A pensive Peter Willcox at a detention hearing at the Kalininskiy Court in Saint Petersburg in 2013 before being set free. Originally charged with "piracy" with a penalty of up to 15 years, Willcox faced the prospect of languishing in a Russian jail for the rest of his life. Image: Igor Podgorny/Greenpeace
WHEN Anote Tong, the former president of Kiribati, a collection of 33
tiny atolls sprawling across the Pacific equator in the frontline of
climate change, believed he wasn’t being listened to, he thought of a
simple strategy – polar bears.
By comparing himself and his country’s meagre population of 102,000 to the endangered creature, he suddenly got more headlines.
The endangered polar bear … anecdote for former President Tong,
FB mojo for Peter Willcox. Image: Still from Greenpeace video
And he got the idea after having just seen a polar bear in the wild.
“I drew a comparison that what happens to polar bears will also be happening to us in our part of the world,” he explained.
Tong feared that the bears in their Arctic habitat, like the people
of Kiribati in the Pacific, were in danger of losing their homes in the
near future.
Today the polar bear is the mojo adopted by Greenpeace skipper Peter Willcox on his Facebook page.
THE WHEEL of climate action turns slowly, but in Paris it has turned. There’s much in this deal - the so-called Paris Agreement - that frustrates and disappoints me, but it still puts the fossil fuel industry squarely on the wrong side of history.
Parts of this deal have been diluted and polluted by the people who despoil our planet, but it contains a new temperature limit of less than 2C degrees.
That single number, and the new goal of net zero emissions by the second half of this century, will cause consternation in the boardrooms of coal companies and the palaces of oil-exporting states and that is a very good thing. The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable.
Now comes our great task of this century. How do we meet this new goal?
The measures outlined simply do not get us there. When it comes to forcing real, meaningful action, Paris fails to meet the moment.
We have a 1.5 degree wall to climb, but the ladder isn’t long enough. The emissions targets outlined in this agreement are simply not big enough to get us to where we need to be.
Roskill MP and opposition Labour spokesperson on disarmament Phil Goff speaking
at the World Without War conference in Auckland today. Image: Del Abcede
BEFORE Parisian car engineer turned-designer Louis Réard named the sexy two-piece swimsuit he created a “bikini” in 1946, it was the name of an obscure Pacific atoll in the Marshall Islands, lost among more than 1100 islets in the trust territory, now an independent republic.
And Bikini Atoll was the Ground Zero for 23 US nuclear tests in the Pacific – out of some 67 conducted over the next dozen years in the Marshall Islands. (Excellent background on this in Giff Johnson's Don't Ever Whisper).
Last year the little republic filed a controversial lawsuit in the International Court of Justice at The Hague against Washington and the eight other nuclear powers – Britain, China, France, India, Israel (although it denies possessing a nuclear arsenal), North Korea, Pakistan and Russia.
The Marshall Islands accuses the nuclear club members of “violating their duty” to negotiate in good faith for the elimination of these weapons.
Now, over this weekend in New Zealand, some 200 people have participated in a World Without War conference drawing up a list for proposed action for peace and the Marshall Islands action came in for some strong support from several speakers.
THE unmasked French bomber who sank the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago had some revealing comments during his interviews with the investigative website Mediapart and TVNZ’s Sunday programme, none more telling than “the first bomb was too powerful, it should have ended as a Watergate" for French President François Mitterrand”.
Mitterrand stayed in office for 14 years - a decade after the bombing and before he finally stepped down when his second presidential term ended in May 1995, the year that nuclear tests ended.
The bomber, retired colonel Jean-Luc Kister, added that had Operation Satanique involved the United States, “more heads would have rolled”.
But while the “innocent death” of Portuguese-born Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira has clearly played on his conscience for all these years, Kister’s sincere apology wasn’t without a hint of trying to rewrite history.
The claim that the secret sabotage operation never meant to kill anybody is unconvincing for anybody on board the Rainbow Warrior on that tragic night of 10 July 1985 when New Zealand lost its political innocence and the crew lost a dear friend.
Alistar Kata's Rainbow Warrior report for Pacific Media Watch.
A PROGRESS report on the new Eyes of Fire – it's very different from previous editions, with an even greater emphasis on the Rongelap and Polynesian casualties of American and French nuclear testing in the Pacific.
