TERRORISM
AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW

The French sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior 20 years ago tomorrow backfired disastrously. Mounting Pacific and global pressure forced France to abandon nuclear testing 11 years later. DAVID ROBIE, the only New Zealand journalist on board the bombed ship, looks back on the legacy of this sordid act of state terrorism in a New Zealand port.

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IT WAS dubbed "Blunderwatergate". This was an apt epithet for the Jacques Tati-like farce marking the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents on July 10, 1985.

And the bungled attempts to cover up the murky trail leading back to the highest levels in Paris.

It was tragic too. The death of Portuguese-born photojournalist Fernando Pereira that night at Auckland’s Marsden Wharf was a shock to the crew – and to me as a journalist who had been on board the ship for 10 weeks.

But we had no illusions about French involvement. The ship had just arrived in Auckland and was preparing for protest voyage to Moruroa against French nuclear testing.

In a sense it was lucky that the death toll that night was only one – Fernando had gone below deck to find another missing crew member and to rescue his cameras.

He died after the second bomb exploded, crippling the propeller shaft just aft of his cabin.

Fernando drowned with his camera straps tangled around one of his legs.

More people could have died. Several were already asleep after the lively 29th birthday party for campaign coordinator Steve Sawyer earlier in the evening.

Some were still chatting in the mess when the first limpet mine went off below them, blasting a hole the size of a garage door in the engine room at ten minutes to midnight.

There was no warning to the crew or others on board in this worst case of state terrorism ever to happen in New Zealand.

Pictured: David Robie at Marsden Wharf 20 years after the bombing. - Auckland City Harbour News

In fact, Fernando Pereira was on the Rainbow Warrior’s Pacific voyage almost by chance.

Steve Sawyer – who is back in New Zealand for this weekend’s memorial ceremony at Matauri Bay and will turn 49 tomorrow – had been seeking a wire machine for transmitting pictures of the campaign to the Marshall Islands.

He phoned Fiona Davies, then heading the Greenpeace photo office in Paris. But he wanted a machine and photographer separately.

"No, no … I’ll get you a wire machine," replied Davies. "But you’ll have to take my photographer with it."

So Fernando Pereira joined the Rainbow Warrior in Hawaii and he covered the voyage to Rongelap Atoll, where the islanders wanted to leave their ancestral home. They had serious health problems because of radioactive fallout that had dusted their island from at least five dirty American nuclear tests in the 1950s.

The 15-megaton Bravo test on March 1, 1954, was the worst. Hundreds of people were living on the downwind atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik, barely 150 km away to the east.

Thyroid tumours, cancers and a host of other illnesses have been the legacy of those tests.

Neglected by both the United States and Marshall Islands authorities, the islanders called on the Greenpeace flagship to evacuate them to Mejato, on Kwajalein Atoll, some 120 km away.

It took four voyages for the Rainbow Warrior to move about 320 Rongelapese, their dismantled homes and belongings – some 100 tonnes – to their new atoll.

Pictured: Fernando Pereira with Rongelap islander Bonemej Namwe. - David Robie

Their future and their health remain uncertain two decades after Greenpeace helped them. But the media spotlight on the humanitarian voyage helped put pressure on the US authorities to make amends.

Now, two decades later, the US has provided US$150 million as part of the Compact of Free Association to establish a nuclear claims tribunal to deal with health claims over the testing.

It has also given the Rongelap people $60 million to "clean up" the atoll. The islanders are debating a return to Rongelap, but many are not convinced that their atoll is safe yet.

The islanders’ senator, Abbaca Jeton, is expected in New Zealand for the Rainbow Warrior memorial. Her father, Senator Jeton Anjain, pleaded with Greenpeace to help. He has since died.

Pictured: Rongelap Islanders leave on the Rainbow Warrior for Mejato. - David Robie

Why was the Rainbow Warrior bombed? Many in the French military were blinded by an intense paranoia over Greenpeace and other activists working against nuclear testing in the South Pacific and in promoting independence struggles.

And the French secret service – the DGSE – was given a free hand by Defence Minister Charles Hernu to "neutralise" the environmental organisation. The French Prime Minister at the time, Laurent Fabius, recently admitted in a TVNZ interview that he had been "betrayed" by his minister.

Hernu died in 1990 – still popular over the bombing.

The sabotage attack on the Rainbow Warrior certainly wasn’t out of character with many other brutal actions taken by French authorities against Greenpeace vessels protesting against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

In 1972, for example, French commandos boarded the yacht Vega and savagely beat one of the founders of Greenpeace, David McTaggart. He almost lost an eye.

McTaggart filed a civil action against the French Navy, accusing it of piracy, The Paris court found the navy guilty of having deliberately rammed the Vega.

In 1995, Greenpeace led another big peace flotilla to Moruroa. French commandos boarded the Rainbow Warrior II, smashed equipment, fired tear gas on the ship’s bridge, arrested Greenpeace activists and seized the protest ship.

France returned the vessel to Greenpeace several months later.

And I also had my own personal run-ins with French authorities as a journalist covering environmental and independence issues in the 1980s.

In January 1987, a year after the first edition of my book Eyes of Fire was published and four months before the first of Sitiveni Rabuka’s two military coups, I was arrested at gunpoint by French troops near the New Caledonian village of Canala.

The arrest followed a week of being tailed by secret agents in Noumea. When I was handed over by the military to local gendarmes for interrogation, accusations of my being a ‘spy’ and questions over my book on the Rainbow Warrior bombing were made in the same breath.

But I was released after about four hours of questioning.

At the time it seemed unlikely that in less than two decades nuclear testing would be finally abandoned by France in the South Pacific.

