BOOK 32 | Repúblika | republikamagazine.com Issue 17 | July-August 2015 BOOK You can’t sink a rainbow By DAVID ROBIE A year after Eyes of Fire was first published, in January 1987 – four months before the Fiji military coups, I was arrested at gun- point by French troops near the New Caledonian village of Canala. The arrest followed a week of me be- This paranoid drama over my re- When Marie-Thérèse and Bengt ing tailed by secret agents in Noumea. porting of the militarisation of East Danielsson’s then 22-year-old damn- When I was handed over by the mili- Coast villages in an attempt by French ing indictment of French nuclear co- tary to local gendarmerie for inter- authorities to harass and suppress lonialism, Moruroa, Mon Amour, was rogation, accusations of my being a supporters of Kanak independence republished in 1986 with new sections ‘spy’ and questions over my book on featured on the front page of the New under the title Poisoned Reign, French the Rainbow Warrior bombing were Zealand Sunday Times and Les Nou- intransigence over nuclear testing and made in the same breath. But after velles Calédoniennes in Noumea. It was demands for independence in Tahiti about four hours of questioning I was also covered by a regional Pacific news was at a peak. It seemed unlikely then released. magazine. that in less than two decades, nuclear Rainbow Warrior III passes by the last resting place of the bombed Warrior near the Cavalli Islands, Northland. PHOTO: NIGEL MARPLE/GREENPEACE Issue 17 | July-August 2015 facebook.com/republikamag | Repúblika | 33 BOOK JOHN MILLER Rainbow Warrior on the morning after the bombing in Auckland. Inset: The cover of Islands Business featuring David Robies’ story in the August 1985. testing would be finally abandoned in an arched creation by Kerikeri sculp- The agreement included an apology the South Pacific – and Tahiti’s leading tor Chris Booth – incorporating the by France and the deportation of jailed nuclear-free and pro-independence bombed ship’s brass propeller. secret agents Alain Mafart and Domi- politician, Oscar Manutahi Temaru, However, the decision to scuttle nique Prieur after they had served less would emerge as the territory’s new the first Rainbow Warrior has angered than a year of their 10-year sentences president four times and usher in a skipper Peter Willox to this day. Just for manslaughter and wilful damage refreshing ‘new order’ with a com- seven months earlier, at the time of of the bombed ship. They were trans- mitment to pan-Pacific relations. Al- arbitration hearings in Geneva in May ferred from New Zealand to Hao Atoll though independence is nominally 1987, Greenpeace International’s Da- in French Polynesia to serve three off the agenda for the moment, far- vid McTaggart had told Willcox that years in exile at a ‘Club Med’ style nu- reaching changes in the region are in- he was going to get a cheque in a few clear and military base. evitable. months to fix up the Warrior ‘any way But the bombing scandal did not After being awarded $8 million you want’, Willcox recalls. He was end there. The same day as the scut- in compensation from France by the shocked when told the Greenpeace tling of the Rainbow Warrior in 1987, International Arbitration Tribunal, International board had voted to sink the French Government told New Greenpeace finally towed theRainbow the ship, which had been ‘floating pa- Zealand that Major Mafart had a ‘se- Warrior to Matauri Bay and scuttled tiently in Auckland Harbour for two rious stomach complaint’. The French her off Motutapere, in the Cavalli Is- years’. authorities repatriated him back to lands, on 12 December 1987 to cre- An earlier compensation deal for France in defiance of the terms of the ate a living reef. Her namesake, the New Zealand mediated in 1986 by United Nations agreement and pro- second Rainbow Warrior, formerly United Nations Secretary-General tests from the Lange Government. the Grampion Fame, was launched in Javier Perez de Cuellar awarded the It was later claimed by a Tahitian Hamburg four years to the day after Government $13 million (US$7 mil- newspaper, Les Nouvelles, that Mafart the bombing, on 10 July 1989. And lion) – the money was used for an an- was smuggled out of Tahiti on a false on 15 July 1990, a memorial was ti-nuclear projects fund and the Pacific passport hours before New Zealand unveiled at Matauri Bay featuring Development and Conservation Trust. was even told of the ‘illness’. Mafart 34 | Repúblika | republikamagazine.com Issue 17 | July-August 2015 BOOK reportedly assumed the identity of Fortunately, someone saw that before international recognition. However, a carpenter, Serge Quillan. Captain it got distributed. So Mafart got his fee Danielsson’s health deteriorated after Prieur was also repatriated back to but 40,000 calendars were destroyed.’ this honour and he died in July 1997, France in May 1988 because she was The Danielssons highlighted a pub- barely a year after French nuclear pregnant. France ignored the protests lic opinion poll by the SOFRES institute testing in the Gambiers had ended by New Zealand and the secret agent three months after the Rainbow War- finally. France had agreed to sign the pair were honoured, decorated and rior bombing to gauge what French Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty af- promoted in their homeland. A su- people thought of the ‘Blunderwater- ter a final swansong package of eight preme irony that such an act of state gate’ scandal. While no questions in planned nuclear tests to provide data terrorism should be rewarded in this the poll directly raised the social or for simulation computer software. But age of a so-called ‘war on terrorism’. health implications for the Polynesian such was the strength of international In 2005, their lawyer, Gerard Cur- people, 60 per cent were found to ap- hostility and protests and riots in Pa- rie, tried to block footage of their prove of French nuclear testing (as peète that Paris ended the programme guilty pleas in court – shown on closed long as they were in Polynesia, well prematurely after just six tests. France circuit to journalists at the time but away from France). officially ratified the treaty on 10 Sep- not previously seen publicly – from ‘This represents a “national con- tember 1996. Marie-Thérèse contin- being broadcast by the Television New sensus”, we are told, which should ued in the struggle to ‘help Polynesians Zealand current affairs programme be respected by all peoples in the Pa- to find the right way to a fair and ra- Sunday. Losing the High Court ruling cific,’ noted the Danielssons. ‘So far, tional independence’ and to continue in May 2005, the two former agents no French politician or editorialist documentation of the harm caused by appealed against the footage being has cared to mention the embarrass- French nuclear tests for three decades. broadcast. They failed and the foot- ing fact that political, civic and church But she too died in 2003. age was finally broadcast by Televi- leaders in French Polynesia have for Elaine Shaw worked for Green- sion New Zealand on 7 August 2006 years been asking the French Govern- peace New Zealand for 16 years and – almost two decades later. They had ment to organise a local referendum developed it with an Auckland core lost any spurious claim to privacy over so as to allow the people most con- group into the small but lively move- the act of terrorism by publishing their cerned, the islanders themselves, to ment it had become by the time of the own memoirs – Agent Secrète and decide the issue.’ bombing. But she was not comfortable Carnets Secrets. Mafart recalled in The Danielssons were an inspira- with the changes and rapid growth of his book how the international media tion to the nuclear-free and indepen- the organisation after the bombing. were dumbfounded that the expected dent Pacific movement, especially in She worked tirelessly for the people of huge High Court trial had ‘evaporated the Cook Islands and Tahiti. Along Rongelap as well as French Polynesia, before their eyes’, describing his court- with Elaine Shaw of Greenpeace New the victims of nuclear testing. She con- room experience: ‘I had an impression Zealand, they played a vital role in tinued working for a nuclear-free and of being a mutineer from the Bounty ... raising public awareness of the issues. independent Pacific until 1990 and but in this case the gallows would not Swedish-born Dr Danielsson was di- then decided to take a well-earned be erected in the village square. Three rector of his homeland’s National Mu- break, travelling overland in Australia. courteous phrases were exchanged seum of Ethnology. In 1947, he joined Shaw soon found herself back in the between [the judge] and our lawyers, Thor Heyerdahl’s epic Kon Tiki balsa fray, this time as a Greenpeace can- the charges were read to us and the raft voyage across the eastern Pacific vasser. Tragically, she died from cancer court asked us whether we pleaded Ocean that made a crash-landing on in October that year. ‘I sensed that her guilty or not guilty. Our replies were the atoll of Raroia. He married Marie- interest stemmed from her concern clear: ‘Guilty!’ With that one word the Thérèse, a French national, in 1948 for the people rather than any politi- trial was at an end.’ and they made their home in Tahiti. cal ideology,’ said Tahitian activist Téa Ironically, Mafart much later be- She was very active in local politics Hirshon. ‘She went to many islands came a wildlife photographer, under and women’s environmental organ- and saw for herself what people in the the moniker Alain Mafart-Renodier, isations.