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A broken rainbow
Pacific women and nuclear testing
WISE News Communique on May 11, 1999

French Polynesia which, according to the tourist brochures, has the islands closest to paradise, is nurturing the fire of death, the fire of the disaster of humanity.
The nuclear age was heralded into Te Ao Maohi/French Polynesia on July 2, 1966 with the first French nuclear detonation at Moruroa. In 1964, Moruroa and Fangataufa had been ceded to France for use by the Centre d'expérimentation du Pacific (CEP). The atolls are to be returned when the CEP stops its activities, in the condition they are at the time.

(509/10.5024) Zohl dé Isthar - The tentacles of The Bomb know no boundary but weave their way into the most hidden, personal corners. Children are born deformed, if born at all. Women bear marks where their breasts once fed the babies they nurtured, against all odds, to carry full term. The legs and throats of their menfolk are scarred where blisters festered after they'd gone fishing.

Too many people have died, shattering families. Ancestral land, stolen for military bases or contaminated by nuclear explosions, cannot provide food, so people go hungry. The best beaches and most fertile valleys are taken up by foreigners who claim the land as theirs, leaving only the steep mountain slopes for the homes of Indigenous people. The foreigners run the government, imposing cultural structures which do not benefit the Indigenous, or into which they simply do not fit, like round pegs in square holes. They can't get a decent education, a decent job. They live in slums where youth suicide is too common and children die from preventable illnesses.

On September 11, 1966, a 120-kt bomb was triggered on Moruroa, this time with President de Gaulle as audience. The wind was blowing the wrong way but De Gaulle was impatient. Within hours radioactive fallout covered the entire Tuamotu and Society Islands (including Tahiti). Days later radioactivity reached Western and American Samoa, the Cook Islands and Fiji.

As with their neighbors the Marshallese, throughout Te Ao Maohi people began complaining that they were "withering away", their hair was falling out, they had blisters on their arms and legs and problems with their digestion. Cancers became far too common. Marguerite Tetuanui's story is one among many:

"My mother is dead from cancer of the stomach. My brother Paulo is dead from general cancer. My sister Celistine is dead from cancer of the lungs. My sister Leonie is dead from cancer of the lungs. My sister Liliane is dead from cancer of the breast and lungs. My sister Madeleine and myself have had cancer of the breast"(Tetuanui, 1995) Marguerite died of cancer in 1996.
Women began to experience increasing miscarriages and still birth, or gave birth to children with disturbing physical deformities. Toimata relates how her children were affected: 
"Our first and eldest child was born in 1975. She always seemed to be sick with a chronic cough and stomach pains ... My second baby was born premature at seven and a half months and died the day he was born. My third baby was born at home full term but died two weeks later. She had a skin problem. Her skin would come off immediately if it was touched.
... Eugene, my fourth baby was born at full time but died when he was two months old. He had diarrhea ... When it stopped, it was replaced by another condition. The baby became rigid, like wood. Every part of his body was racked by continuous muscular contractions and he had a high temperature. ... Our fifth baby is alive and well. The sixth baby was born at full term ... she died the next day. The seventh is alive and well. My eighth was still-born prematurely at six and a half months. My ninth baby, a girl, was born at full term but she died when she was eight months old. ... they said she had a blood infection. The tenth baby was born in mid-1985. She has had an airway infection and a heart condition since birth. We were told that she had a hole in the heart." (Mills, et al. 1990)
Toimata blames the bomb for her children's suffering - her husband was one of hundreds who worked on Moruroa as a laborer. 
Despite the absence of a comprehensive radiological survey and the laundering of the few inadequate statistics that do exist, France persists in claiming that nuclear testing is safe. They base their analysis on some rather irrational thinking. For example, when the government announced that a clinic would be open to check anyone who believed his or her health had been affected by nuclear testing no one turned up. The authorities took this as proof that no one had been affected by the testing. But the number of Maohi/Tahitians seeking cancer treatment is alarming. According to Clarisa Lucas of Kura Ora, the nuclear-victim support organization:

"Every month we have almost forty persons who fly to France to be operated on for cancers and other maladies associated with nuclear. And when some of them come back they die. Forty persons every month. I know this." (Lucas, 1995)
The full human cost of nuclear testing will take several generations before it is felt. Marie-Therese Danielsson warns that it will be the unborn generations who will suffer most: We are only beginning to see the effects of the atmospheric testing, only the tip of the iceberg. When will we begin to suffer from the underground tests? Ten years, twenty? The government says everything is safe for a thousand years. Even if that were true, which it isn't, what legacy do we leave the future generations? 
Deteriorating health, miscarriages, deformed babies, contamination of the environment--these are the more obvious costs of the nuclear testing program. The impact on the social, economic and political life of the Maohi people is often overlooked. Before 1963 Te Ao Maohi provided for its people, then the French government needed laborers to construct the airport and other military facilities. [This led to an influx of Maohi into Tahiti Island looking for work.] As the construction era came to an end the Maohi laborers were laid off but French promises of rehabilitation were conveniently forgotten. The Maohi population explosion was mirrored by a similar influx of French civilians following on the heels of the military. Today 70 percent of the nation's people crowd onto Tahiti Island. The French citizens invariably adapted the social and political environment to suit their own needs, pushing the Tahitians to the periphery until they became fringe dwellers in their own island. There is nothing unique in this. Colonizers always import their own culture and the French have been imbedding theirs in Te Ao Maohi since the early 1700s.

