Climate crisis concerns shouldn’t overshadow the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific, where there are lingering health and sociopolitical insecurities. For example, there are concerns in French Polynesia about the mysterious fate of a former anti-nuclear investigative journalist and editor of the now closed Les Nouvelles de Tahiti newspaper.

Early in 2015, a judge upheld prosecution against three men accused of a kidnapping that led to the death of journalist Jean-Pascal Couraud, known as “JK”, in Tahiti in 1997.

More than a decade earlier, JK’s family lodged an allegation of murder with the police following claims that he had been assassinated by a (now disbanded) local presidential militia. An investigating commission had alleged that three men, Rere Puputauki, Tino Mara and Tutu Manate, had abducted JK and dumped his body at sea.

Twenty two years later, the family are still waiting for justice, and fed up with France’s “investigation”. When the Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985 is set against its broader political context in the Pacific, it can be seen that this event was much more than the dramatic, isolated episode against the Greenpeace flagship as portrayed by most New Zealand media.

An “Eyes of Fire” video project in 2015, which included more than 40 student journalists, also demonstrated the importance of a continuing interpretation of these events for the future of Aotearoa New Zealand and its citizens. The students looked back at the past, but were asking questions relevant to the present and future when they interrogated me and my Greenpeace colleagues involved in the Rongelap voyage.

My own baptism in French nuclear arrogance and perfidy was thanks to the late Swedish activist, researcher, and writer Bengt Danielsson, who was awarded the 1991 Right Livelihood Award for “exposing the tragic results… of French colonialism”. He and his wife Marie-Thérèse Danielsson wrote the classic and chilling books Moruroa, Mon Amour and Poisoned Reign.

In 2021, a French investigation team published a book and website that introduced new revelations about the nuclear testing programme and its health and environmental harm inflicted on Tahitians. The book, Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie, by Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, and the associated website Moruroa Files, were a forensic analysis of about 2,000 French government documents declassified in 2013.

Consistently lied about the tests
According to former Auckland University of Technology scholar Ena Manuireva, who was born in Mangareva (an atoll near the French nuclear testing sites of Moruroa and Fangataufa), these publications confirmed what Tahitian people already knew: “That since 1966, the French government has consistently lied about and concealed the deadly consequences of their nuclear tests, which they now seem to acknowledge, to the health of the populations and their environment.”

Following the third test after French nuclear bombs began in the Pacific, on 7 September 1966, local Tahitian lawmaker John Teariki challenged then French president Charles de Gaulle by saying: “No government has ever had the honesty or the cynical frankness to admit that its nuclear tests might be dangerous. No government has ever hesitated to make other peoples — preferably small, defenseless ones — bear the burden.”

“May you, Mr President, take back your troops, your bombs, and your planes.”

De Gaulle ignored the advice. And it took another 30 years and 190 further tests before France stopped its ruthless nuclear pollution in the Pacific.

France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) was reported in early 2025 to have spent 90,000 euros in a big public relations campaign in a vain attempt to discredit the research in Toxique and the Moruroa Files, according to documents obtained by the investigative outlet Disclose.

The CEA published 5000 copies of its booklet, titled ‘Nuclear tests in French Polynesia: why, how and with what consequences’ and distributed them across Oceania.

The Rainbow Warrior bombing, with the death of photographer Fernando Pereira, was a terrible tragedy. But a greater tragedy remains in the horrendous legacy of Pacific nuclear testing for the people of Rongelap, the Marshall Islands and “French” Polynesia; associated military oppression in Kanaky New Caledonia; and lingering secrecy.

New Zealand and the PIF states should now require full investigation of nuclear testing in French Polynesia and seek a more robust compensation programme than currently exists. New Zealand and the PIF states also need to take a less ambiguous position on decolonisation in the Pacific, give greater priority to that issue and seek a “re-energising” of the activities of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation.

