No one bothered to inform residents why the southern tip of their home island was suddenly inaccessible. All they know is the place where women for generations have scoured the jagged tidal pools for crabs and where the farmers who have long tended the fields of taro and millet have suddenly turned into a large construction site.
Rumors began to fly. It’s a box of pineapples. No, it’s a canning factory for fish. Whatever it is, the locals decide, it will mean more jobs for the islanders.
It wasn’t until many years later, in 1980, when a local pastor saw an article buried in the back of a newspaper that the islanders knew what the real location was: a waste dump. giant nucleus.
“The government has deceived us,” pastor Syapen Lamoran, 76, said in a recent interview at his home in Lanyu, a lush volcanic island off the southeast coast of Taiwan. is the traditional home of the Tao, one of 16 officially recognized indigenous tribes. in Taiwan. “They don’t care that nuclear waste will kill us, that the Tao people will go extinct.”
More than three decades after that revelation, the nuclear waste dump remains at Lanyu, a painful reminder to Tao of the government’s broken promises and a symbol to Taiwan’s indigenous people about their protracted struggle for greater autonomy.
The landfill in Lanyu, also known as Lan Island, or Ponso no Tao, is one of the most prominent causes due to the indigenous Taiwanese people, the main inhabitants of these islands until four centuries ago, when Colonial settlers began to arrive from other islands. Mainland China, Europe and then imperial Japan.
Today, Han Chinese make up more than 95% of Taiwan’s 23 million population. In contrast, about 583,000 indigenous people make up 2%, and many still face widespread social and economic marginalization. Lanyu itself is home to more than 5,000 residents.
The larger indigenous rights movement has gain traction in recent years as Taiwan, an autonomous territory claimed by Beijing, promotes a separate identity separate from mainland China. In 2016, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen became the first leader officially sorry against the island’s indigenous people for centuries of “pain and abuse”.
But on the issue of nuclear waste, the government has been slower to act.
After it was revealed that the site was a nuclear waste facility, Tao fought vigorously to convince the government to dismantle it. For years, they have organized mass protests on the island and in front of government offices in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. They become self-taught experts on nuclear waste.
But despite repeated government promises to relocate the site, the landfill remains.
On a recent afternoon, Taiwanese tourists in wetsuits were laughing and frolicking in the sparkling blue water, seemingly unaware that directly above them, hidden in the wooded mountainside, It is a nuclear waste dump that some Taoists believe has contributed to the rise in cancer rates. mutant fish and other health problems of the island’s inhabitants.
Taiwanese officials and Taipower, the state-owned company that operates the landfill, have said that residents’ exposure to low levels of radiation from the landfill is minimal, citing numerous scientific studies.
Thomas Isaacs, a nuclear waste management expert and former chief consultant to Blue Ribbon, says the health effects of such landfills, often in remote areas near active nuclear facilities movement, remains a controversial topic among scientists and nuclear energy skeptics. Committee on America’s Nuclear Future. “Scientists will tell you that when you look at places exposed to low levels of radiation, you can’t find any effects.”
Statements from Taiwanese and Taipower officials have done little to assuage the concerns of islanders.
“I don’t believe the problem has really been solved,” said Syaman Jiapato, 63, a retired teacher, as he sat in the shade of a wooden hut, carving a model of a traditional fishing boat. system. “We have lived with such man-made threats for many years.”
Behind the islanders’ skepticism is a deep distrust of outsiders. For good reason.
For centuries, Dao lived largely isolated on this 17-square-mile island, interacting only occasionally with shipwrecked sailors and the people of the northern Philippine Islands. Then, starting in the late 19th century, Taiwan, including Lanyu, came under the control of the Japanese colonists, who began to study Tao, whom they called Yami, as subjects. ethnography.
It wasn’t just an innocent academic pursuit: The Japanese wanted to learn more about the peoples of the Pacific so they could help their empire expand in Asia.
In Dao’s eyes, the island’s later rulers, members of the Kuomintang government, were not much better. They took a more hands-on approach to management, forcing Tao to wear modern clothes, banning their native language in public places and forcing them to leave their traditional underground homes. According to historians and a recent government-led investigation, the new government also sent convicted criminals to the island, some of whom raped Tao women.
It was against this backdrop that, in the 1970s, the authoritarian government decided to build a site on Lanyu to store more than 10,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste produced by several nuclear power plants on the island. Taiwan’s main island. Lanyu is a remote area, according to the theory, and has very few inhabitants in the vicinity.
Dao was not said.
“There have been too many lies,” said Hailin Chung, 42, a Tao woman who runs a cafe on the island. “The outsiders have changed our territory drastically.”
When Pastor Syapen Lamoran saw the article in the newspaper, he immediately started spreading the word to his Tao friends back home about the “poisonous” landfill. Beginning in the late 1980s, Tao held many large-scale protests, even after the landfill opened in 1982. In 1988, protesters stormed the nuclear site’s offices. Years later, they threw rocks into the harbor to prevent Taipower from bringing in new bins of nuclear waste.
“We crossed the line and saw hope,” said Shaman Fengayan, 58, who led the island’s protest movement in the 1980s.
Along the way, the protesters scored small victories. The government has finally agreed to stop bringing in more waste bins.
But efforts to move the waste have failed. In 1993, a group of countries vote ban forever the practice of dumping all nuclear waste in the ocean. Other potential options, including plans to export waste to North Korea, have been scuttled.
In 2018, the Taiwanese government released what many Taos considered a long overdue report acknowledging its failure decades ago to consult with the islanders. on the construction of a nuclear waste site. Following the release of the report, authorities agreed to pay Tao $83 million in compensation, with an additional $7 million to be disbursed every three years.
The most fervent anti-nuclear activists scorned the payments, calling them a “candy-like” tranquilizer that eased locals’ anger and undercut the movement. Others are less concerned.
“It’s not as serious as some people say,” said Si Nan Samonan, 45, a Tao woman who has worked as a tour guide at the nuclear waste storage site for the past seven years.
Taipower said in a statement that it is still “working hard” to find a permanent storage site but it has struggled to overcome resistance from residents in the proposed resettlement areas. export.
With no immediate solution, the anti-nuclear movement in recent years has lost momentum. While posters and stickers have the tagline “Nuclear!” Still swarming in bars and restaurants across the island, many young Taos say they have little interest in running a campaign that has consumed so much of their elders’ time and energy.
For them, the focus now is on tourism and attracting the young Taiwanese crowd to the island by ferry or small propeller plane and get around on rented scooters. Some young Taoists say they want to focus on real social issues that can be solved, like picking up trash on the island and educating foreigners about Tao culture.
“’Antinuclear’ is a cliché now,” said Si Yabosoganen, 34, as he lounged on the porch of his beach bar as the sun went down and the breeze blew. “Promoting Dao culture is much more important than repeating the same old tune.”
But for the older generation of activists in Lanyu, getting rid of the nuclear landfill remains a cause worth fighting for.
Sinan Jipehngaya, 50, owner of Anti-Nuclear Bar on Lanyu, a roadside hut that serves strong, brightly colored cocktails with names like “Nuclear waste get the hell out of here.” “Tourists can come, have fun and leave. Lan Ngoc.”
“We have no backup,” she said. “This island is our only home.”
