A toxic blast from the past: How Algeria still suffers contamination from France’s nuclear legacy
French nuclear blasts in Algeria, which started more than 60 years ago, still have a poisonous impact, reports Simon Speakman Cordall
Abdelkrim Touhami smiles. In his late seventies now, he’s had this conversation before. Nevertheless, he relaxes into his chair as, over the video screen from Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, he describes the French nuclear tests that took place close to his home and their brutal legacy that persists to this day.
In total, France carried out 17 nuclear tests between 1960 and 1967, 11 in military installations earmarked for French use after the country gained independence in 1962.
Much of the waste and detritus from those tests, including tanks, helicopters and entire aircraft that were used to test the radiation, lies buried in the sand: up to 3,000 tonnes, according to recent estimates by the French branch of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN France).
Even now, their toxicity bleeds out into the environment, the people, their crops and their livestock as the past continues to contaminate the present.
Nevertheless, despite the decades that have passed, the French government will not reveal details of the waste buried in the sand or its precise location.
No one is certain how many people are affected. According to one Al Jazeera report citing the gulf between French and Algerian estimates, anywhere between 27,000 and 60,000 people, plus their descendants, could be living with the effects of the nuclear testing in southern Algeria.
What is certain is that the area remains irradiated. With no little sense of irony, a wind from southern Algeria carried the desert’s sand into French territory earlier this month, dust that was later found to be radioactive.
Abdelkrim remembers one of the early tests, the overground Gerboise Bleue (named after the desert gerbil and part of the French flag).
“The French had told people not to panic if they felt the earth shaking," he told a translator as he described the 70-kiloton explosion - three times the size of that which destroyed Nagasaki - that occurred about 180 kilometres from his village in February 1960.
"I was 17 years old at the time. We didn’t see any smoke," he said.
"We could feel the earth shaking," he added, describing how even the French soldiers, government ministers and scientists that were gathered to observe the test had not expected the blast to be so destructive.
"This was the most terrible test," he says.
It wasn’t until later that those living in the area started to notice people falling ill with a variety of cancers, as the incidences of birth defects climbed ever higher.
"We knew very well the effects nuclear weapons and radiation can have on people," Abdelkrim explained. Moreover, as a French teacher working in the village he was better positioned to witness the spread of illness than most. "We understood what was going on, and with time, we started to notice the effects of radiation on our newborns and our children," he said.
Subsequent blasts were moved underground, to the mountain facility in Ekker, where 13 more tests were performed, two even larger, including the disastrous test in 1962.
The 40-kiloton charge whose blast was supposed to have been contained within a sealed shaft exploded out of the mountainside, sending radioactive rock tumbling into the desert, contaminating the soldiers and observers looking on, as well as the surrounding countryside.
According to research performed by Algerian journalists afterwards, the ensuing radioactive cloud drifted over the village of Mertoutek, 60 kilometres distant.
Seventeen people died shortly afterwards. Many in Mertoutek remain ill.
On dismantling the bases before handing them over the Algerian army in 1967, everything went into the sand. From the detritus of everyday military life, to material known to have been contaminated by the blast, such as the planes and tanks used for testing radioactivity, to debris emitted directly from the heart of the blasts themselves. All went under the desert, to be buried still further by the refuse from the Algerian troops who subsequently took over the sites.
For Abdelkrim, 180 kilometres away, the outcome is an everyday reality.
"Our village does have crops and plants and things like that, but when our children eat the food they get diseases," he explains over an uncertain internet connection. "Our babies are born deformed because of the fruits we eat ,fruits that come from the poisoned soil.”
He pauses to allow the translator to work. "I’d say that people in my village live despite all the damage. Of course I would be subjective when I talk about my hometown. One is always nostalgic to the place they were born in. People here are just living peacefully, accepting their lives as they are. They’re attached to the soil, so they would never think of leaving the place."
Footage broadcast by Algerian state television two years ago paints a harrowing portrait of life in the area. Fathers from a village near the test site at Reggane show their children, all born with severe physical or mental impairments as a result of the radioactivity, the clip alleges.
In addition to the shortage of medical supplies, a local doctor, Kheira Harzaoui, tells the channel: "There are so many cases of handicapped foetuses. So many. An incalculable number of abortions and miscarriages."
Eleven years ago, Abdelkrim joined Taourirt, an advocacy group focussed on working with French campaigners, as well as gathering what data remains on the tests.
While not the group’s primary aim, it is hoped some may go towards supporting compensation claims under the 2010 Morin Law offering redress to the victims of French testing in Algeria and Polynesia.
As of last year, galvanised by a coordinated effort from civil society, 1,427 claims had been received from Polynesia. In the last two weeks, thanks to groundbreaking research by several groups including Princeton University, that number could eventually stretch to more than 100,000.
Algeria, in contrast, hampered by a restrictive number of conditions for compensation and the natural barrier that exists between Arabic speakers and a process dominated by the French language, has submitted just 53 claims. Only one has been successful.
Hopes had been high earlier this month that, with the easing of access to the French archives relating to the Algerian war of independence, the nature and precise location of the waste might have been revealed. However, with the savagery of that colonial episode continuing to infect French politics, raking over the country’s toxic legacy in southern Algeria proved a step too far.
"They cited a 2008 law on archives, with its article n°17,on nuclear weapons proliferation," Jean-Marie Collin, one of the authors of an ICAN France report into the issue, said by telephone from Lyon. "Essentially, if they disclose the location of the waste, they claim it could be used to develop weapons.
"If they begin to recognise these locations and the people living nearby who are sick, it could be very damaging," he said, pointing to France’s reluctance to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would open the door for environmental and humanitarian reparations in southern Algeria on a significant scale.
Compounding the issue has been the attitudes of successive Algerian governments who, apart from the occasional angry noise, such as those issued by Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in mid-March, have preferred to focus on the barbarism of French colonisation rather than put in place significant healthcare and humanitarian relief within the area by the tests.
Much of this, Mr Collin said, can be explained by the origin myth that successive Algerian governments continue to peddle; that the country’s military and political forces ejected France wholesale from the country in 1962. To do otherwise, he said, risked examination of a deal that allowed the French to remain and to test weaponry known to be lethal.
"Algiers really has done so little. The whole issue is a big problem for them,” Mr Collin said, the frustration in his voice becoming evident. "Sure, they criticise a lot, but they’ve never really addressed the issue, or taken responsibility for it."
In Tamanrasset, Abdelkrim smiles; he’s heard this before and can be confident he’ll hear it again. "We’re used to the political conversation that changes with the change of circumstances," he says, going on to reference recent French efforts at reconciliation.
"Hope is always there," he says, "I am hopeful and I believe the right thing and truth will come out, eventually."
The Independent has contacted Patric Durel, the French presidential adviser on North Africa and the Middle East, but has yet to receive any response.
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