This is especially important in relation to “French” Polynesia, Kanaky New Caledonia and the end of the Bougainville transitional political autonomy period with a unilateral declaration of independence slated for 1 September 2027.

Decolonisation is also a critical issue that has a bearing on New Zealand’s relations with Indonesia, particularly over the six Melanesian provinces that make up the region known in the Pacific as “West Papua” and Indonesia’s growing politically motivated role in the region over climate change aid.

A massive new transmigration programme under current President Prabowo Subianto is taking place at the same time as Jakarta’s “ecocidal” deforestation regime intensifies in the Melanesian region with the destruction of millions of hectares of tropical rainforest.

“The wealth of West Papua — gas from Bintuni Bay, copper and gold from the Grasberg mine. Palm oil from Merauke — has been sucked out of our land for six decades, while our people are replaced with Javanese settlers loyal to Jakarta,” says a West Papuan leader, Benny Wenda.

Taking the lead
It is critically important that New Zealand and the PIF states take a lead from the Melanesian Spearhead Group — at least those states other than Fiji and Papua New Guinea, which have both been co-opted by Indonesian bribery through economic aid.

They should take a more pro-active stance on West Papuan human rights and socio-political development, with a view to encouraging a process of political self-determination and a new, more credible United Nations supervised vote replacing the 1968 “Act of No Choice”.

With regard to climate change issues, it is essential to address the lack of an officially recognised category for “climate refugee” under international law. It is also important to seek an international framework, convention, protocol and specific guidelines that can provide protection and assistance for people crossing international borders because of climate change.

The existing rights guaranteed refugees — specifically the right to international humanitarian assistance and the right of return — must be extended to “climate refugees” or climate migrants.

This issue should be acted on systematically and with a practical vision by the PIF with the Australian and New Zealand governments. Australia and New Zealand need to respond to Pacific Island States’ (PIS) concerns over climate change and global warming with a greater sense of urgency and resolve.

Regional and country specific climate change plans and policies are needed to deal with large numbers of Pacific refugees or climate-forced migrants, in the event of worsening climate-change scenarios in the future.

This is especially important for New Zealand, as a country with a significant Pacific population (442,632 — 8.9 percent, 2023 NZ Census) with island communities well integrated into the national infrastructure and as a country that is well placed to welcome more Pacific Islanders.

In April 2025, the New Zealand government announced plans to double defence spending as a share of GDP over the next eight years under its long-awaited Defence Capability Plan.

Trump-inspired global arms race
However, the priority appeared to be New Zealand joining a new Donald Trump-inspired global arms race while the country faced no threat, at the expense of the climate crisis, nuclear free and Pacific peace-making capacity that have forged the country’s global reputation.

Speculation was also rife about the possibility of New Zealand joining a second tier of the controversial AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the US, which would raise geopolitical tensions with little benefit for the Pacific region.

As Marshall Islands Journal editor Giff Johnson has remarked, the people of Rongelap changed the course of history for Pacific nuclear justice by taking control of their destiny with the help of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior.

However, the relocation of the islanders four decades ago has revealed that the legacy of nuclear tests remains unfinished business.

“In the current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament,” says former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.

“New Zealanders were clear — we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”

“On the fateful last voyage,” reflects Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, “the crew of the Rainbow Warrior, look at us in black and white through the lens of time, and lay down the wero — the challenge. They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific.

“Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?’

To Ngāti Kura kaumatua Dover Samuels, the Rainbow Warrior was “probably the biggest battleship that ever traversed the oceans of the world. But she wasn’t armed with guns, she was armed with peace”.

An edited extract from the final chapter of New Zealand journalist Dr David Robie’s recent book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior marking the 40th anniversary of the bombing. He sailed with the Greenpeace crew to Rongelap Atoll for the evacuation of the nuclear health-damaged community and remained on board for 11 weeks. This article was first published by Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Every week, health prevailing, I march with our Palestinian friends and their supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand. And my country is one which — under Britain — was colonised.

