Getting proof is problem

Press, 1 November 1985, Page 11

Getting proof is problem

Mangareva is the nearest inhabited atoll to Mururoa. It is a community of 582 people living some 260 miles to the east of the French nuclear test site. During the aerial tests it was provided with bomb shelters, which were used on more than one occasion, 4 with the population being hosed down afterwards.

Mangareva’s plight came to the attention of Greenpeace, who were planning to drop in on the mayor themselves when hurried pre-emp-tive arrangements were made to fly out the next day a party of journalists — mainly from mainland France — who were visiting Mururoa itself.

In a sense, there is no need to travel as far as Mangareva. If you want to hear about other people’s ’ fears about cancer rates you can do that in Tahiti. A visit to Mr John Doom, secretary-general of the Polynesian Protestant Church, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the 166,000 Polynesian population and whose membership - is almost entirely Polynesian: "We -' don’t have any evidence, but we Can only trust our own observations that more and more people ■ ’ are sick now — cancers, leukaemias, all sorts,” he says. “The - ‘ problem is getting the proof.” - “I have seen a lot of people dying of cancer in recent years,” ”says Oscar Temaru, Mayor of Faaa, a suburb of Tahiti. “They are getting younger — we’ve just had ■ Cases of a four-year-old and a 36- ■ year-old with cancer. But nobody -'can prove anything.” '-' Marie Therese Danielson, an - author and wife of Bengt Daniel- - son, the distinguished Swedish an-

thropologist, keeps a file of the cancer cases that come to her own attention. She says there have been two or three cases in her village of Paea in the past three years, one of them a local councillor, Fararii Teuira, who works four days a month as a docker in Mururoa. He got as much money for that as he earned a month in Tahiti.

Converting hearsay into facts has its difficulties in Tahiti as in Mangareva. The publication of public health statistics was suspended altogether for a while by the French authorities and it is only since 1983 that private doctors have been required to enter the cause of death on a death certificate. The civil hospital on Tahiti is staffed entirely by military doctors and the great majority of cancer patients are sent away on the long journey to France for treatment. Autopsies are almost never carried out in Tahiti except in forensic cases. An isolated set of figures released by the French in 1983 showed slight increases in cancers over six years, but attributed most of them to greater use of tobacco and alcohol. The French authorities are more forthcoming as to the mechanics of the tests, which have now been going on for 19 years. There have been around 130 separate detonations, 70 of them underground and 40 of them since Mitterrand came to power in 1981. Charges of up to 150 kilotons are exploded in holes sunk into the lagoon now that space has run out round the edge of the atoll. The holes are between 600 and 1200 metres deep and are plugged with cement. The explosions create temperatures of more than 1,000,000 degrees Celsius and pressures of more than one megapar, which vaporises and melts the basalt, fracturing the surrounding rock. A cavity is created into which seawater eventually seeps.