Protesters marched in Pape'ete last week, to mark 50 years since France set off the first of 193 nuclear tests in French Polynesia. On a visit to Tahiti earlier this year, President Francois Hollande promised to expand compensation for those exposed to radiation...but, as we hear from Neal Conan in Today's Pacific News Minute, little has changed since he left.
While the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union ended atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons in 1963, France was just getting started. In July, 1966, the first blast detonated over Muraroa atoll. Many more followed there, and over neighboring Fangataufa. They're about six hundred miles from the main population center on Tahiti, but the French military operation was supported by thousands of civilian workers as close as ten miles away. As some became ill, protests grew inside and outside the territory. In 1985, French agents bombed and sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand as it prepared to head to Muraroa.
Eventually, tests were moved underground, then stopped, until President Jaques Chirac decided to test a new warhead in 1995. Rioters burned down the airport terminal in Pape'ete.
For decades, the French defense ministry insisted the tests caused no injuries and no environmental damage. Finally, in 2009, France instituted a program to compensate victims of radiation...of the first one thousand claims, 19 were granted. Last month, French Polynesian legislator Richard Tuheiaua told the United Nations Decolonization Committee that he doubted that President Hollande would ever fulfill his promises, but, over time he said, "It might be hard for the colonial power to believe that we will forget it."
