S. Pacific rocks boat on French A-bombs

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"If the nuclear tests are safe, as Mitterand claims, then why does France forbid any independent medical examination of the Polynesian people under its domain?"

SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1985 13 French military agents succeeded in sinking the Rainbow Warrior with their bombs, but they also sprang a slow leak in the French ship of state headed Socialist Party.

After more than two months of official denials, the French government finally confessed its crime. But that admission came only after the thread of official lies had unraveled so far that little remained to cover the stark reality-that an act of state-sponsored terrorism sank the Greenpeace ship and took the life of a crewmember.

The duplicitous details of this French "underWatergate" affair have tarnished Mitterand's credibility and stirred further protest in the South Pacific against France's nuclear tests. But it has not deterred the French president, who used to oppose nuclear weapons, from his dogged defense of the French nuclear strike force.

Mitterand acted outraged at the bombing. But only after two persons arrested in New Zealand in connection with the bombing were identified as French military agents did he decide to launch an official investigation. From this point on things only went from bad to worse.

Mitterand called on Bernard Tricot, De Gaulle's former chief of staff, who asked a couple of questions and declared France innocent. It wasn't long, however, before the Tricot report whitewash faded totally in the light of further disclosures.

Finally, the French government admitted on Sept. 22 that agents of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) had carried out the terrorist attack on Greenpeace. Defense Minister Charles Hernu and Admiral Pierre Lacoste, head of the DGSE, were dismissed for covering up their involvement in the Rainbow Warrior operation.

Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, however, refused to identify the other intelligence agents involved, saying that they were only "following orders." Who gave those orders? That is a Pandora's box the government doesn't care to open.

This strained effort to hide the truth appears motivated by the circuitous path the trail of clues is following to the door of the French presidency. President Mitterand's military adviser at the time, Gen. Jean Saulnier, who is now chief of staff of the armed forces, would have been required, according to normal procedures, to authorize the $300,000 released for the sabotage operation.

One former chief of staff to the army, in fact, told La Croix that Mitterand would "necessarily" have been informed of the operation in advance.

Adding insult to injury, the government has indicted five intelligence agents, not for participating in the bombing, but for leaking information about the crime to the press!

The backdrop for this sordid affair is the refusal of the French government to end its nuclear tests in the South Pacific, despite the deep and near unanimous opposition throughout the region. In August, the entire South Pacific was declared a nuclear-free zone by eight Pacific nations-Australia, New Zealand, Western Samoa, Tuvalu, Fiji, Cook Islands, Kiribati, and Niue.

Nuclear-free Pacific

The treaty bans the manufacture, stationing, or testing of nuclear weapons in the region, but does allow for the transit of nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships. The treaty also leaves the question of whether to allow port visits up to individual countries. Vanuatu did not sign the treaty, in fact, because it objected to the treaty's loopholes.

The declaration stands, nevertheless, as a telling expression of the range of protest sweeping through the South Pacific against from outside.

New Zealand's decision earlier this year to bar port calls by U.S. warships using nuclear power or carrying nuclear weapons is still another expression of that trend. Since U.S. policy is to never confirm or deny whether a ship is nuclear-equipped, U.s. ships have been effectively banned by New Zealand's policy.

Lange backtracks

Prime Minister David Lange, however, is not happy over the strain in relations with his most powerful ally. He now wants to ease the restriction on port visits so that a ship will be barred only if it is actually proven to be carrying nuclear weapons.

To this end he has initiated high-level talks with the United States, although a formal agreement has yet to be worked out. Lange has, in fact, invited a U.S. warship to visit New Zealand in order to demonstrate that the ANZUS defense pact between the two countries and Australia is still alive.

New Zealand and Australia have no strategic qualms with either the United States or France. But they are uneasy over the bullying way these two Western powers dismiss the protests of all those "funny little islands" in the Pacific.

That is the meaning of Australian Ambassador F. Rawdon Dalrymple's recent warning that the Reagan administration's "policy of indifference to what the French are doing" will only provide "fertile ground for anti-United States, anti-West propaganda."

France, for its part, acts as if it couldn't care less. Mitterand has actually stepped up the frequency of test...."

The risk factor is compounded by the possibility of accidents, such as the March 1981 typhoon that destroyed a nuclear waste dump at Moruroa, dispersing high-level radioactive waste. Five months later, another storm again littered the atoll with nuclear waste.

Earlier, in July 1979, an explosion and fire wrecked an underground lab containing plutonium, killing two men who were so radiated they had to be buried in lead coffins. Only two weeks later, a nuclear device exploded while stuck halfway down the test shaft, tearing a mile-long crack across the atoll and setting off a tidal wave that injured personnel.

If accidents are not cause enough for worry, there are other perils, such as President De Gaulle's deliberate decision, early in the testing program, to allow residents of several Polynesian islands to be dusted with radioactive fallout rather than wait until the winds changed direction.

If the nuclear tests are safe, as Mitterand now claims, then why does France forbid any independent medical examination of the Polynesian people under its domain? France says it isn't so, but it won't release the public health statistics for French Polynesia for the last 19 years to refute charges that years of atmospheric testing have caused an increase in leukemia, thyroid tumors, and other cancers.

France used to claim its atmospheric tests were safe, too, when the effects of those blasts were found in radiated fish catches on Mexico's Pacific coast, and in the rain in Fiji, and on Pitcairn Island, where radiation levels six times higher than normal were detected.

De Gaulle's legacy

Charles De Gaulle promised in 1958 that France would remain in the Pacific for ever. That prediction may prove right in one respect. The risks from its bombs will linger long after France is forced to abandon its South Pacific colonies.

But in another respect history will record De Gaulle's promise as a hopeless boast. Because it is a promise that has already failed—in Vanuatu, which achieved independence in 1980, and is today failing in New Caledonia, where the native Kanaks want France out. And in Tahiti, resentment to its status as a colony built on bombs is certain to escalate into another challenge to French rule in the Pacific.

The French government displays an impervious attitude toward protests against its nuclear tests in the South Pacific. But the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, and its plans to construct a military base in New Caledonia that could take up as much as half the main island, tells another story.

France is worried because its strategy of nuclear colonialism can survive only by sabotage and military might. But in the end these are no match for a population inflamed with the slogan of independence and a world free from the prospect of a radioactive death.

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