The new Eyes of Fire ... out on the 30th anniversary
of the Rainbow Warrior bombing, July 10.
New Zealand media has too much preoccupation with the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, and has largely ignored the greater Pacific tragedy.
Outrageous as this attack by French secret service agents was, it pales into insignificance alongside the atrocities inflicted on Kanak independence activists at the same time, such as the Hienghène massacre, the assassination of Éloi Machoro and the bloody ending to the 1988 Ouvea cave siege as exposed in the 2011 docu-drama Rebellion.
The publishers describe the new Eyes of Fire as being as being the "definitive work on Western treachery in the Pacific".
Greenpeace campaigners Dimitry Litvinov and Arctic Sunrise skipper
Peter Willcox (right)
outside a St Petersburg immigration office. Photo: Moscow Times
AS THE last Greenpeace activist detained in the Arctic 30 protest received notification today that he was cleared of all charges under a recently passed amnesty, several other international activists who had already been granted amnesty have received permission to leave Russia.
The news marks the end of a saga that has seen activists of 19 different nationalities spend several weeks in Russian detention despite an international outcry over the case and Western demands to release the suspects.
Twenty-eight Greenpeace activists, as well as a Russian photographer and a British videographer, were charged with "piracy" - which was later changed to "hooliganism" - for staging a protest against oil drilling at Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya oil platform in the Barents Sea in September.
As of today, seven members of the group had been granted visas from the Federal Migration Service, while others expected to receive their visas by the end of the week.
Activists from countries that share a visa-free regime with Russia - Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey and Argentina - were allowed to leave the country immediately.
The seized Arctic Sunrise under Russian Navy guard in Murmansk Harbour.
Photo: Greenpeace
FOLLOWING a hearing at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), where the Netherlands brought a case seeking the release of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise and its crew, Greenpeace International general counsel Jasper Teulings has praised the Dutch government for its "strong stance for rule of law" over the widely condemned seizure of the environmental campaign ship.
"The Dutch government argued its case extremely strongly," Teulings said.
The Arctic Sunrise Tribunal at International Maritime Court/ International Tribunal for
the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg. Photo: Greenpeace
"The Netherlands is taking a strong stance in support of the rule of law and the right to peacefully protest. Greenpeace International applauds the Dutch decision as flag state of the Arctic Sunrise in taking the necessary legal steps to gain the release of the ship and the Arctic 30.
"Greenpeace International is confident that the Tribunal will take appropriate account of the fundamental rights of the Arctic 30, and the impact of their detention on those rights, in reaching its eventual decision."
The Russian Federation did not attend today's hearing in Hamburg, Germany, and the sitting was closed following the presentation of the Dutch government's oral argument.
With the new Rainbow Warrior 3 in New Zealand this month, we’ve been thinking about the Warrior’s place in New Zealand history in the context of reflecting on our national character.
With some help from Perendale Productions we’ve made a short 2min video, which we’ve calledNew Zealand Story. It includes references to more than 30 people and events in New Zealand’s history that all, in some way, embody the best of the New Zealand character. It is far from exhaustive, but, touches on just some of those who have defined our country and its spirit and characterise our historical ability to overachieve in a uniquely Kiwi way.
As the new year rolls on, we hope New Zealand Story might prompt us all to reflect on the sort of country we want to be and how we collectively write the next chapter.
GLOBAL reaction has been applauding France. Media and politicians have given Paris a big tick for finally coming to terms with its post-war militarist legacy with a compensation plan for the Algerian, French and Tahitian nuclear veterans - some 150,000 of them - after a half century of nuking remote parts of the Sahara and the Pacific. Not so fast... On closer scrutiny, the bill unveiled by Defence Minister Herve Morin is revealed as something of a cynical sham. Café Pacific's David Robie talked about this today in an interview with Radio Live host Finlay Macdonald.
The 10 million euros (about NZ$24 million) compensation plan pales into insignificance when compared with the US$500 million paid to the Marshall Islands (and the Marshallese are agitating for a further $2 billion). "French governments believed for a long time that opening the door to compensation would pose a threat to the very significant efforts made by France to have a credible nuclear deterrent," Morin told Le Figaro. "But it was time for France to be true to its conscience."
