these days

Tahiti bombs the mind these days

From JAMES BOYACK in Papeete.

11/fORE has happened in Tahiti during the past two months than I can remember. More has hap pened to me. Here 1 am a simple old journalist, and if you could have slipped into my clothes during these past weeks, you would be sharing with me right now a nostalgia for the straight-forwardness of an airport controller’s job at JFK Airport.

On the left side of my all-night desk, probably 20,000 words of press telegrams. In my head, a plethora of details. I don’t want to write about the 78 people who were killed when a Pan Am 707 jet dropped into the ocean upon takeoff at the end of the Tahiti runway one day after France exploded her first atomic bomb. I have no interest in the bodies which burst on the plane’s contact with the water. I abhor the idea of a woman across the aisle from the one survivor looking straight ahead oblivious of an imminent instan taneous death.

I prefer to write about Captain David Moodie, mild-mannered star good guy in a lousy world. David today told me that General Jacques (Paris de Bollardiere) wrote him a letter in which he expressed pride at haying served under David on his Fri. I like the idea that the pacha of a French destroyer-escort gave David an original copy of Bougain ville’s Voyages in which he inscribed a comparison of David with the French explorer. I like the bananas hanging at Fri’s stern in Opunohu Bay tonight. I like Governor Daniel Videau, a new boy in this crazy school of Franco-Polynesian entente somewhat-cordiale, who invited the Fri off the sea 149 days after it went there to stop French nuclear tests.

All this began when the French Polynesian Territorial Assembly minority (autonomist) in late May began the administrative session with

stamping and cat calls. Gaullist Assembly President Gaston Flosse was drowned out. It was learned afterwards that he said, “Our high standard of living is essentially due to the activity of the Pacific Ex periments Centre over the past 10 years. Our worry is that the CEP should cease to exist.”

David’s only worry is that it con tinues to exist. My only worry is to report faithfully everything that has happened, and then go on vacation.

I have arranged for the fabrication of three pieces of steel which will repair the tiller-rudder combination on the Fri in Opunohu Bay so that the vessel points steadily home.

I resent the fact that there were at least three plainclothes policemen on the waterfront street when the first boat from Tahiti returned from the Fri at sea. I wish it known right here that Francis Sanford, French Polynesia’s National Assembly Deputy, did not go aboard the Fri at that time even though he brought “lots of food and love,” according to David. It must also be known that he said on the return voyage that maybe the Tahitians don’t need all the money and civilisa tion, etc with which the CEP has set this island world on a crash course with the future.

I think Francis is a hopeless dreamer when he says the Polynesians can go back to their old ways when Tahiti achieves independence. I agree with him the Polynesians need the old days. Francis Sanford and Pouvanaa A Oopa, the two French national parliamentarians here, with out consulting their parties, informed French President Georges Pompidou that if France explodes just one more nuclear device at Mururoa, they would demand a referendum on independence.

They did, the next day, when the

bomb went off. I would like to warn Francis Sanford that if Tahiti be comes independent (which it won’t, for a relatively long while), he and those in power after him must not turn the island over to the interests of tourist capital. If they do, the mafia will rule with a black fist.

Strange women will wear black stockings and set an irrevocable example. Croupiers will speak with Brooklyn accents and wear shiny rings. The Tahitians will be unhappy, as I will be.

Robert Cahn, 28, who led Tahiti’s vaudeville revolution last year, con ducted a 24-day hunger strike in a Marseilles prison to protest the French bomb. He stopped when he heard several thousand people demonstrated in the streets of Tahiti against the bomb. French pastor Gilbert Nicolas did the same thing in Tahiti for 22 days. I do not think Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber takes Tahiti seriously, although he led the anti-bomb demonstration in late June.

I saw him stand in Daniel Millaud’s house and comb his hair with more than 70 comb strokes before he went on television.

