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Person

Lijon Eknilang

Woman from Rongelap who was there when the Bravo fallout came, and told the International Court of Justice about it in 1995.

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Q6547018
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  • Castle Bravo According to Lijon Eknilang Primary record 1

    Eknilang gives Lekoj Anjain's age as 15. The U.S. committee records an eighteen-year-old treated for fatal leukemia in 1972; the record read does not say whether they are the same person.

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Proof 2 sources
  1. Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: public sitting of 14 November 1995, verbatim record CR 95/32 (statement of Lijon Eknilang for the Marshall Islands), International Court of Justice, 14 Nov 1995. Primary record Archived copy
    My name is Lijon Eknilang. I was born on Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and I lived there at the time of the nuclear weapons testing programme
    They said we were preparing the foods incorrectly, or that we had fish poisoning.
    We had to believe that our island was radioactive, and we evacuated ourselves from Rongelap in 1985.
    Foreign doctors and other officials called those people the "control group", and we were told the sickness of that group proved our illnesses were common to all Marshallese.
    The fall-out that our bodies were exposed to caused the blisters and other sores we experienced over the weeks that followed. Many of us lost our hair, too.
    We remained on Rongelap for two and one-half days after the fall-out came.
    I cannot have children. I have had miscarriages on seven occasions. On one of those occasions, I miscarried after four months. The child I miscarried was severely deformed; it had only one eye.
    I have also had thyroid surgery to remove nodules.
    We began to learn about leukaemia for the first time when the body of Lekoj Anjain, a 15-year old boy who had been strong and healthy, was return to Rongelap in a coffin.
  2. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Final Report, Chapter 12: The Marshallese, U.S. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (copy on the U.S. Department of Energy Openness site), 1995. Primary record
    It is likely that many if not most of the controls selected had some radiation exposure resulting from the bomb tests.
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