Over 30 years the French government tested 193 nuclear weapons in Māohi Nui and today Indigenous peoples still suffer the impacts through intergenerational cancers.
In 1975 France stopped atmospheric tests and moved to underground testing. Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross was eight years old when the French nuclear tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa stopped in 1996.
“After poisoning us for 30 years, after using us as guinea pigs for 30 years, France condemned us to pay for all the cost of those cancers,” Morgant-Cross said.
She is a mother of two boys and married to another Māohi in Mataiea, Tahiti, and said her biggest worry is what will be left for the next generation.
As a politician in the French Polynesian Assembly she sponsored a unanimously supported resolution in September 2023 supporting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
It called on France to join the treaty, as one of the original five global nuclear powers and one of the nuclear nine possessors of nuclear weapons today.
As a survivor of nuclear testing, Morgant-Cross has worked with hibakusha, which is the term used to describe the survivors of the US atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Together, as living examples of the consequences, they are trying to push governments to demilitarise and end the possession of nuclear arsenals.
Connections from Māohi Nui to Aotearoa
Morgant-Cross spoke to Te Ao Māori News from Whāingaroa where she, along with other manuhiri of Hui Oranga, planted kowhangatara (spinifex) in the sand dunes for coastal restoration to build resilience against storms or tsunamis at a time of increased climate crises.
In the 1970s and 1980s many of the anti-nuclear protests were in response to the tests in Māohi Nui, French Polynesia.
The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement began in Fiji in 1975 after the first Nuclear Free Pacific Conference, which was organised by ‘Against French Testing in Moruroa’ (ATOM).
The Pacific Peoples’ Anti-Nuclear Action Committee was founded by Hilda Halkyard-Harawira and Grace Robertson, and in 1982 they hosted the first Hui Oranga which brought the the movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific home to Aotearoa.
In 1985 Greenpeace was protesting the French nuclear tests in Moruroa on its ship, the Rainbow Warrior when the French government sent spies and members of its military to bomb the ship at its berth in Auckland Harbour. The two explosions led to the death of crew member Fernando Pereira.
Condemned to intergenerational cancer
“We still have diseases from generation to generation,” she said.
Non-profit organisation Nuclear Information and Resources Services data has showed radiation is more harmful to women with cancer rates and death 50 per cent higher than in men.
In her family, Morgant-Cross’ great-grandmother, grandmother, aunt and sister have been diagnosed with thyroid or breast cancer.
A mother and lawyer at the time, Morgant-Cross was diagnosed with leukaemia at 25 years old.
Valentina Cross, her mother has continuing thyroid problems, needs to take pills for the rest of her life and, similarly, Hinamoeura has to take pills to keep the leukaemia dormant for the rest of her life.
Being told the nuclear tests were “clean”, Morgant-Cross didn’t learn about the legacy of the nuclear bombs until she was 30 years old when former French Polynesian president Oscar Temaru filed a complaint against France for alleged crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court for the the nuclear tests.
She then saw a list of radiation-induced diseases, which included thyroid cancer, breast cancer, and leukaemia and she realised it wasn’t that her family had ‘bad genes’.
The known impacts buried by the French state
Morgant-Cross said her people were victims of French propaganda as they were told there were no effects from the nuclear tests.
A research paper from 2000 published in the Cancer Causes & Control journal said the thyroid rates in French Polynesia were two to three times higher than Maōri in New Zealand and Hawaians in Hawaii.
In 2021, over two decades later, Princeton University’s Science and Global Security program, multimedia newsroom Disclose and research collective INTERPT released an investigation using declassified French defence documents.
“The state has tried hard to bury the toxic heritage of these tests,” Geoffrey Livolsi, Disclose’s editor-in-chief told The Guardian.
The report concluded approximately 110,000 people were exposed to ionising radiation. That number was almost the entire Polynesian population at the time.
New nuclear issues and justice
Similarly in Japan, the government and scientists are denying the links between high thyroid cancer rates and the Fukushima disaster.
Morgant-Cross said she was also concerned with the dumping of treated nuclear waste especially after pushback from NGOs, Pacific states, and experts.
The Pacific Islands Forum had an independent expert panel of world-class scientists and global experts on nuclear issues who assessed the data related to Japan’s decision to discharge ALPS-treated nuclear wastewater and found it lacked a sound scientific basis and offered viable alternatives which were ignored.
In Māohi Nui, many of their taxes go towards managing high cancer rates and Morgant-Cross said they weren’t given compensation to cover the medical assistance they deserved.
In 2010, a compensation law passed and between then and 2020, RNZ reported France had compensated French Polynesia with US$30 million. And in 2021, it was reported to have paid US$16.6 million within the year but only 46 percent of the compensation claims were accepted.
“During July 2024 France spent billions of dollars to clean the river Seine in Paris and I was so shocked,” Morgant-Cross said.
“You can’t help us on medical care, you can’t help us on cleaning your nuclear rubbish in the South Pacific, but you can put billions of dollars to clean a river that is still disgusting?”
As a politician and anti-nuclear activist Morgant-Cross hopes for nuclear justice and a world of peace.
She has started a movement named the Māohi Youth Resiliency in hopes to raise awareness of the nuclear legacy by telling her story and also learning how to help Māohi in this century.
