination principle, for which the war had osten sibly been fought, and the territorial appetites of the colonial empires which had won victory. In the Pacific, Nauru and New Guinea were transferred from German to Australian control, and Western Samoa to New Zealand. The Pacific Trust Territory had been seized from Germany by Japan, which had joined war on the Allied side. The League of Nations granted a mandate over them to Japan.

During World War 11, Japan made extensive use of the territory to mount its war against the US. In the course of fierce battles, the United States took the islands and was later granted Trusteeship by the United Nations. The US insisted on a special form of Trusteeship, so the islands became a “Strategic Trust Territory”, over which only the Security Council had authority.

The original concern of the US was to avoid the islands being used by enemies as military stepping stones across the Pacific. “They are not colonies, they are outposts”, said Stinson, the Secretary of Defoe in 1945. There was little doubt as to who was in charge. Article 15 of the Trusteeship Agreement states, “The terms of the present without the consent

of the administering authority”.

As the third World membership of the UN grew, the pressure for decolonisation increased. But that was in the General Assembly and not the Security Council, where the victors of 1945 Britain, France, China, the USA and USSR each had a veto.

The vastness of the ocean which made the islands such valuable military properties had other advantages.

The isolation of Bikini Atoll, one of the Marshall Islands, made it a natural nuclear testing site; natural that is, unless you happened to live there. The 167 inhabitants were moved in a way scarcely consonant with the “sacred mission” of trusteeship.

When appeals were made in 1954 to the Trusteeship Council about nuclear tests, the US fell back on the clauses of the “strategic trusteeship” agreement to

avoid discussion, even though the ther monuclear blasting of islands was diffi cult to reconcile with the other political, social and economic provisions.

In the 19605, embarrassed by the rapid pace of decolonisation, the Kennedy administration envisaged the islands moving together, as Micronesia, into “permanent association” with the US. It was envisaged that the extension of US citizenship would “make the trusteeship agreement an academic issue”.

But people speaking nine different languages, spread over millions of square miles of ocean, were not necessarily going to sing in harmony while the US conducted. Instead, the US itself began to split up the artificial political unit it had earlier promulgated. In 1975, after four years of negotiations, the Common wealth of the Northern Marianas was set up, when voters there approved the Covenant which gave them a relation ship to the US similar to Puerto Rico’s.

The 1986 referendum left only Yap, Truk, Kosrae and Ponape in the FSM, while Palau and the Marshall Islands went their separate ways.

The US timetable provided for an end to the Trusteeship in the 1980 s, leaving the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia in “free association” with the US. However, although by 1975 New Zealand’s and Australia’s trusteeships in the Pacific had all been terminated without serious problems, the conditions the US sought from its territories were certain to provoke the USSR into using its veto in the Security Council.

What the US offered was a concept as unique as the form of quasi

independence which left the US in control of defence.

In 1986, the Pacific Forum countries lined up behind the US in support of the termination of the Trusteeship at the Trusteeship Council, where matters could be decided by a simple majority even with the USSR in opposition. On October 24, 1986, US Ambassador Vernon Walters wrote to the UN Secretary General that the Compacts with the Marshalls Islands and FSM would take effect on October 31, and the Commonwealth agreement with the Northern Marianas would enter effect on November 3. He promised Palau would follow shortly.

The US held the presidency of the Security Council in December, and intended to introduce the letter as a procedural matter, against which there is no veto. But the subsequent Palau referendum failed to secure the necessary 75 per cent majority. The letter was shelved, and the issue was kept off the agenda until last December. Until then the USA had tried to imply that the issue was finished, but even allies like the UK were unhappy with the legality of that position. The rapproachement between the Superpowers allowed a mutually satisfactory resolution of the problem.

Now Palau, with fewer people than the UN has staff, is the only territory left.

The UN trusteeship Council may be in business a long time. After 10 referenda, the voters of Palau have still failed to provide the 75 per cent vote needed to overturn the non-nuclear provisions of its constitution, which is imcompatible with the Compact of Free Association pro visions for US defence. □