This content was originally published by Radio Free Asia, and it is now being reprinted with permission.
Palauan Sharla Paules examines the contaminated soil of her lovely tropical home island, Peleliu, which is still rife with WWII weapons 80 years after it was liberated from the Japanese.
She recalls that her grandmother warned the island was poisoned by old bombs, causing nearly every aspect of conventional life on the island.
According to Paules, 49, who is a member of a group clearing the island for the stone action group Norway People’s Aid,” they said the soil was therefore contaminated they don’t even grow food.”
” They don’t grow fruits, cassava, cassava or soursop. You also can’t grow tapioca and eat it below, it’s actually bad”.
Before starting an amphibious rape in 1944, the United States launched more than 2,800 lots of weapons from the air and naval vessels on the Japanese-occupied area.
Almost 2, 000 Americans, 10, 000 Japanese and an unknown amount of Palauans died in the ensuing war.
Today, many of Peleliu’s southern border is also littered with unexploded weapons, rusting tanks and soldiers ‘ skeletal remains. It’s a stark warning of a Pacific-wide trouble: the lingering tradition of old and abandoned artillery, also known as UXO/AXO.
While accompanying BenarNews on a journey of beach certification work, Paules ‘ partner Roger Hess picks up a rusting Chinese rocket from the ground in the woods.
” We’ll travel back and restore it. It’s essentially also live”, said the 65-year-old American military veteran, brushing off the dirt and marking it with light spray paint for after removal.
Hess is working on a clearance operation for the Palau region of Norway’s People’s Aid, one of the main battlegrounds on Peleliu, along the ridges of Umurbrogal Mountain, a series of rough, jungle-covered coastal ridges.
Hess ‘ Type 91 rocket is not a common obtain in Palau.
” The fuse does not work, but if you put it in a fireplace it does blow”, he said.
One of nine Pacific island nations, including Micronesia, is contaminated by an unreleased number of explosives left behind by Chinese and Military forces following World War II.
Although there is less global awareness of the problem in the Pacific than there are in landmine and grouping munitions hotspots like Cambodia or the Sahel region in Africa, experts claim that possibly devastating munitions are dispersed across the country’s lagoons, beaches, and jungles.
These violent remnants of war are a threat to human life as well as deplete water sources, prevent infrastructure development, and make land very difficult for farmers to farm.
” Palau has not had an accident in years, but that doesn’t mean there is no possible for it”, said Hess.
Any of those mishandled weapons does kill people, the company says.” Just look at the number of weapons we’re pulling out.”
A dangerous threat
Palau may not have experienced a victim for a while, but other regions of the Pacific have not been so fortunate.
In the , Solomon Islands, which witnessed big battle between Japanese and Military troops on the main area of Guadalcanal, two young men died in 2021 when an American 105 mm tank exploded in a residential area of the money Honiara.
Raziv Hilly and Charles Noda were cooking over a backyard fire pit when they passed away, unaware that the projectile from World War II was buried beneath the ground.
Nongovernmental organizations claim that there are no formal systems in place to track accidents or gather comprehensive data on the extent of contamination in Pacific island nations, despite media reports occasionally highlighting the deadly threat.
A regional UXO strategy that the Pacific Island Forum, PIF, approved in 2012 to coordinate and mobilize efforts to address the issue.
However, according to those with knowledge of the plan, little progress has been made in recent years after an initial burst of energy, including two regional conferences in Palau and the Australian city of Brisbane.
BenarNews requested an update on the strategy, but the PIF did not respond right away.
According to experts, poor data collection and coordination prevent Pacific island governments from battling the deadly menace, including obtaining international assistance.
According to Mette Eliseussen, national coordinator of the Australian nonprofit SafeGround, which has conducted extensive surveys and clearances throughout the Pacific,” there is a lack of knowledge that this is important information that can help get funding to deal with the problem long term.”
Pacific states historically have been in the dark because two international treaties that cover landmines and cluster munitions, neither of which were widely used in the Pacific during World War II, support international funding for ERW action.
” Because they have UXO ,]donors ] have sort of said,’ Oh, you don’t have a landmine problem, so we will discriminate against you.’ That’s been the attitude until just recently”, Eliseussen told BenarNews.
The Pacific region saw an increase in funding for the clearance of ERW in 2023. According to the Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor’s 2024 report, the United States, Australia, and Japan increased financial support for the Solomon Islands and Palau and made new investments in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.
Eliseussen claimed that the renewed attention and additional resources for the problem in the Pacific were partially due to the “tension with China” of geopolitical tension.
Last year on Peleliu, U. S. Marines completed a$ 400 million rehabilitation of a WWII-era Japanese airfield, including removing UXOs at the site. It will allow fixed-wing aircraft to operate to enhance the U. S. military’s strategic capabilities in response to China’s ambitions in the , South China Sea , and Pacific region.
Between 2021 and 23, the U. S. Department of State provided Solomon Islands with$ 4.5 million for clearance,$ 1.5 million for Palau and smaller amounts for Marshall Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
John Rodsted, a researcher at SafeGround, said international donors like the U. S., Australia and Japan needed to step up assistance to rid the Pacific of UXOs and take a long-term approach to funding.
He further stated that the Japanese in particular” should put their hands in their pockets and actually help clear this stuff up.”
Contaminated soil
Since NPA began survey and clearance in Palau in 2016, it has found 10, 844 ERW scattered across the country, according to its records.
Hess was unable to say whether Peleliu, which has a population of about 500, would ever be free of ERW, but said that despite the intense fighting there were “probably still around 100 suspected hazardous areas” ( about 500 people ).
On a recent survey of Umurbrogal Mountain, the detritus of war was obvious to see – mortars, rockets and shells dotted the ground.
While accompanying Japanese personnel in search of the remains of soldiers, NPA staff discovered the remnants of a suspected landmine outside a cave weeks earlier, according to Hess.
White phosphorus munitions fired from 81 mm mortars pose the greatest threat to public safety, he said, referring to the incendiary weapons that ignite when they touch oxygen.
Not everything that has been found is hazardous, but yellow-tipped stakes and white spray paint are used to mark them, and their GPS locations are recorded for later retrieval that day.
After the munitions are collected, they are moved to a temporary storage facility close to the Peleliu’s trash heap, where they are cut open and burned. They are then transported to a disposal facility in the nearby state of Koror.
The work is slow going – and decades late – but according to locals like Paules, it’s starting to make a difference.
” When I was little, we saw a lot of]munitions ] on the side of the street. Nowadays we don’t see so much”, she said.
