Macron acknowledges France's "debt" to Polynesia for nuclear tests

France's nuclear power status has not been gratuitous. And a good part of the debt is dragged, until today, by French Polynesia, where between 1966 and 1996 almost 200 nuclear tests were carried out, some with bombs of much more power than the one dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima. A quarter of a century after the last nuclear test ordered by then-President Jacques Chirac, his current successor, Emmanuel Macron, acknowledged on Wednesday that France owes a "debt" to this remote region in the South Pacific. In a speech before returning to Paris, the head of the Elysee has promised "truth and transparency" about the process, although he has not gone so far as to apologize for practices that, as he stressed, allowed the country to achieve, as a of the few nations on the planet with nuclear deterrence capabilities,a key political and geostrategic weight until today.

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"The nation owes a debt to French Polynesia," Macron said in a speech Tuesday night (Wednesday morning in Paris) from Papeete, Tahiti.

"I assume it and I want the truth and transparency" in the matter, he added between applause, although he did not get to pronounce the word "sorry" demanded by some local associations due to tests that, according to various studies, exposed more than 100,000 citizens to radioactivity.

The president did acknowledge that the debt is especially heavy in relation to the nuclear tests carried out between 1966 and 1974, "of which there is no way to say that they were clean."

France carried out, between 1966 and 1996, a total of 193 nuclear tests in the Polynesian atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa, in the South Pacific. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), there were 15 safety tests and 178 nuclear weapons tests in which atomic devices were exploded that released fission energy. Of these, 41 were atmospheric (the last, in 1974) and the rest were underwater.

One of the most controversial was the so-called Centauro, held on July 17, 1974, when Chirac was prime minister.

The test in Mururoa did not go as expected and caused a radioactive cloud that, according to researcher Sébastien Philippe and journalist Tomas Statius, authors of a book on nuclear tests in Polynesia, could contaminate up to 110,000 citizens, including in Tahiti, located at more than 1,000 kilometers from the atoll where the ill-fated test was carried out.

The last nuclear test was carried out on January 27, 1996 again in Mururoa, after Chirac, already as president, reversed the moratorium decided by his predecessor, the socialist François Mitterrand, and resumed the tests before signing, in September of that In the same year, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (TICE), which Paris ratified in 1998.

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More than a quarter of a century after the latest tests, Macron assured from Tahiti that France has not sought to hide information from the local population. “I tell you clearly that the military who carried out (the tests) did not lie. They took the same risks, "he said. At the same time however, he acknowledged that probably no one would have dared to order the same kind of tests in mainland France. “I think it is true that we would not have done those same tests in [the French regions of] Creuse or Brittany. We did it here because it was further away, because it was lost in the middle of the Pacific and it will not have the same consequences, it is true ”, acknowledged the French president,that he promised to open all the files on nuclear tests - except those that could compromise military security - and to speed up the files for compensation of people affected by radiation, an extreme advanced at the beginning of the month in Paris.

During a series of round tables of Polynesian representatives and senior officials of the Macron government in the French capital on July 3, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, had already committed to funding research on some types of cancer related to the exhibition. to radioactivity and to facilitate administrative processes to receive compensation, among others. As one of the participants in the meetings, the former president of the Polynesian Social Security office, Patrick Galenon, told Agence France Presse, "Polynesian women between 40 and 50 years old have the highest rate of thyroid cancer in the world." .

Macron's first visit to French Polynesia comes five years after his predecessor, François Hollande, in 2016. The Socialist president has already recognized "the impact on the environment and health" of three decades of nuclear tests and announced a series of commitments, such as the creation of a memory center on nuclear tests that has not yet materialized.