BEARING WITNESS

Thirty years after the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, a crew member reflects on its legacy for Greenpeace, New Zealand and the Pacific Ocean.

What is the point in writing a story in 2015 about an event that happened in 1985? It’s a good question – and one we could also ask about Anzac Day remembrance and memories of wars fought long ago.

I was discussing this with a friend; as he pointed out, the reasons for remembering anniversaries change over the years; for example, from being sad to being determined.

I was a crewmember on the Rainbow Warrior when it was blown up by French Secret Service agents on July 10 1985, while tied up alongside Marsden Wharf near downtown Auckland.

For me this story starts in the USA when I joined the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior as third engineer. Our first job was to put a fore and aft sailing rig on the old Aberdeen trawler. She had a lovely hull and turned out to be a gorgeous sailing boat. Our first mission in the Pacific was to help relocate the people on Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Their island was contaminated by fallout from North American atmospheric nuclear bomb testing, ironically code-named Bravo. The Americans had deliberately exposed the island population as living experiments to the testing to be studied for future observations.

The answer to the experiment was that they were – and still are – severely affected. We helped them move with their dismantled

homes and everything they owned lashed on deck. They moved from their ancestral homeland to an uncontaminated island that they had to lease. In the Marshall Islands, you are born with land rights through your mother’s side so you always have a place to live and grow your food. The Rongelap people lost this birthright. They asked for our help only after their government and the American government refused to relocate them.

For our crew, it was a poignant experience. It made us a tight group and would set the scene for our next big campaign: to stop French nuclear testing in French Polynesia. The plan was to have a short stopover in Auckland to get together with local yacht crews and then sail out of Auckland with a Nuclear Free Peace Flotilla heading to Mururoa in French Polynesia. There, we would stay just outside the 12-mile exclusion zone to bear witness. In the Greenpeace tradition, it was always going to be a non-violent campaign and this was made clear right from the beginning.

The French Government had other ideas. As the Rainbow Warrior lay alongside Marsden Wharf, the French secret service agents set two bombs under her hull. It was just before midnight, while the ship was fully crewed. There was total disregard for possible human casualties; our friend and the ship’s photographer, Fernando Pereira, was trapped in the aft cabin as the ship sank. He was murdered, casually, and left behind two kids.

A friendly nation had come into a New Zealand harbour and committed an act of international terrorism by blowing up a non-violent protest vessel. There was no warning given.

Initially the police thought it was our fault, that we must have done something wrong with the ship. But the Navy divers found the hull buckled in from the outside; if the explosion had happened inside the ship, the tears in the hull would have been pushed out, not in.

The first bomb exploded beside the engine room, leaving a hole big enough for a man to walk through. The second bomb – the one that killed Fernando – was placed on the propeller shaft, crippling the ship to ensure she would never again go to sea.

“The first bomb exploded beside the engine room... the second bomb was placed on the propeller shaft...”

For me, a young ordinary seaman, and for most of the crew, it seemed unreal. When excellent work by the New Zealand Police proved that the French secret service was responsible, we and most of the New Zealand public lost some of our innocence. It has made me wary of statements made by politicians.

A few books have been written about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. There is even a Hollywood movie with all the ingredients of a good spy thriller, but for the people of French Polynesia and the Marshall Islands there is reality: their lands and seas are poisoned. They are still living with the effects of nuclear contamination on a daily basis.

In 1995, exactly 10 years after the bombing, I went back to French Polynesia. The French had decided to do another round of nuclear testing – how ironic is that? We were part of a flotilla of 14 vessels; most were from New Zealand but some boats were from Fiji and Chile.

It was a long ocean passage for a small boat from anywhere to get to Mururoa, and it required a good boat and good seamanship. Mostly it required a big commitment from the individuals involved, but we did have a bit of fun when we got there.

Some of the crews took their boats or their dinghies into the 12-mile exclusion zone around Mururoa but most of us stayed

just outside the zone, bearing witness and telling the story of what was going on while getting chased by boats and planes from the French Navy. GPS had just started to become affordable so we could meet up in pre-determined locations for strategy discussions on what to do next. We used an Auckland city map overlaid on the chart for Mururoa so we could meet on the corner of Queen and Wellesley Streets, for example.

We also had the occasional party. I recall a barbecue on the deck of the R Tucker Thompson and some of the ships’ crews rowing back to their boats at night, struggling to find their mother ships amidst the ever-changing positions of the flotilla boats drifting in the mid-pacific Ocean. All is well that ends well.

The French did stop their nuclear testing, and I’m sure the work by the Nuclear Free Flotilla people had a lot to do with that. Over the years I helped organise two other nuclear-free flotillas

from New Zealand and Australia to protest against the shipment of plutonium fuel through the Tasman. Again we went out with a dozen boats and positioned ourselves in line between Lord Howe and Norfolk Island, forming a symbolic chain of vessels to stop the plutonium ships from coming through. Of course we could never physically stop them but we could bear witness and make visible what was going on in our ocean backyard.

We did a similar thing in November 2013 off the Raglan coast of the North Island to stop deep-sea oil exploration and to highlight the dangers of an economy based on the most dangerous oil exploration practices, rather than develop and invest in a variety of renewable energy sources. Again, a group of boaties came together and made visible what is almost invisible but which could have disastrous effects for our coastline. The most memorable day on that particular voyage was when more than 5000 New Zealanders took a day out of their lives to go to the beach with banners to send a strong message: We do not want deep sea oil exploration of our coastline. It gave those of us at sea the courage to carry on.

In all of these voyages the most important ingredient, besides a good boat, is the people involved and that the actions we take as a flotilla are decided by the individuals during the sometimes painfully long group discussions, and that they are not dictated by Greenpeace or other organisations. That is the real people power that works.

My partner Bunny Mcdiarmid came up with a good reason to celebrate the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior 30 years on. Rather than make a big deal out of the bombing and all of that old story, we should celebrate activism and personal courage in New Zealand, to not be afraid to express our opinions and try to make a difference in a positive way to our home.

And yes, once a greenie always a greenie. For the record I’m not particularly courageous or brave but I do believe that there are lots of things we can do, particularly with our most pressing issue around climate change with current governments and co-operations who seem unwilling to do much about it. We have an opportunity to make a change now and we should do it before this door closes. B