Colonisation perpetrates injustices against indigenous people. This legacy is still felt by Indigenous people today.

All around the world we must dismantle our unfair systems. A fair system ensures that everyone has a flourishing start in life. But our systems are linked to Israel — and Israel demonstrates that colonisation is still practised.

Israel headed by megalomaniacs ruling with a muscular thug army is proof that the Empire has not stopped because the Western Empire has supported this.

Far too many Western journalists report from the perspective of the abuser rather than the victims. They need to ask, “what if it was my child, my wife, my mother, my brother, my grandfather, suffering like this? What if I was forced from my home?”

Journalists must report from the perspective of people who are pleading for the right to breathe rather than reporting from the perspective of the landlord killing people when they resist eviction.

They must use their imagination to exercise empathy in reporting. Only then will they report the truth and only then will the real narrative emerge.

Colonisation unchecked
Colonisation is not checked, rather it is supported by countries engaged in Empire building.

Like South Africa under apartheid, Indigenous people are oppressed and if they resist they are dispensed with, in other words, exterminated.

But this system is enabled rather than disabled. The rampant megalomania is enabled by the US, Britain, Germany, and other nations.

Tens of thousands of children, women, and men have been robbed of life and the journalists I once worked alongside in conflict zones are complicit if they do not report this as a human rights atrocity.

We — journalists — must report on the evil that is the expansion of empire and we must report on it from the perspective of the victims not the perpetrators.

The extermination of Palestinians and expansion of Israel is clearly supported by the legs of the octopus — the countries that make up this Western Empire.

Standing by and reporting from anything other than the perspective of the victims is akin to standing by and watching slaves being bound, gagged and shipped under the name of empire.

Journalists must stand up and report with the moral courage of abolitionists. They must have the gumption to attack the rotten policies practiced in our own time.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad has told an international conference in Bangkok that some of the most severely debt-stressed countries are the island states of the Pacific.

Dr Prasad, who is also a former economic professor, said the harshest impacts of global economic re-engineering are being felt by the poorest communities across this region.

He told the conference last month that the adaptation challenges arising from runaway climate change were the steepest across the atoll states of the Pacific — Kiribati, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands.

Dr Prasad said at no time, outside of war, had economies had to face a 30 to 70 percent contraction as a consequence of a single cyclone, but Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga had faced such a situation within this decade.

He said the world must secure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“There is no Plan B. The two options before the world are to either secure the goals, or face extreme chaos,” he said.

“There is nothing in the middle. Not this time.”

Extreme chaos risk
Prasad said there will be extreme chaos if the world went ahead and used the same international financial architecture it had had in place for years.

“And if we continue with the same complex processes to actually access any grant funding which is now available, then we cannot address the issue of this financing gap, as well as climate finance — both for mitigation and adaptation that is badly needed by small vulnerable economies.”

More and more Pacific states would approach a state of existential crisis unless development funding was sorted, he said.

Dr Prasad said many planned projects in the region should already be in place.

“We don’t have time on our hands plus the delay in accessing financing, particularly climate resilient infrastructure and for adaptation — then the situation for these countries is going to get worse and worse.”

He wants to “decolonise” aid, giving the developing countries more control over the aid dollars.

More direct donor aid
This would involve more donor nations providing aid directly into the recipient nation’s budgets.

Dr Prasad, who is also the Fiji Finance Minister, has welcomed the budget funding lead taken by Australia and New Zealand, and said Fiji’s experience with Canberra’s putting aid into the Budget had been a great help for his government.

“It allows us, not only the flexibility, but also it allows us to access funding and building our Budget, building our national development planned strategy, and built in with our own locally designed, and locally led strategies.”

He said the new Pacific Resilience Facility, to be set up in Tonga, is one way that this process of decolonising aid could be achieved.

Prasad said the region had welcomed the pledges made so far to support this new facility.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Another church has been set alight in New Caledonia, confirming a trend of arson which has already destroyed five Catholic churches and missions over the past two months.

