ENVIRONMENT-SOUTH PACIFIC: French Test the Tempers in Region

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

PORT MORESBY, Jun 26 1995 (IPS) - From Perth to Pago-Pago, there is a nuclear fall-out all over the South Pacific just two weeks after the French announced they would resume nuclear tests in the region.

Already, Australia has cancelled a 500 million-dollar bid by the French company Dissault Aviation to provide jet trainers for the Royal Australian Air Force. The mayor of Brisbane this week also publicly tore up his city’s sister-city pact with Nice.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Don McKinnon ordered the French ambassador out of his office for making “lame excuses” about the resumption of French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Here in Port Moresby, Prime Minister Julius Chan has condemned France’s “total lack of sensitivity”. In Fiji, protests are mounting against the French because of tests, and also against the Japanese for the transport to Japan of French plutonium across Pacific waters.

In the tiny island of Niue and other South Pacific nations, the momentum is gathering for a boycott of the South Pacific games in the French territory of Tahiti, in August.

In Paris itself, the Tahitian representative in the French Senate, Daniel Millaud, called the French move to resume tests a “monumental error”.

France says it will hold a series of eight tests at its Mururoa atoll test site beginning September and ending May 1996.

The first test later this year will coincide with the summit of the South Pacific Forum (SPF) in the Papua New Guinea city of Madang. The timing is being seen here as especially insensitive on the part of the French.

The return of a six-nation SPF delegation to Paris last week has been greeted by dismay across the region, as France refused to back down from its plans for tests.

Now the outrage is turning into anger and outright anti-French racism. In Perth, the French consulate was torched, apparently by irate locals. And the headline of a column in the Sydney newspaper Telegraph Mirror screamed: “Pourquois les Francais sont des connards (Why the French are bastards).”

Still, that new French President Jacques Chirac announced the resumption of tests two weeks ago came as no surprise to many in the region.

They remember only too well the crackdown on Kanak separatists in Caledonia in 1988, and the killing of 19 Kanaks in an incident in Ouvea. French President Francois Mitterand had then appealed for conciliation, but it was Chirac (who was then prime minister) who gave the order to kill the Kanaks.

On Jul. 10, 1985, a Greenpeace flagship called ‘Rainbow Warrior’ was sunk at Auckland harbour by French secret service agents who planted dynamite on its hull. The crew escaped, but a Portuguese photojournalist, Fernando Pereira, was killed.

The French government ultimately admitted it gave the order to sink the Greenpeace ship. But ten years later, the reason why it did so is still unclear.

The 11th Shock, the French secret service unit that sabotaged the Rainbow Warrior, was renamed the Service Action Squad — the same unit that three years later became responsible for the killing of Kanaks in Ouvea.

“The history of French activity in the South Pacific is a history of arrogance, arm-twisting and sabre-rattling,” says David Robie, a New Zealander who was on the Rainbow Warrior before it was sabotaged.

Robie, author of ‘Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior’, is now a lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby. He says the whole saga still leaves a bitter taste in the region.

“The planned resumption of tests so close to the tenth anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing has again fuelled outrage,” Robie told IPS.

The French, of course, are not the only ones who have poisoned the South Pacific with fall-out from past tests. U.S. atmospheric tests in the region have included the notorious detonation of a 15 megatonne H-bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima.

The United States went on to conduct a total of 106 nuclear tests, underground and atmospheric, in the South Pacific. Britain tested nine in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, and later with the United States on Christmas Islands.

By 1990, though, the French had conducted 167 official tests on two atolls near Mururoa, 1,200 km from Tahiti and 4,200 km north- east of New Zealand.

In 1979, a 120-kilotonne warhead got stuck in a shaft below Mururoa while it was being lowered for a test. Normally, tests take place 800 metres below the surface. This time, the French detonated the stuck bomb at 400 metres.

According to the International Commission to Investigate the Health and Environmental Effects of Nuclear Weapons Production, the blast caused the lagoon to foam, created a one million cubic metre rock and coral landslide and a radioactive tidal wave on the Tuamotu archipelago.

The Commission says in its report: “The discovery of Caesium 134 indicates only the beginning of a long-term leakage from the atolls’ detonation chambers.”

Experts say the immediate fall-out of tests is nothing compared to the dangers of long-term effects of the Pacific Ocean tests.

Writing in the Fiji-based Pacific Islands Monthly, Ian Williams sums up the anger in the region against distant superpowers: “The possession of such diabolical strength (of the bombs) seems to ring out the devil in decision makers. The hell-fire they control seems to vapourise their consciences.”

Just recently, though, the ‘Rainbow Warrior II’ arrived in the Cook Islands to carry on Greenpeace’s action against testing with the slogan: “You cannot sink a rainbow.”