The French parliament issued the much-awaited admission in a bill reforming the status of the collectivity of 118 islands in the South Pacific, with MPs saying the change should make it easier for the local population to request compensation for cancer and other illnesses linked to radioactivity.
From 1966 to 1996, France carried out 193 nuclear tests around the paradise islands, including Bora Bora and Tahiti, immortalised by Paul Gauguin. Images of a mushroom cloud over the Moruroa atoll, one of two used as test sites along with Fangataufa, provoked international protests.
Charles De Gaulle and subsequent presidents had thanked French Polynesians for their role in assuring the grandeur of France by allowing it to conduct the tests.
But in the parliamentary bill, France acknowledges that the islands were “called upon” – effectively strong-armed – into accepting the tests for the purposes of “building (its) nuclear deterrent and national defence”.
It also stipulates that the French state will “ensure the maintenance and surveillance of the sites concerned” and “support the economic and structural reconversion of French Polynesia following the cessation of nuclear tests”.
Patrice Bouveret of the Observatoire des armements (Armaments Observatory), an independent organisation that has been assessing the impacts of French nuclear testing in Polynesia since 1984, welcomed the reform.
“It recognises the fact that local people’s health could have been affected and thus the French state’s responsibility in compensating them for such damage. Until now, the entire French discourse was that the tests were ‘clean’ – that was the actual word used – and that they had taken all due precautions for staff and locals.”
However, he said it was a “scandal” that it had taken 23 years for France to officially recognise its responsibility, and said there was nothing in the law on the ill-effects on future generations……. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/24/france-acknowledges-polynesian-islands-strong-armed-dangerous/
Antinuclear 