However, Roland Oldham, president of the French Polynesian nuclear test veterans movement Moruroa e Tatou, dismissed the plan as "peanuts". He told Radio New Zealand: "It really is peanuts when you compare how the French government spends a lot of money on defence." The Algerian veterans are juat as unhappy. According to Abderahmane Laksassi, head of the 13 February 1960 Association - named after the date of the first French nuclear test near Reggane in the Sahara desert - "It's a good first step but I'm not satisfied." He dismissed a "little pension" for victims as inadequate compensation. "We want France to build a hospital for the victims," he added.
Also, the Morin bill is a poor imitation of an earlier draft law that had gained universal acceptance from all parties in the French National Assembly. The veterans' groups were much happier about this.
In mid-October 2008, the lobbying group Vérité et Justice (Truth and Justice) had outlined a draft bill that gained support from Moruroa e Tatou and all political parties. Features included:
The "presumption principle", which changes the proof so that workers and military personnel from the test sites suffering designated diseases and illnesses will be compensated without long drawn out court hearings;
The creation of a special fund for compensation;
the establishment of a monitoring committee made up of parliamentarians, independent experts and representatives of the government, veteran' and workers' associations.
Nic Maclellan backgrounded this draft law well in a paper posted at the Medical Association for Prevention of War website. Just days before this draft law was due to be tabled and debated in the National Assembly, the Morin bill was introduced instead. And the three key elements above have been removed or watered down. The cynical view is that the Morin bill in in fact designed to reduce the number of eligible people to bring compensation claims. While in metropolitan France descendants of a victim can still bring a compensation case, in Tahiti only surviving widows can do this.
In September 2008, an industrial relations tribunal in the Tahitian capital of Pape'ete ruled that France must account for the consequences of nuclear testing on the health of the Maohi people. Three former workers who claim leukemias, or blood cancers, were caused by nuclear testing will try to prove their case. Five Tahitian widows of five workers who died of leukemia also have legal cases pending against France.
France conducted 210 nuclear tests over more than 40 years - four atmospheric tests and 13 underground tests in Algeria (1960-1965), and 46 atmospheric and 147 underground tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls (1966-1996). The Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior was bombed by the French secret service in Auckland on 10 July 1985, an act of state terrorism that hastened the eventual end of nuclear testing in 1996.
Footnote: According to the New Zealand Herald, one of the French secret agents involved in Operation Satanic against Rainbow Warrior, Dr Xavier Maniguet, 62, died in a plane crash in the French Alps last week. He was one of four men who smuggled the limpet mine explosives into New Zealand on board the yacht Ouvea.
Graphic: The Malcolm Walker cartoon of the French secret service DGSE at work was published in David Robie's 1986 book Eyes of Fire.A memorial edition was published in 2005.
Greenpeace isn't on the port of Lyttelton's Christmas card list any more - if it ever was! But the charmed public image of the global environment lobby and activist group in New Zealand took a beating with a high profile attempted blockade of a "legal" shipment of coal to China late last month. This spectacular protest against the Hellenic Sea led to six arrests and ill-informed mutterings by the local establishment about Greenpeace tactics. In a Press article this weekend , Philip Matthews raised the question of whether the message about climate change is a harder sell than the old "black-and-white" issues of nuclear-testing and waste. But current Greenpeace executive director Bunny McDiarmid, who was a crew member on the original Rainbow Warrior at the time of the bombing by French state-terrorists in July 1985, reminds us about the harsh reality of back then. The RW's tactics were to try to get in the way of ships before barrels of nuclear waste could be kicked overboard. It's a shocker: back then, dumping nuclear waste was entirely legal. Greenpeace's action, both at sea and behind the scenes, were instrumental in having nuclear waste declared illegal. "A lot of things that are considered legal today will be illegal tomorrow," she says. I am quoted in the article about "classic Greenpeace" tactics to boost public awareness of the broader issue - in this case climate change. In the earlier post-bombing years, Greenpeace - small, non-violent, determinedly independent in terms of not taking money from governments or corporations - was like an idealised version of New Zealand itself in the early years of the nuclear-free legislation. But the movement took a dip in membership in the 1990s as self-interest began to dominate community values. It's refreshing to see these grassroots protests making their mark.
