Pacific leader blasts Macron over nuclear tests snub
RT | August 23, 2023
French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson has condemned French President Emmanuel Macron for failing to offer even a “symbolic” apology for decades of nuclear weapons tests on the Pacific archipelago.
Speaking to Russia’s RTVI in an interview published on Tuesday, Brotherson said: “193 nuclear tests were carried out on our soil – tests that we did not ask for, and about which we were not even properly informed, because at that time the inhabitants of Polynesia did not know about the level of danger.”
“Today we are still dealing with dire consequences [and] there are people who get sick and die because of nuclear tests,” he continued. “Therefore, such a symbolic action as Emmanuel Macron’s apology was so important [and] we wondered why he did not do this.”
After detonating nearly two dozen atomic bombs in Algeria during the early 1960s, France shifted its nuclear testing to its overseas territories in the Pacific, namely the French Polynesian atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa. In total, 193 tests were carried out around the coral islands, causing a spike in thyroid cancer cases and exposing more than 100,000 inhabitants to high radiation levels, according to a 2021 review of government documents by Disclose, an investigative news site.
Both atolls remain uninhabitable to this day, and the French government has paid compensation to only 63 civilians for radiation exposure.
Macron visited French Polynesia in 2021 and declared that France owed residents of the archipelago a “debt” for the decades-long testing program. However, he did not offer an apology, and did not address the issue when he met with Brotherson in Paris earlier this summer.
“We did not expect an apology from President Macron in person, as a private individual,” Brotherson told RTVI. However, the Polynesian leader said that he would have been satisfied with “an expression of the political position of France as a state in relation to what happened, expressed by its president.”
French Polynesia’s 121 islands and atolls are a part of France’s overseas territories, a group of 13 lands under direct or semi-direct French administration that make up the remnants of its former colonial empire.
French Polynesia is semi-autonomous, and although Brotherson is a proponent of full independence, he told RTVI that he doesn’t predict any change to the status quo in the near future.
“I believe that if we held an independence referendum tomorrow, the majority would vote against it,” he said. “The people are not ready yet. Today all teachers in Polynesia are paid by France. Part of the healthcare system is financed, of course, by Paris. The communes are partly financed by France. Therefore, such questions about the future are quite natural.”
Le Parisien uncovers French lie on 1960 nuke test
Press TV – February 16, 2014
A report says France covered up the extent of the nuclear fallout from its first atomic bomb test in North Africa.
The report published by the French daily Le Parisien was based on a recently declassified military map regarding the fallout from the detonation of the Gerbouise Bleue bomb in the Algerian desert in 1960.
The map revealed that radioactive particles reached the Italian island of Sicily and the southern Spanish coast on the 13th day after the blast.
Lawyer Fatima Benbraham, who represents dozens of cases in Algeria, said the map shows that Algeria and practically the whole Saharan region was contaminated following the atomic test.
The documents were declassified last year following a ten-year legal battle, in which the French government fought long and hard to prevent the documents from becoming public, according to Bruno Barrillot, a member of the pressure group Observatoire des Armaments.
The pressure group along with others battled through court to have the documents released in a bid to bring compensation to people whose health has been allegedly affected by the radioactive fallout.
Human rights activists say civilians were not warned of the danger of the 17 blasts that took place in North Africa in 1960-66.
France admitted in 2009 that a small-populated area has been affected by the fallout.
Barrillot said he hopes the newly declassified maps would force the administration of French President Francois Hollande to admit that more people could have been affected by the fallout.
“They did not do these tests under the Eiffel Tower,” said Barrillot. “No, they went far away from France and then lied about the true impact.”
France conducted a total of 210 tests in Algeria and then in French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean from 1960 to 1996.
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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