• Live
    • Audio Only
  • google plus
  • facebook
  • twitter
News > World

Japan's Hibakusha, Atomic Bomb Survivors, Welcome UN Anti-Nuclear Treaty

  • A mother and her child in traditional dress in Hiroshima in September 1945 shown against the backdrop of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on August 5, 2013.

    A mother and her child in traditional dress in Hiroshima in September 1945 shown against the backdrop of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on August 5, 2013. | Photo: Reuters / teleSUR

Published 9 July 2017
Opinion

The treaty powerfully referred to  “the unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to the victims of the use of nuclear weapons (hibakusha)."

Japan's survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States have hailed an unprecedented United Nations treaty approved by 122 countries calling for a ban on nuclear weapons that made reference to the “unacceptable suffering” faced by the 1945 attack's victims.

OPINION:
Obama in Japan: 'Looking Forward' Comes to Hiroshima

The multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty was passed after months of negotiations, with nuclear powers like the U.S., Russia, the U.K., China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and the DPRK abstaining. The Netherlands was the only country to vote against the treaty while the right-wing Liberal Democrat Party government in Japan, ironically, took the U.S.' lead in boycotting the talks leading up to the treaty's passage, as did Germany and South Korea, who all rely on the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” for protection.

The pact's preamble noted the “the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons,” while referring to “the unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to the victims of the use of nuclear weapons (hibakusha), as well as of those affected by the testing of nuclear weapons.”

Japan's nuclear survivors, collectively referred to as hibakusha, had recounted their harrowing experiences before negotiators at the U.N. For the past 72 years, the victims of the atomic attacks have attempted to raise awareness of the consequences of nuclear attacks on civilian populations, including Indigenous people impacted by nuclear tests, including Australian Indigenous peoples, and Pacific Islanders.

“I have been waiting for this day for seven decades and I am overjoyed that it has finally arrived,” said Setsuko Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor, and long-time anti-nuclear advocate, to Japan Times. “This is the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.”

RELATED:
US, UK, and France Vocally Oppose Nuclear Weapon Ban Supported by over 120 Countries

Thurlow was a 13-year-old schoolgirl when she witnessed the devastating attack on her home city on August 6, 1945. Now 85, she has devoted much of her life to raising awareness about the painful ordeal she suffered as a result of the U.S. attack.

Recounting the experience, she explained: “(Victims') hair was standing on end — I don’t know why — and their eyes were swollen shut from the burns. Some peoples’ eyeballs were hanging out of the sockets. Some were holding their own eyes in their hands. Nobody was running. Nobody was yelling. It was totally silent, totally still. All you could hear were the whispers for ‘water, water.’"

While many U.S. historians have claimed that the attacks on the civilian centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to compel Japan to quickly surrender, thus preserving the lives of countless Japanese civilians and U.S. troops, a revised consensus has determined that the atomic bombings that claimed over 200,000 lives were live-fire exercises meant to impress the Soviet Union with the powerful arms of the U.S. military.

Following the attacks, the U.S. government established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to undertake a long-term epidemiological and genetic study of the effects of the bomb on Japan's hibakusha and their children. Survivors have testified that they were pulled from their homes, classrooms and workplaces by members of the commission who drew their blood, forced them to strip naked and photographed them. When survivors died, they were subject to autopsies by the commission. Given that the ABCC wasn't meant to provide any sort of medical care to survivors, those suffering serious effects were provided no treatment but were studied as “experimental animals,” according to survivors.

“I never would imagine this treaty was going to be concluded on July 7,” Toshiki Fujimori, assistant secretary-general Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, told members of the press. “I think it is the collective effort of the humanity of all the people that came together here at the United Nations.”

Comment
0
Comments
Post with no comments.