THE TIME has come “for France to be true to its conscience”, defence minister Hervé Morin said, explaining his decision to compensate the victims of 210 French nuclear tests conducted in Algeria and the South Pacific between 1960 and 1996.
In an interview with Le Figaro newspaper, Mr Morin estimated the number of French civilians and soldiers affected by the tests to be 150,000, not counting the indigenous populations of the Sahara desert and French Polynesia at the time of the tests.
The draft law presented by Mr Morin yesterday will set aside €10 million annually from the defence ministry budget to settle claims. Applications will be considered by an independent commission comprised of doctors and headed by a magistrate.
Despite years of campaigning by the Association of Veterans of Nuclear Tests, the French government hitherto maintained it was impossible to establish a direct link between the tests and disease. “It will no longer be up to the claimant to establish causality between exposure to radiation and his illness,” Mr Morin said.
“To refuse a claim for reparations, the state must show that the pathology was not caused by radiation.” The government already faces numerous lawsuits from veterans suffering from cancer. The human cost was emphasised in Gerboise bleue (blue jerboa), a documentary released last month and named after the first test in the Sahara desert in 1960. Former soldiers in the film are blind, disfigured, have irradiated lungs and bone marrow disease.
The defence ministry did not attempt to follow the medical history of personnel who helped with the tests. In 1970 the defence minister Michel Debré went swimming in the lagoon of the Mururoa atoll six hours after a nuclear test, to show how “safe” it was.
Florence Borel was a secretary for the French Atomic Energy Commissariat in Mururoa in the early 1980s. “We swam in the lagoon two or three times a day, went diving and water skiing,” she told Le Figaro. Ms Borel followed instructions not to eat fish or coconut, take a shower and rub herself with a cloth after swimming. She contracted thyroid cancer in 2002.
The nuclear tests constitute one of the more shameful episodes of French colonial history. The first test at Reggane was four times more powerful than the US bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A secret clause in the 1962 Evian accords that granted independence to Algeria allowed France to carry out 13 further tests, until 1967.
