10/07/2005 - Greenpeace
volunteers create a human peace sign in the
Esplanade Tracodéro to commemorate
the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.
It was twenty years ago that two explosions
sank our flagship, Rainbow Warrior, and killed
our photographer, Fernando Pereira. To mark
this anniversary, we brought original crewmembers
and new activists together to pay tribute
to a colleague killed and a boat bombed, in
two ceremonies: one in Matauri Bay, New Zealand,
and the other in Paris.
On July 10, 1985, two explosions on the Warrior
rocked Waitemata Harbour in Auckland. They
were planted by the French Government, in
an attempt to stifle Greenpeace's protests
against the French nuclear testing programme
in the Pacific.
20 years later, in Matauri Bay, original
skipper Pete Willcox dived 25 metres down
to the wreck and placed a memorial sculpture
on the bridge, as around 100 people gathered
on the boat cast flowers and greenery on the
water.
In Paris, more than 500 activists from 21
countries formed a human rainbow and peace
sign in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, among
them Grace O´Sullivan, of the original
crew.
Grace O´Sullivan.
"When the warrior went down and our friend
Fernando was killed," she told her colleagues,
"I was under tremendous pressure from
my family to return home. They didn´t
want me to stay in New Zealand, or to work
for Greenpeace. Working for Greenpeace now
involved a risk that none of us had ever anticipated.
But all of us on the crew were totally committed
to end this madness of nuclear proliferation,
and within six weeks Peter Willcox and I were
on another ship, sailing toward the test site
at Moruroa to oppose the French programme."
(You can hear an audio feed of Grace speaking
in this "Podcast for Peace")
Crew member and campaigner in 1985, Steve
Sawyer, whose birthday was being celebrated
on the night of the bombing, urged world leaders
to join New Zealand and the 39 other countries
which have declared themselves nuclear-free,
and to stop wasting vast amounts of money
and intelligence on more sophisticated nuclear
weapons. Those resources, he argued, would
better be used to promote peace, combat climate
change and preserve the world's forests and
oceans.
Marelle Pereira daughter of Fernando Pereira
is comforted by Martini Goteji original crew
member of the Rainbow Warrior at the 20th
anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow
Warrior in Matauri Bay.
"Today we are facing a bigger nuclear
threat as an ever increasing number of states
continue their development of nuclear weapons."
"We also face a global crisis as serious
and devastating as any nuclear threat: climate
change. We only have a decade or two to begin
in earnest the transformation of our global
energy system, or heat waves, droughts, floods,
rising sea-levels and widespread famine and
disease will overwhelm us just as surely as
the mushroom cloud," said Sawyer.
The peace symbol and rainbow in Paris was
created by more than 500 activists, half of
them French, half of them from around the
world. Among them were young American students
who are working with Greenpeace to promote
clean energy use on their campuses, volunteers
from the UK and Netherlands, and activists
who have sailed or walked into nuclear weapons
test zones, blocked nuclear shipments, and
taken action around the world for peace and
a clean environment. "The message today
is about three things: it´s about commemoration,
it´s about peace, and it´s about
taking action." said Mike Townsley. "No
bomb is acceptable -- not on the Rainbow Warrior,
not in London, not in Baghdad,not in Hiroshima.
We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can´t
bomb it into peace."
