More than 60 years since France launched its nuclear test in Algeria, their legacy continues to poison the relations between the North African nation and its former colonial rulers.
The issue has resurfaced after President Emmanuel Macron said in French Polynesia on Tuesday that Paris owed “a debt” to the South Pacific over nuclear tests there between 1966 and 1996.
The damage that the mega-blasts did to humans and nature in the former colonies is still a source of deep aversion, seen as evidence of discriminatory colonial attitudes and disregard for local life.
“Diseases related to radioactivity are passed on as a legacy, generation after generation,” said Abderahmane Toumi, head of the Al Gheith El Kadem Algerian victims’ support group.
“As long as the region is polluted, the danger will persist,” he said, citing serious health effects from birth defects and cancer to miscarriage and sterility.
France conducted its first successful nuclear bomb test deep in the Algerian Sahara in 1960, making it the world’s fourth nuclear power after the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.
Today, as Algeria and France struggle to deal with their painful common history, the identification and decontamination of radioactive sites is still one of the most important disputes.
In his landmark report on French colonial rule and the Algerian war of 1954-62, historian Benjamin Stora recommended continued joint work examining “the sites of nuclear tests in Algeria and their consequences”.
France in the 1960s had a policy of burying all radioactive waste from the Algerian bomb tests in desert sand, and for decades declined to reveal its locations.
“Fall-out”
Algeria’s former veteran minister Tayeb Zitouni recently accused France of refusing to release topographic maps identifying “cemeteries for polluting, radioactive or chemical waste not found so far”.
“The French side has not technically taken any initiative to clean up the sites, and France has not taken any humanitarian action to compensate the victims,” Zitouni said.
According to the Ministry of Defense in Paris, Algeria and France now handle “the whole subject at the highest state level”.
“France has provided the Algerian authorities with the maps they have,” the ministry said.
Between 1960 and 1966, France conducted 17 atmospheric or underground nuclear tests near the city of Reggane, 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from the capital Algiers and in rock tunnels at a place then called In Ekker.
Eleven of them were implemented under the 1962 Evian Agreement, which granted Algeria independence but included an article allowing France to use the sites until 1967.
A radioactive cloud from a 1962 test made at least 30,000 Algerians sick, the country’s official APS news agency estimated in 2012.
French documents declassified in 2013 revealed significant radioactive fallout from West Africa to southern Europe.
Last month, Algeria set up a national agency for the rehabilitation of former French nuclear test sites.
In April, Algeria’s army chief, General Said Chengriha, asked his then French counterpart, General Francois Lecointre, for his support, including access to all maps.
“We respect our dead”
Receiving maps is “a right that the Algerian state strongly demands, not forgetting the issue of compensation for the Algerian victims of the tests”, stressed a senior army officer, General Bouzid Boufrioua, who wrote in the Defense Ministry newspaper El Djeich.
“France must take its historical responsibility,” he said.
However, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune rules out all claims for compensation and tells Le Point every week that “we respect our dead so much that financial compensation would be detrimental. We are not a begging people.”
France adopted a law in 2010 providing for compensation for “persons suffering from diseases caused by exposure to radiation from nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara and in Polynesia between 1960 and 1998”.
But out of 50 Algerians who have since claimed, only one, an Algerian soldier stationed at one of the sites, has “been able to get compensation”, says the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
No residents in the remote desert region have been compensated, it is said.
In a study released a year ago, “Radioactivity Under the Sand”, ICAN France called on Paris to provide Algeria with a complete list of cemeteries and to facilitate their decontamination.
The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons forces states to provide adequate assistance to individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons.
It was signed by 122 UN countries, but none by nuclear power. France claimed that the treaty was “incompatible with a realistic and progressive strategy for nuclear disarmament”.
ICAN France claimed in its study that “people have been waiting for more than 50 years. It is necessary to go faster.
“We are still facing an important health and environmental problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.”
(AFP)
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