"Pacific women are losing their status because we have inherited the modern civilization from your society." Suliana Siwatibau (dé Ishtar, 1994)
The imposition of French culture undermined the traditional status of women. Although Maohi civilization was a hierarchical system, within class divisions women and men were equal. Now Te Ao Maohi suffers under the yoke of an imported male dominant society. When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti Island in 1767 they found a people that respected and honored women. The English explorer Captain Wallis, on the Dolphin, attempting to annex the island in the name of his king, found himself pitted against Queen Purea and 4000 warriors on 500 war canoes. In 1842 when the French imposed their rule on Tahiti it was a woman, Queen Pomare IV, who led her people in armed resistance. 
Then the inevitable missionaries arrived to impose their culture on the Maohi. It was a time when, according to Roti Tehaevra, Maohi men, faced with the intruders' gynophobic fraternity, began to believe that they were superior:

"In the Western system man is power. When our men saw the soldier-man coming to the island they said, 'Oh, only man comes.' So they say, 'Man is power. Woman you are under, I am top.' That was not tradition." (Tehaevra, 1995)
This imbalance has been maintained by French settlers and, more recently, by military personnel. So that, Marie-Therese Danielsson asserts, Maohi women now experience the hardships imposed on women in any gender-distorted culture: 
"[T]hey have become French. And at the same time they are Tahitian women, vahine. It makes problems in their lives. ... They have to work very hard. They have a lot of children. They are beaten by their husbands. They have to make money because there is no money because he has spent it drinking." (dé Ishtar, 1994)
Finding themselves at the bottom of Te Ao Maohi's imposed social structure, Maohi women attempt to break the cycle of poverty by investing in their children the dream of a just society. But, Maea Tematua warns, they are too often thwarted because they do not have the skills to assist their children to live in both worlds. Nor are they always able to protect their children, particularly their daughters, from the many violences that assault them daily. Sexual assault, rape and prostitution are just some examples. Likewise, Maohi women are attempting to protect their children from nuclear testing. They are, Roti Tehaevra explains, at the forefront of the campaign: 
"The man power government has made many mistakes because they are proud. Women are not so proud. They have a humility because she feels very strong for the children of tomorrow, for the new population of tomorrow. Jacques Chirac is a man and he has taken a man decision. It is not a woman decision. It is a man decision. It is war. Man thinks war. Women don't think war. Women think protection. To protect the children. Not to bring them to the war to be killed. Women don't do that because they love their children." (Tehaevra, 1995).
France has announced that there would be no further nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa but it has broken this promise before. Only when the Maohi regain their inalienable right to govern their lives and their lands can we rest assured that the fragile Tuamotu atolls will never again quake with a nuclear explosion. As Marguerite Tetuanui insists: 
"There is one very simple way to stop the French nuclear testing in Moruroa. It is to ask for the independence of our country." (Tetuanui, 1995).
(This article is dedicated to the memory of Marguerite Tetuanui, who died from breast cancer in 1996 as a direct result of nuclear testing. A strong leader of her people, she is sorely missed. These excerpts were taken from Zohl de Ishtar, 1997, "A Broken Rainbow: Pacific Women and Nuclear Testing", in Gender and Catastrophe, Ronit Lentin (ed.), Zed Books, London) 
Sources:

dé Ishtar, Z. (1994) Daughters of the Pacific. Spinifex Press. Melbourne 
Lucas, Clarisa, in conversation with Zohl dé Ishtar, Papeete, 1995 
Mills, S. J. Miles, M. Helmer & S. Kouwenberg (1990) Testimonies, Witnesses of French Nuclear Testing in the South Pacific, Greenpeace International 
Tehaevra, Roti, in conversation with Zohl dé Ishtar, Papeete, 1995 
Tetuanui Marguerite, Unpublished paper to Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995 
Zohl dé Ishtar, an Irish-Australian lesbian, sailed to Moruroa in 1995 to protest against the resumption of France's nuclear testing program. Director of Pacific Connections, Zohl is author of Daughters of the Pacific (Spinifex Press, 1994) and has been campaigning for an independent and nuclear free Pacific since 1982 and against nuclear testing since 1972. She is Oceania Representative for the International Peace Bureau. In 1998 Pacific Women Speak Out - for Independence and Denuclearisation (edited by Zohl) was published. Order a copy at the

Disarmament and Security Centre, PO Box 8390, Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand
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