The latest fire took place on Sunday evening at the iconic Saint Denis Church of Balade, in Pouébo, on the northern tip of the main island of Grande Terre.

The fire had been ignited in at least two locations — one at the main church entrance and the other on the altar, inside the building.

The attack is highly symbolic: this was the first Catholic church established in New Caledonia, 10 years before France “took possession” of the South Pacific archipelago in 1853.

It was the first Catholic settlement set up by the Marist mission and holds stained glass windows which have been classified as historic heritage in New Caledonia’s Northern Province.

Those stained glasses picture scenes of the Marist fathers’ arrival in New Caledonia.

Parts of the damages include the altar and the main church entrance door.

In other parts of the building, walls have been tagged.

A team of police investigators has been sent on location to gather further evidence, the Nouméa Public Prosecutor said.

250 years after Cook’s landing
The fire also comes as 250 years ago, on 5 September 1774, British navigator James Cook, aboard the vessel Resolution, made first landing in the Bay of Balade after a Pacific voyage that took him to Easter Island (Rapa Nui), the Marquesas islands (French Polynesia), the kingdom of Tonga and what he called the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu).

It was Cook who called the Melanesian archipelago “New Caledonia”.

Both New Caledonia and the New Hebrides were a direct reference to the islands of Caledonia (Scotland) and the Hebrides, an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland.

Five churches targeted
Since mid-July, five Catholic sites have been fully or partially destroyed in New Caledonia.

This includes the Catholic Mission in Saint-Louis (near Nouméa), a stronghold still in the hands of a pro-independence hard-line faction (another historic Catholic mission settled in the 1860s and widely regarded as the cradle of New Caledonia’s Catholicism); the Vao Church in the Isle of Pines (off Nouméa), and other Catholic missions in Touho, Thio (east coast of New Caledonia’s main island) and Poindimié.

Another Catholic church building, the Church of Hope in Nouméa, narrowly escaped a few weeks ago and was saved because one of the parishioners discovered packed-up benches and paper ready to be ignited.

Since then, the building has been under permanent surveillance, relying on parishioners and the Catholic church priests.

The series of targeted attacks comes as Christianity, including Roman Catholicism, is the largest religion in New Caledonia, where Protestants also make up a large proportion of the group.

Each attack was followed by due investigations, but no one has yet been arrested.

Nouméa Public Prosecutor Yves Dupas told local media these actions were “intolerable” attacks on New Caledonia’s “most fundamental symbols”.

Why the Catholic church?
Several theories about the motives behind such attacks are invoking some sort of “mix-up” between French colonisation and the advent of Christianity in New Caledonia.

Nouméa Archbishop Michel-Marie Calvet, 80, himself a Marist, said “there’s been a clear determination to destroy all that represents some kind of organised order”

“There are also a lot of amalgamations on colonisation issues,” he said.

“But we’ve seen this before and elsewhere: when some people want to justify their actions, they always try to re-write history according to the ideology they want to support or believe they support.”

While the first Catholic mission was founded in 1853, the protestant priests from the London Missionary Society also made first contact about the same time, in the Loyalty Islands, where, incidentally, the British-introduced cricket still remains a popular sport.

On the protestant side, the Protestant Church of Kanaky New Caledonia (French: Église Protestante de Kanaky Nouvelle-Calédonie, EPKNC), has traditionally positioned itself in an open pro-independence stance.

For a long time, Christian churches (Catholic and Protestants alike) were the only institutions to provide schooling to indigenous Kanaks.

‘Paradise’ islands now ‘closest to Hell’
A few days after violent and deadly riots broke out in New Caledonia, under a state of emergency in mid-May, Monsignor Calvet held a Pentecost mass in an empty church, but relayed by social networks.

At the time still under the shock from the eruption of violence, he told his virtual audience that New Caledonia, once known in tourism leaflets as the islands “closest to paradise”, had now become “closest to Hell”.

