Fijian
victims of British nuclear testing in 1958 are to get compensation, according
to Fiji's government. Seventy military personnel were taken to Christmas
Island, a test site in the Pacific, more than 50 years ago.
Deutsche Welle, 27 Jan 2015
Fiji's
government said on Tuesday that military veterans exposed to radiation 56 years
ago or their families are to get compensation for subsequent health problems,
including cancer of the blood.
The Fiji
Sun newspaper quoted the country's National Security and Defense Minister
Timoci Natuva as saying Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama would outline
compensation details on Friday.
Maleli
Naigulegu, now aged 80 and one of the surviving veterans who has campaigned for
decades for assistance, told the Fiji Sun it was "the greatest news."
"At
last my group has been recognized," the former laboratory technician said.
During
British Cold War nuclear testing in 1957 and 1958, some 70 Fijian military
personnel were sent to Christmas Island on board New Zealand naval ships.
The island
is now part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati.
Naigulegu
said the Fijian personnel were not briefed on the purpose of their deployment
to the test zone.
Several
Pacific test zones
Last year,
a lawsuit was filed at the International Court of Justice by another Pacific
nation, the Marshall Islands, where the US conducted 60 nuclear tests between
1946 and 1958.
The
Marshalls, with a population of 70,000, became fully independent in 1986 after
being administered in the past by the United States.
The lawsuit
seeks to hold the US and eight other nuclear-weapon nations accountable for
breaching or allowing violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Nuclear
weapons have been used twice - at Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan by the US,
near the close of World War Two in the Pacific region.
Several thousand
tests
From 1946
until the 1990s nuclear powers conducted more than 2,000 nuclear tests
worldwide.
A French 'test' over Mururoa in 1971 |
The United
State's largest was at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1954. The former Soviet
Union's largest test "Tsar Bomba" took place in 1961.
France
conducted tests in French Polynesia in the 1970s and 1990s, prompting strong
protests from New Zealand, Australia and environmental rights group Greenpeace.
Last year,
remote southern Australian land used by Britain to test atomic bombs in the
1950s and 1960s was handed back to its Aboriginal owners, the Maralinga
Tjarutja, after attempts to decontaminate it.
Around
16,300 atomic bombs remain, held mainly by the US and Russia, despite the
various versions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
Some 70,000
to 80,000 had existed at the height of the Cold War.
ipj/jlw (AFP, IPS)
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