After being awarded $8 million in compensation – but no apology – from France by the International Arbitration Tribunal, Greenpeace finally towed the Rainbow Warrior to Matauri Bay and scuttled her off Motutapere, in the Cavalli Islands, on December 12, 1987, to create a living reef.
Her namesake, the Rainbow Warrior II, formerly the Grampion Fame, was launched in Hamburg four years to the day after the bombing, on July 10, 1989.

And on July 15, 1990, a memorial was unveiled at Matauri Bay, featuring an arched creation by Kerikeri sculptor Chris Booth – incorporating the bombed ship’s brass propeller.

An earlier compensation deal for New Zealand mediated in 1986 by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar awarded the Government $13 million – the money was used for an anti-nuclear projects fund and the Pacific Development and Conservation Trust.

The agreement included an apology by France and the deportation of jailed secret agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur after they had served less than a year of their 10-year sentences for manslaughter and wilful damage of the bombed ship.

They were transferred from New Zealand to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia to serve three years in exile at a "Club Med" style nuclear and military base.

But the bombing scandal didn’t end there. The same day as the burial of the Rainbow Warrior in 1987, the French Government told New Zealand that Major Mafart had a ‘serious stomach complaint’.

French authorities repatriated him back to France in defiance of the terms of the United Nations agreement and protests from the Lange Government.

It was later claimed by a Tahitian newspaper, Les Nouvelles, that Mafart was smuggled out of Tahiti on a false passport hours before New Zealand was even told of the "illness".

Captain Prieur was also repatriated back to France in May 1988 because she was pregnant. France ignored the protests by New Zealand and the secret agent pair were honoured, decorated and promoted in their homeland.

A supreme irony that such an act of terrorism should be rewarded in this age of a so-called ‘war on terrorism’.

In May this year, their lawyer, Gerard Currie, tried to block footage of their guilty pleas in court – shown on closed circuit to journalists at the time but not seen publicly – from being broadcast in the TVNZ current affairs programme Sunday.

Losing the High Court ruling in May, they appealed against the footage being broadcast.

But the two former agents had surely lost any spurious claim to privacy over the act of terrorism by publishing their own memoirs – Agent Secrète (Prieur, 1995) and Carnets Secrets (Mafart, 1999).

Dr Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish anthropologist, and his French wife, Marie-Thérèse, were an inspiration to the nuclear-free and independent Pacific movement, especially in the Cook Islands, New Zealand and Tahiti.

Along with Elaine Shaw of Greenpeace New Zealand, they played a vital role in raising public awareness of the plight of Tahitians harmed by the years of French atmospheric nuclear tests.

While the Danielssons published several scientific studies and popular books on the islands, they constantly campaigned to expose French nuclear colonialism – particularly through their books Moruroa, Mon Amour and Poisoned Reign.

The couple were honoured for their commitment and achievements with the Right Livelihood Award, an alternative Nobel Peace Prize-style international recognition.

However, Danielsson’s health deteriorated after this honour and he died in July 1997, barely a year after French nuclear testing in the Gambiers had ended for good.

France had agreed to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty after a final swansong package of eight planned nuclear tests to provide data for simulation computer software.

But such was the strength of international hostility and protests and riots in Pape’ete that Paris ended the programme prematurely after just six tests. France officially ratified the CTBT on September 10, 1996.

Elaine Shaw worked for Greenpeace New Zealand for 16 years and developed it with an Auckland core group into the small but lively movement it had become by the time of the bombing.

But she was not comfortable with the changes and rapid growth of the organisation after the bombing. She worked tirelessly for the people of Rongelap as well as French Polynesia, the victims of nuclear testing until she died of cancer in 1990.

"I sensed that her interest stemmed from her concern for the people rather than any political ideology," said Tahitian activist Téa Hirshon. "She went to many islands and saw for herself what people in the Pacific wanted."

Other Greenpeace stalwarts too have died since the Rainbow Warrior bombing, including "Warrior of the Rainbow" author and journalist Bob Hunter, founding president of Greenpeace (2005), and David McTaggart (2004), for many years the inspirational chairman of Greenpeace International.

Kawhia-based Owen Wilkes, who had joined a Vega voyage to the Cook Islands in mid-1986, and Fijian nuclear-free and independent Pacific campaigner Amelia Rokotuivuna, also died recently

The best possible memorial for Elaine, Amelia, Owen, the Danielssons and other Pacific campaigners came last year when Tahitians elected Oscar Temaru as their territorial president.

He had established the first nuclear-free municipality in the Pacific Islands when he was mayor of the Pape’ete airport suburb of Faa’a.

Since the Temaru coalition came to power, demands have increased for a full commission of inquiry to investigate new evidence of radiation exposure in the atmospheric nuclear tests in the Gambiers between 1966 and 1974.

Altogether France detonated 193 of a total of 210 nuclear tests in the South Pacific, 46 of them dumping more than nine megatons of explosive energy in the atmosphere – 42 over Moruroa and four over Fangataufa atolls.

The pressure on France will continue.

The sordid Rainbow Warrior affair was a diplomatic debacle for the French, especially in the South Pacific, and it has taken years for Paris to recover some mana in the region. Greenpeace and the environmental movement have grown dramatically and matured over the past two decades.

Campaigns have been broadened into issues such as climate change, driftnet fisheries, genetic engineering, glacier retreat and the illegal rainforest timber trade.

Now perhaps Elaine Shaw and the Danielssons will still get their commission of inquiry into the Tahitians’ health after all.

And the Tahitians could win some compensation for being poisoned just like the Rongelapese.

The original Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage and the death of Fernando Pereira were not in vain. The struggle lives on.

* Eyes of Fire can be ordered in Australia and New Zealand from South Pacific Books Ltd: sales@southpacificbooks.co.nz NZ$39.95
or in the Pacific from the USP Book Centre in Fiji: info@uspbookcentre.com