Islanders Fear ‘Evil Spirits’ of Nuclear Waste Dump

Syapen Jyazikna, clad only in a loincloth, strolled down the main street of Hongtou Village, squatted by the roadside and joined a conversation about this tiny island’s nuclear waste dump.

“It’s bad,” Jyazikna declared. “If that poison escapes, we’re finished. This island will be finished. It will be the end of the Yami people.”

The Yami, who for centuries have eked out simple lives fishing and farming on this 17-square-mile tropical island, are now confronted with late 20th-Century garbage. They do not like it.

“Clean places in the world are disappearing,” said Syaman Rapongan, 31, leader of the Yami anti-dump movement. “People are destroying their own living space. Orchid Island, this tiny place, cannot endure having this high-technology nuclear waste sent here. The life of this island and the life of the Yami people are one and the same.”

Built in 1982

When Taiwan’s only low-level nuclear waste storage facility was built here six years ago, few if any Yami fully understood what it was. Many even took construction jobs on the project.

“The county head we had then was illiterate,” explained Syinam Naralai, a woman who runs a souvenir shop for tourists in one of the island’s six villages.

Over the past year, relaxation of political controls in Taiwan and growing knowledge among the Yami about the dangers of radioactivity have led to a surge of intense opposition to the dump.

“It’s like they tricked us,” Naralai said. “Now we want to get rid of it.”

About 250 people, including some environmentalist supporters from the main island of Taiwan, staged a protest march to the dump site in February. A smaller group, estimated at 100 to 200 and made up mainly of young Yami people living on the main island, demonstrated in Taipei in April.

By latest official count, there are 2,745 Yami people. About 1,800, along with 300 ethnic Chinese, live on Orchid Island.

The island, with jungle-covered mountains dropping to a turquoise sea, bears a strong physical resemblance to the more rugged parts of Hawaii, which lies at the same latitude. As an economically underdeveloped place inhabited by an ethnic minority and increasingly popular as a vacation spot, Orchid Island also stands in much the same relationship to Taiwan as Hawaii once did to the mainland of the United States.

Mostly Young Adults

Slightly fewer than 1,000 Yami people, mostly young adults, are scattered among the nearly 20 million people of the main island, which lies to the west across 39 miles of ocean.

The vast majority of people on Taiwan are ethnic Chinese. Most are descendants of immigrants who came from mainland China a century or more ago. A much smaller number, about 250,000 people, are members of various aboriginal groups that lived on Taiwan long before Chinese began to move there.

The Yami, descendants of Pacific seafarers who came from what is now the northern Philippines, share some racial similarities with these indigenous groups but are culturally distinct.

No Solution in Sight

Rapongan, who helped organize both the Orchid Island and Taipei demonstrations, said that although they drew some media attention, they failed to move the issue any closer to a solution.

Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council defends the facility as the best available option for safely storing nuclear waste. Rather than harming the Yami people, construction of the dump has been accompanied by financial aid that has improved the quality of life on Orchid Island, according to the agency.

The choice of sites was dictated by geological considerations, explained Yang Chao-tsung, director of the facility. Experts decided that the southeastern tip of Orchid Island was most suitable.

“There are mountains on three sides and ocean on one side,” Yang said. “This material is dangerous, but the degree of danger is very small. Using this place reduces the effect on people to the lowest possible level.”

The radioactive wastes, shipped to the island in barrels, are deposited in thick concrete vaults at the dump. An audio-visual slide presentation shown to dump-site visitors states that “continual environmental monitoring shows that the establishment of this facility has not brought any pollution to Orchid Island . . . and there is no increased health hazard to residents.”

The Atomic Energy Council has sought to buttress its reassurances by explaining basic facts about radioactivity in newsletters distributed to island residents. Among the points stressed is that natural background radiation is many times greater than emissions from the dump. Some newsletters have presented the results of safety monitoring of radioactivity levels at various points around the island. All of the measurements are well within natural levels.

Explanation Fuels Fears

The attempt at explanation, however, seems to have backfired. The meaning of these figures is not easily understood by the island’s farmers and fishermen, while the acknowledgment that radiation exists has fueled their fears.

“They say it’s very safe, but there’s a problem,” declared Syanma Naralai, mayor of Ivalino Village and husband of the souvenir shop operator.

Naralai took out the June issue of the Atomic Energy Council’s newsletter and began reading off numbers for different villages. The figures he read actually were meant to show the margin of error in the measurement of natural radioactivity. But he believed the numbers showed levels of radioactivity caused by the waste dump.

When his misunderstanding was pointed out to him, he dismissed his error as irrelevant.

‘That Waste Can Kill’

“We don’t understand these numbers, but we know there’s radioactivity,” he declared, his voice laced with anger. “We’ll keep protesting. All the people of Orchid Island oppose it. That waste can kill people.”

Rapongan, leader of the anti-dump effort, also has a rejoinder to arguments that the facility is no threat to the Yami people.

“If it’s so safe, they should put it in Taipei, or in Yangmingshan,” he said, referring to a mountainous area at the edge of Taipei with fancy homes, elite resorts and wide expanses of unspoiled mountainside.

Yang, the man in charge of the dump, responded that it simply would not make sense to have it on the main island of Taiwan.

“With such a large population on Taiwan, if you place it there without a good shield (of mountains), it will be more serious than having it here,” Yang said. “This radioactivity, it goes without saying, is quite formidable.”

The argument, however, goes beyond scientific issues of radioactivity and health. The debate also involves spiritual attitudes and questions of ethnic relations.

“In our religion, we believe in many spirits,” Rapongan said. “It’s hard to explain, but it’s a kind of respect for nature. . . . After people die, their spirits remain, and we usually think of these spirits as evil spirits. We are very afraid of evil spirits. We’re very afraid of the evil spirit of this nuclear waste dump, and we want to drive this evil spirit out of Orchid Island.”

This has become the slogan of the movement: “Drive out Orchid Island’s devil.” Posters carrying this phrase also display pictures of the greatest symbol of Yami culture--beautiful handcrafted oceangoing canoes, painted white with stylized red and black markings. The Yami, with their seafaring origins, treasure these boats above all other possessions.

Plan for National Park

Rapongan, and other young people who have maintained their ties to the island, dream of achieving more than just ridding their native land of the nuclear waste dump. There is talk in government circles in Taipei of making Orchid Island a national park, even though the idea seems to many to be incongruous with the nuclear waste facility.

Many older people on Orchid Island oppose establishment of a national park because they fear restrictions on fishing and farming. But Rapongan hopes that the park idea could lead to preservation both of Orchid Island’s environment and the culture of the Yami people.

“It has its drawbacks, but it would help us fight the nuclear waste dump,” he said. “If the park is created, we want a self-governing, autonomous national park. Young Yami people could come back from Taiwan. Having a national park could solve the problem of unemployment.

“But if they won’t do it the way we want, then we don’t want it. We don’t want Taiwan people to control things. The way it is now, the tourists think our people are very low. They treat our customs and clothing as curiosities, and don’t respect us.

“Think of a tiny minority confronting a huge culture. We’re always yielding to their demands, and they don’t understand our psychology and our feelings. You can understand how we feel pain in our hearts.”