Tight security in Papeete

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32959, 4 July 1972, Page 2

Tight security in Papeete

(Prom SELWYN PARKER)

PAPEETE (Tahiti), July 3.

French officialdom has clamped a tight net of security on the slow-moving South Pacific city of Papeete. Extra police have been rostered to keep a check on incoming passengers, and customs officials subject all baggage to a conscientious inspection unusual in this French territory.

As passengers disembarked from my flight from Sydney, passports were checked five times—• once at the exit of the Boeing 707 jet, three times at the check - 8 counter, and once at the entrance of the baggage room. Officials carefully compared names with a special list of undesirables, numbering about seven. One of the names is that of a New South Wales air transport operator who earlier offered to fly an Australian team of parachutists, including a New Zealander, Mr Rangi Nichols, into the nuclear test zone. None of the listed men were apparently on the flight. At Sydney, the flight was delayed for 80 minutes as airport staff and hired security guards submitted passengers to a thorough personal inspection with a metal detector.

All personal luggage was turned inside out. The aim of the inspection

was to forestall the muchpublicised "invasion” of Tahiti of the parachutists, who planned last week in a splash of self-advertisement to hurl themselves on the Mururoa Atoll area, site of the bomb test. The Victorian Labour member of Parliament, Dr J. F. Cairns, had also announced that he would take the same flight at the head of an anti-bomb mission. A seat was booked, economy class, for Dr Cairns—but he did not take it.

The parachutists arrived at Sydney Airport, surrounded by a noisy team of supporters. Mr Nichols, a former instructor for the crack Ist Ranger Squadron, New Zealand Special Air Service, was not among them. Headed by Mr Gordon Mutch, the originator of the parachute-drop plan, the parachutists marched down to the departure lobby accompanied by a miniorchestra of flutes and tambourines. GREENPEACE 111

The team wore flyingsuits, black berets, and boots. It gave an extempore press conference, and announced that French officials did not have the 31ft ketch Greenpeace 111 under custody, as announced, but that the boat was still free. The team would drop alongside the yacht and reinforce the crew. Instead, none of the parachutists boarded the plane. An airline official said they had forgotten their passports. Activity in the colourful city of Papeete continues with Gallic insouciance in spite of the presence of the nuclear bomb, either exploded or intact, on Mururoa Atoll. The Tahitians are not happv about the fall-out risk of the exploded nuclear bomb, but they are not worried about it, either. The attitude of the Tahitian Government appears to be that no information is better than a little information, which might feed the mills of rumour in a city whose mental climate now is ripe for such. An airline official told me that there was talk of the oresence of a Japanese kamikaze terrorist in Tahiti from the same radical organisation which burst loose with grenades and machine-guns at Lydda Airport. SENSE OF BITTERNESS Rumours apart, it is a fact that a sense of bitterness towards Australia and New Zealand has sprung up over the virtual shut-down in communications and the boycott of French air and sea freight and passenger services. , (The independent French airline. U.T.A.. is now forced to fly through Saigon via only New Caledonia instead of

through New Zealand.) "It’s almost like a state of war,” said a European who has lived in Papeete for 25

years. Officials feel that the protest of Australia and New Zealand affects only those who can do least about preventing the bomb tests—the Tahitians and long - term European residents themselves. “It’s not the first ’bagarre’ (row),” remarked an airline official now resident in Papeete. But he went on to say that relations between the French and “the other" were now tense and required concentrated diplomacy from the Australians and New Zealanders to keep down friction. In a sense, the Federation of Labour boycott has made life more difficult for Tahiti’s New Zealanders than for the Tahitian residents themselves. CLAMP-DOWN As the boycott drags on, the French officials are moving towards a complete clamp-down on foreign reporters. Already the word has been spread in Sydney that journalists are not wanted in Papeete. Two Sydney journalists from a commercial television station had their cameras confiscated when they flew into Papeete Airport on Thursday night.