How can they ignore us?

Vehia Wheeler (photo supplied).

Earlier this month, a group of anti-nuclear advocates from Mā‘ohi Nui French Polynesia attended a UN meeting in New York on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Vehia Wheeler was part of the group. Here, she discusses the ongoing challenges of addressing the harm caused by France after it detonated 193 nuclear bombs over three decades in Mā‘ohi Nui.

Vehia is speaking with Teuila Fuatai.

I never wanted to research the impact of France’s nuclear experiments in Mā‘ohi Nui.

For many of our families and communities, the consequences of that 30 years (from 1966 to 1996) are simply too painful to talk about. There’s still so much trauma about what happened, and that includes the legacy of health and environmental issues we’ve been left with. It feels like a taboo subject.

I also told myself there were plenty of other people looking into nuclear issues, and therefore my energy and focus were best placed elsewhere. But the more I looked into it, the more I found that I was wrong. There aren’t enough people doing research on the impacts of nuclear testing.

As a master’s student, I studied urban planning at the University of Hawai‘i in Manoa because I wanted to do something practical. We covered land management, ocean management and cultural resource management, and learned how important understanding climate change impacts were to future planning. All the research and work we did resonated deeply with me, and I was eager to apply it to Mā‘ohi Nui.

At that point, I’d never thought about how, or even if, the impacts of France’s nuclear bomb experiments were relevant.

Then, three years ago, I was doing research with the University of Bergen in Norway called Island Lives, Ocean States. I was looking at how the ocean was changing because of climate change, and how local people had responded to it. I was on the island of Mangareva for the research. I’d picked Mangareva because that’s where my mother’s father is from. The island also isn’t far from the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa, where France exploded 193 nuclear bombs.

When I asked locals about changes in the ocean, no one wanted to discuss climate change. They all wanted to talk to me about the impacts of the nuclear bombs.

On Mangareva, there are people who lived through the entire bombing period. They remember what it was like before the explosions. They remember being put into bomb shelters as children to avoid detonations. They also remember how the ocean and their lives changed once the nuclear experiments began.

I heard stories of people on the island dying after becoming ill immediately from eating fish they’d caught after the bombs started. Eventually, people stuck to eating much smaller fish. These were deemed okay to consume because people didn’t seem to get immediately sick or die after eating them. Essentially, people believed they contained less poison.

Over time, that turned into a permanent change in diet. Now, a lot of fish and food is imported from Tahiti island because people won’t eat a lot of stuff from the water around them.

My research on Mangareva made it very clear that, for locals, climate change was only part of the picture. People are primarily concerned about understanding the impacts of the French nuclear bombs because that’s the urgent need in their community. They want to know if there’s still harm from eating fish and other food, and what changes they may need to make to be healthy and safe — for themselves and future generations.

But that’s difficult because we don’t have robust information about the impacts of France’s bombs across Mā‘ohi Nui.

I believe that’s directly related to France’s culture of denial around its nuclear experiments.

Most of the available research has been funded through the French state, which means it’s not independent. And the pattern in that research is to minimise the impacts of the 30 years of bombing.

In 2021, a two-year study involving researchers from Princeton University and journalists investigated the effects of some of the bombs. It found that radiation from one of the big atmospheric, or above-ground, bombs that France dropped reached Tahiti island and Mo‘orea island.

That’s really significant because the majority of us live in Tahiti. Therefore, everyone alive at that time in Tahiti and Mo‘orea was exposed to nuclear radiation. In total, there were 110,000 people exposed.

Instead of addressing the findings, France responded by doing its own study. That study concluded that the impacts in Tahiti were minimal.

It basically said that even if we got exposed to this stuff, it wasn’t in any way significant. That lack of honesty and accountability runs throughout France’s nuclear legacy.

For example, to get buy-in for the tests in the 1960s, they told our people the explosions were “clean”. At the time, activists responded by asking why the bombs weren’t being exploded in Paris or somewhere in France if that was true.

It then took France until 2016, 20 years after it last detonated a bomb in our islands, to acknowledge the environmental and health consequences of its bombing experiments.

Access to military information on the bombs has also been largely restricted. Up until July 2021, France’s military archives were classified. The 2021 study involving researchers and journalists was based on a huge swathe of declassified French military documents. Today, even though the archives are declassified, they are inaccessible in numerous ways to the Mā‘ohi population. For example, the archives are housed in France, far from our islands, and the documents are scattered and unorganised across several archives.

In places like Japan, it’s been much easier to get solid research and studies on the Hiroshima bombing. No one has denied that the bombing of Hiroshima occurred, and that a nuclear weapon was used on people and the environment.

In Mā‘ohi Nui, we simply don’t have that level of accountability and honesty from the French state. And we don’t have the resources to perform our own independent research.

I think France believes that exposing the extent of the harm in our islands will be bad for its global reputation. France is very invested in maintaining the illusion of being a country of human rights — even though it maintains colonies in the Pacific and other parts of the world. And despite its legacy of nuclear harm.

How can they ignore all the testimonials from our people? How can they ignore the amount of cancers that we have and the patterns these cancers exhibit? From research on the Hiroshima bombing, we know that exposure to nuclear radiation can affect several generations. We also know that it has an impact on health and the environment. That’s exactly what we’re seeing here.

The same goes for the Marshall Islands, which was used by the US as a nuclear weapons bombing site. Our populations all suffer the same cancers — thyroid cancer, blood cancer, breast cancer. All these cancers are associated with nuclear radiation exposure. Often, multiple people in families are affected across generations, which is another marker of nuclear radiation exposure.

France needs to accept its responsibility in addressing that. It shouldn’t be on us to go and find the funding to understand and rectify what they did. Instead of funding researchers that it knows will align with its interests, France needs to fund independent studies, so the data and conclusions are honest.

In Tahiti, we eat a lot of fish caught locally. A lot of our food is grown here too. We need to know whether that’s safe, or if we should be looking at growing and exporting our food from another island. We need to know if it’s safe to drink the water here, and if that’s going to affect us forever, or if it’s something we can live with through mitigation and adaptation.

That information would help us to understand what we’re actually dealing with in terms of radioactivity in our environment. I think people would use the data and adjust as needed, because they want to remain. This is home, and this is the land that we’re connected to.

Having an accurate knowledge base is also important for the big issues like climate change and ocean management. The data would help us adapt to climate change, or adapt our diets, so we know what fish we can and can’t eat.

But France doesn’t treat us as equals. We simply aren’t worth spending research money on. It’s like our future health and prosperity as people doesn’t matter.

More than that, I think France believes that continuing to deny the impacts of their nuclear bombs means those impacts don’t exist. Their attitude seems to be that we simply aren’t smart enough to understand.

But there are long-term questions that we need answered. And they are directly related to our experience as people affected by nuclear harm.

France’s ongoing refusal to properly address this shows how little progress it’s made in shedding its colonial mindset.