For the first time since the start of his mandate, Emmanuel Macron is going to French Polynesia.
The president, who had to postpone a visit scheduled for 2020 due to the Covid-19 epidemic, arrived in Tahiti on Saturday July 24, in the evening (Sunday morning in Paris), for a stay of four days.
If he immediately urged the population to get vaccinated against Covid-19, the French president is especially expected on the thorny question of the consequences of the 193 French nuclear tests carried out from 1966 to 1996 on the atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa . The victims hope for a gesture from Emmanuel Macron, while many of them have developed cancer after these tests and are struggling to be compensated.
In Polynesia, several political and associative organizations have been warning for years about the long-term effects of radiation. "This country has suffered so much in its flesh from these nuclear tests and continues to suffer. When we see that today, eminent scientific gray matter predict that radiation-induced diseases have a transgenerational effect, we ask ourselves the question of what we will bequeath to our children tomorrow ", underlined, last weekend on Outre-Mer La 1ère, Antony Géros, vice-president of the independence party Tavini huiraatira, committed to the recognition of these victims.
On Saturday July 17, several thousand people demonstrated in Papeete, Tahiti, to pay tribute to the victims of one of the most polluting tests. Baptized Centaur, it was carried out on the same date, in 1974, in Moruroa. Another demonstration took place on July 2, the anniversary of the first firing of this long series of nuclear tests.
These marches are all the more symbolic for the inhabitants as new revelations about this nuclear fire have emerged in recent months.
An investigation, entitled "Toxic" and carried out by the investigative media Disclose, affirms that the population has been exposed to doses of radioactivity higher than those officially announced and that the French state has neither alerted nor protected the population.
According to this survey, after the Centaur test, "approximately 110,000 people were dangerously exposed to radioactivity, ie almost the entire population of the archipelagos at the time".
First atmospheric tests
Between 1966 and 1974, the tests were first carried out in the atmosphere, which caused noxious fallout. "There was international pressure to stop these aerial tests and take them underground, but France did not give in and hid the extent of the fallout to limit the impact of international pressure", sums up France 24 Sébastien Philippe, teacher-researcher and co-author of the survey and of the book "Toxic. Investigation of French nuclear tests in Polynesia" (Puf, 2021).
From 1975, France then abandoned aerial tests and carried out underground tests.
If "this period is still very little documented", according to Sébastien Philippe, the researcher believes that the impact was more environmental than human.
"The atolls have been disfigured. These underground tests have caused collapses, rock fractures and hundreds of kilos of fission products and plutonium remain trapped. The flora and fauna have been severely affected," explains this specialist member of the Science and Global Security program at Princeton University and associate researcher in the Nuclear Knowledges program at Sciences Po Paris.
>> To read also: "French nuclear tests in Polynesia: a referral to the ICC ... without much chance of success"
These revelations had a resounding echo in French Polynesia, pushing the government to organize a round table in early July with representatives of the ministries of Defense, Health and Overseas and a Polynesian delegation. "There was no state lie", then launched Geneviève Darrieussecq, Minister Delegate in charge of Memory and Veterans Affairs. Despite requests from anti-nuclear associations and local political organizations, the minister excluded a pardon from France, on the sidelines of this meeting attended by anti-nuclear associations, several Polynesian elected officials and historians.
Why does the French state not recognize its responsibility for the consequences of nuclear tests?
"This would be to recognize that the authorities have exposed populations without their knowledge after having maintained for decades that these tests were clean", answers Sébastien Philippe.
And the specialist continues: "Some institutions do not necessarily want to formalize what happened or do not think they probably did something wrong, given that at the time, they had followed orders."
Compensation, the heart of the matter
The lack of a state pardon request is also closely linked to the issue of compensation for victims. "Recognizing what happened also means massively compensating the population", adds Sébastien Philippe, who estimates at "700 million euros the weight of compensation for cancers that could be recognized as being linked to the period. atmospheric tests ".
Many victims continue to seek compensation. But they come up against the verdicts of the Compensation Committee for Victims of Nuclear Tests (Civen) which, moreover, did not recognize that the nuclear fallout had caused cancer. During the round table in July, it appeared that it was necessary to help claimants to put together their cases, while the Civen receives 140 to 150 claims per year.
The new president of Civen, Gilles Hermitte, anticipates an increase in requests in the event of an official compensation decision. We must "already ensure that the information reaches these people", he told AFP, but also "accompany them throughout the steps they must take to try to obtain the information. documents which will be necessary for the constitution of this file, in particular the medical documents ", he adds.
To calm things down, the government also says it wants to clarify this troubled past, which poisons relations with this overseas community.
The Ministry of the Armed Forces has assured that it is committed to "allowing all Polynesians to access their history, archives and health data, in complete transparency, to objectify what happened during this period".
This access will therefore be facilitated, "while preserving certain secrets which could allow foreign powers to progress towards the acquisition of nuclear weapons".
The full opening of the archives was then confirmed by Emmanuel Macron, said Édouard Fritch, President of French Polynesia.
The hope of opening the archives
For Sébastien Philippe, the opening of the archives is "an important step to be able to finish the work started and to calculate the impact of the fallout from nuclear tests independently".
"This would, for example, make it possible to better understand how the decisions were taken by the authorities, why and when the populations were exposed to the fallout and why it was acceptable at the time for the populations to be exposed", specifies the researcher.
But the opening of the archives does not solve everything: "The question is to know which archives will be declassified", notes Sébastien Philippe.
"We must also see if the government opens them to all researchers without filtering, which would make it possible not to write a one-sided story," he adds.
If this decision testifies to Emmanuel Macron's desire for appeasement on the subject of nuclear tests, many questions still remain unanswered. The Ministry of the Armed Forces affirmed having, for example, to explain "the methods and data used to calculate the doses received during and after the nuclear tests".
While the Polynesians await significant announcements on the occasion of the visit of the Head of State, the Elysee has remained vague so far on the intentions of Emmanuel Macron.
"The President of the Republic will be keen, during this trip, to promote this close and transparent dialogue by encouraging the rapid and concrete implementation of several actions, both on the issue of memory with the opening of archives and on questions of individual compensation ", declared the Élysée.
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