GIFF JOHNSON
Tuesday morning, while the fire still burned at Nitijela, the RMI Cabinet held an emergency meeting at the MIMRA headquarters conference room to discuss its response.
By mid-afternoon, President Hilda Heine had issued a short statement posted to the President’s Office Facebook page describing the situation and the government’s next steps.
President Heine in her social media address told the nation that the foundation of democracy and culture will never falter. “As we see the ashes, it is a depressing sight to behold as Marshallese,” said Heine. “The Nitijela is a symbol of democracy, a place where our leaders converge and determine the future of our islands.”
The President vowed to start the work of a new parliament building before the end of this year and recognized the bravery of the first responders who fought the fire.
“The Nitijela will rise again,” she said. “Especially us the people of these islands.”
From its Tuesday meeting, Cabinet put a priority on a new parliament building, which will see this project leapfrog ahead of the new capital building that is about to go into a design phase before construction starts.
Justice Minister Wisely Zackhras, sitting outside Nitijela Tuesday afternoon with first responders, also commented that Cabinet had endorsed a plan to fast-track work to develop a new Nitijela building.
“PII has an emergency notice to proceed rebuilding immediately – we have engineers flying in this week and will divert material for other jobs,” said Pacific International Inc. CEO Jerry Kramer Wednesday.
For the meantime, the Nitijela is already setting up shop in the ICC large conference hall that has been used on multiple past occasions to host large meetings.
The list of fire disasters to hit Majuro is long over decades — the Marshalls District HQ offices in Uliga during Trust Territory time, and Midtown Shop, Cost Price, and DAR store in more recent history.
But all these pale in comparison to the burning of the Nitijela earlier this week. The parliament building is the pinnacle of democratic rule in the RMI and far more than a symbol of democracy such as the flag or a government office.
“Nitijela is not merely a place and office space, it is where the seat of the democracy is situated,” said former Speaker Kenneth Kedi in a social media post responding to the fire devastation of the Nitijela.
The outpouring of concern we at the Journal received from random members of the public about the loss of important original documents relevant to the founding of the Marshall Islands demonstrates how keenly people feel the loss of the Nitijela building in the aftermath of the overnight fire Monday.
The Nitijela archive that contained many original documents, including the history of the first Constitutional Convention and the early Nitijela bills from its 1979 establishment forward, were destroyed in the fire, according to Nitijela staff.
The library and archive was a large facility, developed over the past 32 year life of the Nitijela building — and particularly in more recent decades as Nitijela engaged in staffing and facilities upgrades. Many bills and resolutions that were adopted over the years are available on the Nitijela website, rmiparliament.org.
Meanwhile, Nitijela staff told the Journal documents were digitized, but it wasn’t immediately clear how complete the digitization was or where the digital records were located.
“The entire Marshall Islands Revised Code (laws) is saved including the previous digitized public laws are saved as well,” said Nitijela Legislative Counsel Joe Lomae Wednesday. “These were all digitized in the past.”
Lomae said he was able to get into his office to save records. “I managed to run into my office to get my external (hard drive) and the CPU,” he said.
In addition to the loss of the thousands and thousands of documents in the archives, there were many original and irreplaceable pieces of artwork and photographs in the halls of and on display in parliament that were virtually all destroyed.
A look at the interior of the parliament tells the story: Virtually anything that wasn’t destroyed by fire was rendered useless by water damage from the firefighters working to contain the blaze.
—With additional reporting by Wilmer Joel.