The president will speak about France’s responsibilities to residents who are still struggling with the effects of radiation. And promise new compensation for the ’74 accident that involved over one hundred thousand people. In Polynesia the women between 40 and 50 have il Highest thyroid cancer rate in the world
FROM THE CORRESPONDENT PARIS The presidential Airbus landed in Tahiti, a team of doctors boarded to subject the head of state and 150 members of his delegation to the anti-Covid test. Then Macron stepped onto the dance floor – greeted with a necklace of white flowers and a demonstration of orero, ancestral declamatory art – and began his first visit to Polynesia, the overseas country more than 15,000 kilometers from Paris but part of France since 1840.
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Macron went immediately to thank the doctors of the Tahiti hospital who are fighting against Covid, he responded curtly to the no vax demonstrations on Saturday – there is no freedom in which I owe nothing to anyone – and he took as an example Jenny Opuu, the popular traditional healer who both believes in science and gets vaccinated.
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The highlight of the trip to Polynesia scheduled for tomorrow evening, when Macron will deliver a solemn speech on the indissoluble link between metropolitan France and French Polynesia. The president will not be able to help but touch on the question of 193 nuclear tests conducted by the French army between 1966 and 1996, until 1974 with atomic explosions in the atmosphere, then underground.
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The Force de Frappe experiments were carried out first in Algeria (the first in 1960 in Reggane) and then in Moruroa and Fangataufa, in Polynesia. In 1985 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior which was about to head towards Moruroa was sabotaged by the French secret services – on the orders of President Franois Mitterrand – while in the port of Auckland, New Zealand, resulting in the death of photographer Fernando Pereira.
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After a moratorium starting in 1992, the new president during his first press conference at the Elysée Jacques Chirac in 1995 announced the decision to resume nuclear tests in the Moruroa atoll, sparking a wave of international protests. A year and six experiments later, in 1996 Chirac himself declared the end of the explosions and all the infrastructures were dismantled.
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The polygons have not existed for decades, but the consequences on the health of the French in Polynesia still last. Ma’ohi Lives Matter, Polynesian Lives Matter, was written on the banners of the thousands of people who demonstrated to obtain an apology from the French state, 47 years after perhaps the most catastrophic experiment, that of July 17, 1974. That day the Centaur test detonated a nuclear bomb in the sky of Moruroa: the mushroom cloud did not rise to 8000 meters as expected but stopped at 5200, e the radioactive cloud instead of dispersing in the Pacific was carried by the winds over the island of Tahiti. Last March, the book Toxic by Sbastien Philippe and Tomas Statius highlighted the damage suffered by 110 thousand people, almost all of the Polynesians of the time.
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The association 193 denounces decades of silence from the authorities: One hundred ninety-three nuclear tests equals 800 Hiroshima bombs, denying their effects is tantamount to engaging in denial, says the president, Auguste Uebe-Carlson. Former local social security officer Patrick Galenon says Polynesian women between the ages of 40 and 50 have the highest thyroid cancer rate in the world.
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Unlikely Macron will apologize on behalf of the French state. Taking responsibility is stronger than asking for forgiveness, announces the overseas minister, Sbastien Lecornu: Macron it could guarantee compensation to the victims, and hospital funding.
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July 25, 2021 (change July 25, 2021 | 22:33)
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