Labour leader pledges to fight French nuclear tests

Press, 24 September 1982, Page 3

Labour leader pledges to fight French nuclear tests

NZPA-Reuter Paris The New Zealand Opposition leader, Mr Rowling, said in Paris yesterday that his Labour Party would do everything possible to stop French nuclear tests in the Pacific if it came to power. He told reporters that ■Labour would also continue to press hard for a nuclearfree zone in the South Pacific. in spite of opposition from the United States.

Mr Rowling, who left for Asia after talks with the Socialist Party leader, Mr Lionel Jospin, and other senior officials, said that France greatly underestimated anger in Pacific countries about its tests in French Polynesia.

If French leaders did not change their stance before the Socialist International meeting in Sydney in February there would be a head-on clash, he said. President Mitterrand has told the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, that the underground atomic experiments would continue as long as necessary for France's security.

Mr Rowling would not rule out the possibility of a future Labour government repeating the action it took in 1974 of sending a frigate into the test zone with a Cabinet Minister aboard, to publicise its objections.

“We will continue the fight. We want a cessation of testing.” said Mr Rowling. He had also suggested that France set a date for the independence of its Pacific territory of New Caledonia

as soon as possible. Mr Rowling was- pleased that reforms there had started, and that they had started to defuse, a potentially explosive situation between the indigenous population and white settlers. Senior French Government officials showed no surprise or disapproval when he suggested a target date for independence in 1985 or 1986. he said.

Mr Rowling was disappointed with his talks. JeanBaptiste Piggin. a , former “Evening Post" diplomatic reporter, now in Europe on a French Government journalism sponsorship, reported from Paris.

He had hoped to take his plea as far as President Mitterrand, but in the end failed even to get a meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mr Claude Cheysson. “I cannot put a finger on any one reason because I do not know exactly what the commitments were. I do know that there were no particular signs of an effort to accommodate a meeting, and I bluntly said that to them." Mr Rowling was reported to have said. “I explained to them that this will earn them a certain amount of cane when they show up at the Socialist International Congress in Sydney next year, a point which registered immediately with them. I am bound to say, and caused a flurry of activity thereafter. In this issue I am not just representing the New Zealand Labour Party. “I speak with the authority of quite a number of Island Governments and for the socialist grouping in the Asia-Pacific region generally. So it is not just someone from an opposition party in New Zealand speaking. It seems that point had been lost on them earlier. “There was some concern that they had been more than slightly remiss in not making a greater effort to see that some meeting, at the very least with Cheysson. had been established. “The New Zealand Embassy did its very best for me, but it was the fault of the French Socialist Party. The excuse was that there was a breakdown in its own communications and it very much regretted that. As I went from one' office to another up the scale, I had the feeling that if I had had another half-day I would have got to the President without much bother.”

Mr Rowling said that the French had been “pretty defensive” over nuclear weapons. “We had expectations of a more sympathetic response from a socialist Government than we have been able to gain so far. In a way it was almost more firm that its predecessors.”