Rikitea (France) (AFP)

"Here, illness is part of our daily life".

Sitting in front of her house in the shade of a large bougainvillea on the island of Mangareva, in the Gambier archipelago, Monica Paheo, 69, explains that many of her relatives fell ill after the army's nuclear tests French in Polynesia.

She herself developed thyroid cancer in 2000. Seventeen years later, the French nuclear test victims compensation committee, created following the Morin law in 2010, recognized the link between her pathology and nuclear.

France carried out 193 nuclear tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996. The Gambier archipelago, located only a few hundred kilometers from Moruroa, was particularly affected by the radioactive fallout.

Monica Paheo remembers the first shot, July 2, 1966. She was with her parents in the village of Rikitea, 424 km from the site of the tests.

She was only a teenager at the time, but she keeps an unchanging memory of it: "The house shook as if it was going to burst. The next day there were rotten fish on the beach and chickens were found. and dead pigs in front of a family's house. I saw soldiers overturn barrels of water, telling us that we should never drink it ".

In 2013, the state recognized 31 radioactive fallouts on Mangareva.

Among the most important: the first shot, Aldebaran, and the Phoebe test on August 8, 1971.

- "I found out after" -

At the end of the 1960s, the French authorities built protective shelters on the island, which had 570 inhabitants and a few hundred soldiers: a tin hangar in the village of Rikitea and a blochkaus on the other side, for the military.

"I was a little girl, I remember there was a cinema and a lot of food. We sometimes stayed there for a few days and we had a good time there. We were put in shelters because of the radioactive clouds and rains. but that, I knew it afterwards ", tells Tina Pavaouau while keeping an eye on her linen to dry, threatened by a sky which is covering.

Despite treatment for her thyroid to avoid cancer, the 50-year-old never wanted to leave her native land where, 25 years after the explosion of the last bomb, there is no trace left of the shelters destroyed by the army in the late 2000s when the Pacific Experimentation Center was dismantled.

The images of the nuclear mushroom that the inhabitants once proudly displayed in their homes have also almost disappeared, thrown in the trash as a bad memory.

Part of the legacy of the tests is no longer visible but the population keeps the marks.

"The disease is still present. One of my sisters has (nodules on, Editor's note) the thyroid and lupus. My mother died of esophageal cancer and, in 2020, it was my father. He had thyroid cancer which got worse because it was poisoned several times by the fish, "says Maria Mahaa, gazing darkly at one of her father's last photographs.

Become a reality of the daily life of the Mangaréviens, the ciguatera, also called the "scratch", a food poisoning by the coral reef fish, has been known for centuries in Polynesia.

But it has taken on another proportion for several decades.

“We knew where and which fish was bad. But since the bombs almost everyone is sick. Fish is our main course, so a lot of people and even children have been poisoned. I've seen several vomit and have diarrhea ", underlines Monica Paheo in whom the concern is palpable.

Today, no scientific study has made it possible to make a direct link between nuclear power and the increase in fish poisoning.

But this localized increase is confirmed by the commission of inquiry into the consequences of the nuclear tests of the Polynesian Assembly in 2005.

So, like many Mangaréviens, Monica Paheo wonders: "Four of my children have developed (nodules on, Editor's note) thyroid and one of my daughters had uterine cancer. Are my grandchildren? they too in danger? "

© 2021 AFP