Jean-Jacques proposed health centres and think tanks to take up the economic slack of a withdrawn CEP. I would like to inform Jean- Jacques that if he thinks thinkers can think in Tahiti, he is crazier than he looks. I accuse J.J.S.S. of having never thought about French Polynesia before Francis made his “Reformateur” group an authentic 30-member “group” in the National Assembly. For such a slick politician, I admit he deserves credit for having obliged the dissolution of his “group” by coming to the Pacific to protest the bomb. (He was disavowed by most of it). I think Captain David McTaggart of Greenpeace 111 started the fight in which he got busted up,

The protest yachts Fri, nearest the camera, and Spirit of Peace anchored off Tahiti. James Boyack charges the French with ill-treatment of David McTaggart, the skipper, and crew of another protest yacht, Greenpeace III.

ialthough I think it was disgusting of six French commandoes to savagely Ibeat him up. He is in the Tahiti imilitary hospital. I think everyone iwho has an opinion for or against Ithe bomb is too hung up on his own smug logic to have any idea of what Ithe opposition is thinking, Mike Wignall, 34, former senior crown prosecutor of New Guinea, sailed single-handed to the zone in protest at the misappropriation of ocean and also because coral atolls have seniority in the sun. One of the most striking things about the Fri is it is free. David’s father IBM Crazy Gordon negotiated the unconditional release of the Fri and crew with now departed Governor Pierre Angeli (the governor cried at the airport after saying that Tahiti will always be French because the Polynesians want it so and because France wants it too).

Another thing about the Fri.

Nothing is done unless everyone approves, and those who don’t ap prove, they get all the time they want to convince everyone else that they are right. If they can’t manage, they eventually accept the majority decision. This is a time-consuming process that drove the French nuts.

A French government official by the name of Berges, who did all the talking to the Fri, was principally responsible for the crew’s not being put on an airplane. This was because he respected the crew’s right to their opinion even if he did not agree with them. He often interceded on their behalf and his interlocution finally got the point across to civilian authorities that they were really pharming people even if a big pain in the ass.

David Moodie, Alstead Centre, New Hampshire guru and conscience for the earth in the absence of one, is a master political gamesman who frayed a lot of French nerves. I have lot had an opportunity to consult :he admiral about this. Even when he was sailing into Opunohu Bay one lay after the resumption of French ;ests in August, he was heard to say, ‘lt is not our intention to appear to le stopping our protest just as things ?et cooking again.” lie expressed ■eserved gratitude to the governor for allowing him to make repairs at anchor in a French Polynesian port 10 days after he arrived off Tahiti and requested permission to do so. He »aid, “It is about time that France ived up to its motto of liberte, fraterniie and egalite for us poor icaceful seafarers.”

The gendarmes who have guarded :he Fri for the past two days already appear to have become infected by [he good spirit of this jolly roger.

David McTaggart, Canadian Green-

peace 111 Captain, almost had his eye gouged out by a French black rubber truncheon. He said that Nigel Ingram, his navigator, told him by phone from Hao that he, Nigel, was knocked out twice and the two women on board were pulled to the deck of the ship by their hair during the boarding “ceremony”. David McTag gart is undoubtedly the bitterest pro tester I have met. He said that Barry Metcalf and the Peace Media People in New Zealand are full of crap.

He said that all the French journalists in Tahiti, including the French Polynesian ones, are “sold out to the government”, so he called for objective me. I am not sold out.

I would like David to know that the French have had the elegance never to tell me directly what to report and what not to report.

They may imply, and one day my visa may suddenly expire, but they have never approached David’s gaucherie. Which is why 1 have not returned to the hospital, although I think he is a courageous fighter. I am sorry he is hung up on being jealous of those who have no other goal than his own.

The Spirit of Peace is on its way to the zone. It should arrive in time for the test believed planned for this week. It will be captured. It has been rumoured here that a Mirage fighter bomber will be involved in the next test. A former very high ranking government official told a good friend of his, who told me, that Peru’s rupture of diplomatic relations with France because of the bomb is not significant. It will only result in Peru getting Mirages for free.

I did not see it myself, but others did, and someone who knows for sure told me that HMAS Supply, the sup port vessel for the two now departed protesting New Zealand frigates, the Australian protest gesture, was in Papeete over the weekend, the test resumption weekend, getting resup plied, to return to Australia.

Frands Sandford ... a hopeless dreamer