He also launched a stinging attack on all politicians there, saying they had “failed their obligations” and that from now on their words were “no longer credible”.

More recently, he told local media:

“There is a very real problem with our youth. They have lost every landmark. The saddest thing is that we’re not only talking about youth. There are also adults around who have been influencing them.

“What I know is that we Catholics have to stay away from any form of violence. This violence that tries to look like something it is not.

“It is not an ideal that is being pursued, it is what we usually call ‘the politics of chaos’.”

Declined Pope’s invitation to Port Moresby
He said that although he had been invited to join Pope Francis in Port Moresby during his current Asia and Pacific tour he had declined the offer.

“Even though many years ago, I personally invited one of his predecessors, Pope John Paul II, to come and visit here. But Pope Francis’s visit [to PNG], it was definitely not the right time,” he said.

Monsignor Calvet was ordained priest in April 1973 for the Society of Mary (Marist) order.

He arrived in Nouméa in April 1979 and has been Nouméa’s Archbishop since 1981.

He was also the chair of the Pacific Episcopal Conference (CEPAC) between 1996 and 2003, as well as the vice-president of the Federation of Oceania Episcopal Conferences (FCBCO).

In 1988, charismatic pro-independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as head of the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), signed the Matignon-Oudinot Accords with then French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, putting an end to half a decade of quasi civil war.

One year later, he was gunned down by a member of the radical fringe of the pro-independence movement.

Tjibaou was trained as a priest in the Society of Mary order.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

No progress has been made in sending a UN human rights mission to Indonesia’s Papuan provinces despite the appointment of Fiji and Papua New Guinea’s prime ministers to negotiate the visit.

Pacific Island leaders have for more than a decade requested the UN’s involvement over reported abuses as the Indonesian military battles with the West Papua independence movement.

The latest UN Human Rights Committee report on Indonesia in March was highly critical and raised concerns about extrajudicial killing, excessive use of force and enforced disappearances involving indigenous Papuans.

Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape were appointed by the Melanesian Spearhead Group last year as special envoys to push for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ visit directly with Indonesia’s president but so far to no avail.

“We have not been able to negotiate terms for an OHCHR visit to Papua,” Commissioner Volker Türk’s office in Geneva said in a statement to BenarNews.

“We remain very concerned about the situation in the region, with some reports indicating a significant increase in violent incidents and civilian casualties in 2023.

“We stress the importance of accountability for security forces and armed groups operating in Papua and the importance of addressing the underlying grievances and root causes of these conflicts.”

Formal invitation
Indonesia issued a formal invitation to the OHCHR in 2018 after Pacific leaders from Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga and Marshall Islands for years repeatedly called out the human rights abuses at the UN General Assembly and other international fora.

The Pacific Islands Forum — the regional intergovernmental organisation of 18 nations — has called on Indonesia since 2019 to allow the mission to go ahead.

“We continue establishing a constructive engagement with the UN on the progress of human rights improvement in Indonesia,” Siti Ruhaini, senior advisor to the Indonesian Office of the President told BenarNews, including in “cases of the gross violation of human rights in the past that earned the appreciation from UN Human Rights Council”.

Indonesia’s military offered a rare apology in March after video emerged of soldiers repeatedly slashing a Papuan man with a bayonet while he was forced to stand in a water-filled drum.

The latest UN report highlights “systematic reports about the use of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or ill-treatment in places of detention, in particular on Indigenous Papuans” and limited access to information about investigations conducted, individuals prosecuted and sentences.

In recent months there have been several deadly clashes in the region with many thousands reportedly left displaced after fleeing the fighting.

In June Indonesia was accused of exploiting a visit to Papua by the MSG director general to portray the region as “stable and conducive”, undermining efforts to secure Türk’s visit.

Invitation ‘still standing’
Siti told BenarNews the invitation to the UN “is still standing” while attempts are made to find the “best time (to) suit both sides.”

