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July 11, 2005
You Can't Sink a Rainbow
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the sinking of Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship that was bombed by the French intelligence service, with the personal authorization of French president Francois Mitterand -- according to latest revelations:
In its Sunday-Monday edition, daily Le Monde published extracts of a 23-page, handwritten account by Adm. Pierre Lacoste, the former head of DGSE spy agency, in which he says that Mitterrand authorized the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's port.The ship was preparing for a protest at sea against French nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific when the explosion ripped open its hull and the vessel sank. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira died.
The account was published for Sunday's 20-year anniversary of the July 10, 1985, sinking of the ship. Hundreds of people gathered across France to commemorate the sinking and pay tribute to Pereira.
The ship was mined in an Auckland port -- incidentally, the government of New Zealand called the attack the first terrorist incident in the country. (I really would like to know if the indigenous people of New Zealand believe that to be the first...)
Many people gathered in Paris to commemorate the anniversary, dressed in colors of the rainbow. The commemorators formed a peace sign in front of the Eiffel Tower and unfurled a banner expressing their determination:
The most telling sign of nature's own determination, perhaps the only hope we have against our incredible, growing destructive capacity, however, was Rainbow Warrior herself, now an "artificial" reef, and a home to many at the bottom of the sea:
So maybe there is hope, if not for necessarily for us. But today is a day of many anniversaries, and hope is not the word that comes to mind when I think of Fatima Budic, whose 14 year old son was killed ten years ago in Srebrenica, and whose 16 year old son and husband have never been found.
How long before "never again" becomes nothing more than an ad slogan for this or that product?
Posted by zeynep at July 11, 2005 08:21 PM