True or False

The Region

True or False The Moruroa Test

France enters its 25th year of nuclear testing in the Pacific. What are the real worries?

By Al Prince

JULY 2 marks France’s 25th year of nuclear testing in French Polynesia, a date that has become one of the most controversial and unpopular yearly anniversaries in the South Pacific since the end of World War 11.

France’s quarter century membership in the world’s nuclear arms club has earned it an ever-lasting, controversial and not always honorable chapter in the history of the South Pacific. At the same time, that history has produced its share of contradictions among the countries in the region opposing the French tests the louder.

The French nuclear testing since 1966 in a remote area of the sprawling French Overseas Territory of French Polynesia has also played a key role in Tahiti’s history, affecting just about every aspect of life in these islands, converting what was previously a sleepy South Pacific paradise with a third world economy into a French boutique of the modern way of life.

The testing so completely turned the local economy upside down, according to one recent French study, that the “perverse” results prohibit Tahiti’s Ter ritorial Government from surviving economically from one year to the next without massive injections of French State subsidies.

Meanwhile, France’s nuclear testing programme has produced an almost

love-hate relationship with an over whelming majority of former Anglo- Saxon colonies in the South Pacific. On the one hand, bourgeois consumers in the region continue to love buying just about anything that is French from wines and cheese to perfumes and jewellery, not forgetting expensive vacations to Tahiti and Her Islands.

However, the historic year of 1985 produced two dramatic events that darkly coloured Paris’ diplomatic rela tions with South Pacific countries, both individually and collectively. The first event was the July 10 sinking in Auckland Harbour of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior after mines planted by French government secret agents had exploded, killing a crew member.

Sixteen days later, eight countries at the 16th South Pacific Forum meeting in the Cook Islands signed the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, more com monly known as the Rarotonga Treaty.

But with the treaty’s sixth anniversary coming up on July 26, the only nuclear powers that have signed the treaty’s

protocols, banning nuclear testing in the

region, have been the Soviet Union and China. France, The United States and the United Kingdom have yet to sign the protocols, each for very different reasons.

One of the major contradictions that has occurred during the past 25 years of French nuclear testing has been the up and down relationship between France

and the South Pacific’s two biggest countries, Australia and New Zealand, the region’s most vocal and diplomatically active opponents of the tests.

While the Canberra and Wellington governments have had long periods of strained relations with Paris because of the nuclear testing, the passing of time has gradually led up to today’s good diplomatic relations despite the con tinued French testing.

The two most obvious explanations are basic economics and France’s stub born determination to continue its test ing regardless of any opposition. New Zealand’s economic reality is that it needs to sell its lamb and dairy products and Australia has lots of uranium to sell to France for its many nuclear power

plants.

Other South Pacific governments, like that of Fiji and the self-governing New Zealand dependency of the Cook Islands, have become very willingly enticed in recent years by France’s generous offers of development aid, technological exper tise and low-interest loans.

But France’s previous negative image in the South Pacific was not due entirely to its nuclear testing in French Polynesia.

Other key factors were its handling of an independence movement in New Cale donia, also a French Overseas Territory, and its self-admitted lack of communica tions with the predominantly Anglo- Saxon government of the region. Still another factor has been a much weaker independence movement in Tahiti, which, by constantly opposing the nu clear tests, has picked up anti-French support in the region.

And it was not until late 1986 that France finally began doing something to improve its South Pacific image after 20 years of testing and support at home for those tests by four governments (three conservative and one liberal). French Socialist President Francois Mitterrand has faithfully respected conservative

President Charles de Gaulle’s famous force de frappe (independent nuclear arsenal) policy into his second seven-year term since 1981. But it was not until France’s unique “cohabitation” exper iment in 1986 that it began softening its stone-walling approach to the nuclear tests.

The first sign of that change occurred at 26th South Pacific Commission confer ence in Tahiti in November 1986.

President Mitterrand’s conservative Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, sent emissaries to that conference with the obvious goal of enticing the commission, with its 40-year history of doing things the Pacific Way, into considering a new

French Way in the region.

There has never been a unanimous, or even a concensus, opinion coming out of the collective in terpretation of reports compiled by various ex perts on the effect of nu clear testing in French Polynesia. Some reports tend to tilt in favour of the French claim that 25 years of nuclear testing have not caused any health or envir onmental damage for the 200,000 people now living in French Polynesia.

But individual interpret ations of those reports, par ticularly by the interna tional environmental or

ganisation Greenpeace,

strongly refute the French claim. Greenpeace, has earned a reputation over the years for consistently criticising the French tests.

The obvious question to day, for critics and sup porters alike, is how much longer will nuclear tests continue? The best answer appears to be that the day when tests are no longer

held may be getting closer each year.

But that raises perhaps an even more alarming question for Tahiti. What happens to its false, but rich, economy when France eventually decides to halt its nuclear testing programme in French Polynesia?

That question directly and indirectly concerned the nine experts sent to Tahiti last year by the Association of French Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Called the Feuilhade Mission after team leader Dr Frank Feuilhade, a lecturer on cancer, its report described the 1964 construction of the French nuclear testing facilities at Moruroa as having been an event that “turned the economy of French Polynesia upside

down. French Polynesia is now directly concerned by the (world) politics of nuclear dissuasion. Totally concerned from now on by the nuclear armament disarmament process, the Polynesian economy and community lives as if in suspension between a dream and a nightmare in which the development experienced has no irreversible charac teristic and remains dependent on the inequalities and susidies of the Centre d’Experimentation Nucleaire (CEP) and more generally in the aid of the French State.”

The Feuilhade report estimates that the direct cost of a single underground nuclear test at Moruroa is about 10 million French francs, or about US$1.8 million. French Polynesia has a gross national product of US$7830 per inhabi tant, according to the report. That puts the territory slightly ahead of New Zealand (US$7290), way ahead of Fiji (US$1820) and comfortably ahead of French Overseas Departments and Ter ritories, with the exception of New

Caledonia (US$8300).

But distribution of the level of devel opment is irregular, high revenues co existing with unemployment rate of 40 per cent among young people. The national (territorial) . budget is com pletely unbalanced ... Traditional econ omic activities, such as agriculture and fishing, are in recession and development is mainly observed in the tertiary sector.

But what the Feuilhade Mission report appears to be just as equally concerned about is what will happen to Tahiti when France eventually decides to halt its nuclear testing programme. “What will this economy, which is essentially ‘per verse,’ become when the test centre is closed down, as demanded by interna

tional public opinion, the Polynesians

and our association?

“Can the population tolerate the disintegration of its sanitary and econ omic systems? This shows the urgent necessity for ensuring the development of an alternative economic system in Poly nesia.”

The Tahitian dilemma: nuclear test or go broke