After years of delays the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — whose members are Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and New Caledonia’s Kanak independence movement — appointed the two prime ministers last November to negotiate directly.

A state visit by Marape to Indonesia last week left confusion over what discussions there were over human rights in the Papuan provinces or if the UN visit was raised.

PNG’s prime minister said last Friday that, on behalf of the MSG and his Fijian counterpart, he spoke with incumbent Indonesian President Joko Widodo and president-elect Parbowo Subianto and they were “very much sensitive to the issues of West Papua”.

“Basically we told him we’re concerned on human rights issues and (to) respect their culture, respect the people, respect their land rights,” Marape told a press conference on his return to Port Moresby in response to questions from BenarNews.

He said Prabowo indicated he would continue Jokowi’s policies towards the Papuan provinces and had hinted at “a moratorium or there will be an amnesty call out to those who still carry guns in West Papua”.

During Marape’s Indonesian visit, the neighbours acknowledged their respective sovereignty, celebrated the signing of several cross-border agreements and that the “relationship is standing in the right space”.

Human rights ‘not on agenda’
Siti from the Office of the President afterwards told BenarNews there were no discussions regarding the UN visit during the meeting between Marape and Jokowi and “human rights issues in Papua were not on the agenda.”

Further BenarNews enquiries with the President’s office about the conflicting accounts went unanswered.

Indonesia is an associate member of the MSG and the ULMWP has observer status. Neither have voting rights.

“That is part of the mandate from the leaders, that is the moral obligation to raise whether it is publicly or face-to-face because there are Papuans dying under the eyes of the Pacific leaders over the past 60 years,” president of the pro-independence United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP), Benny Wenda, told BenarNews.

“We are demanding full membership of the MSG so we can engage with Indonesia as equals and find solutions for peace.”

Decolonisation in the Pacific has been placed very firmly back on the international agenda after protests in the French territory of Kanaky New Caledonia in May turned violent leaving 10 people dead.

Kanaky New Caledonia riots
Riots erupted after indigenous Kanaks accused France of trying to dilute their voting bloc in New Caledonia after a disputed independence referendum process ended in 2021 leaving them in French hands.

Meeting in Japan late last week, MSG leaders called for a new referendum and the PIF secured agreement from France for a fact-finding mission to New Caledonia.

While in Tokyo for the meeting, Rabuka was reported by Islands Business as saying he would also visit Indonesia’s president with Marape “to discuss further actions regarding the people of West Papua”.

An independence struggle has simmered in Papua since the early 1960s when Indonesian forces invaded the region, which had remained under separate Dutch administration after Indonesia’s 1945 declaration of independence.

Indonesia argues it incorporated the comparatively sparsely populated and mineral rich territory under international law, as it was part of the Dutch East Indies empire that forms the basis for its modern borders.

Indonesian control was formalised in 1969 with a UN-supervised referendum in which little more than 1,000 Papuans were allowed to vote. Papuans say they were denied the right to decide their own future and are now marginalised in their own land.

Indonesia steps up ‘neutralising’ efforts
Indonesia in recent years has stepped up its efforts to neutralise Pacific support for the West Papuan independence movement, particularly among Melanesian nations that have ethnic and cultural links.

“Indonesia is increasingly engaging with the Pacific neighboring countries in a constructive way while respecting the sovereignty of each member,” Theofransus Litaay, senior advisor of the Executive Office of the President told BenarNews.

“Papua is always the priority and programme for Indonesia in the attempt to strengthen its position as the Pacific ‘veranda’ of Indonesia.”

The Fiji and PNG leaders previously met Jokowi, whose second five-year term finishes in October, on the sidelines of a global summit in San Francisco in November.

The two are due to report back on their progress at the annual MSG meeting scheduled for next month.

“If time permits, where we both can go back and see him on these issues, then we will go but I have many issues to attend to here,” Marape said in Port Moresby on Friday.

Copyright ©2015-2024, BenarNews. Republished with permission of BenarNews.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz