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Two activists who fought for compensation for the victims of nuclear testing were commemorated on Monday in Papeete as Tahiti marks the 51st anniversary of France’s first nuclear weapons test in the Pacific.
A Mass for the victims of radiation was followed by a meeting in the afternoon to also remember the two activists who died in the past year.
One of them, veteran expert Bruno Barrillot, was known as the “Little Priest”
From 1972 to 1985, Barrillot was a priest who worked as chaplain responsible for the Rural Youth Christian Movement in the Diocese of Lyon.
When French bishops issued a collective statement characterising the government’s policy of nuclear deterrence as “acceptable”, Barrillot left the church and became a journalist in Lyon writing for the leftist publication Libération. He was in his late forties.
In 1984 he founded the NGO Arms Observatory and after the French sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in 1985 he focussed on the damage caused by the nuclear tests in the Pacific.
In 2001, with Roland Oldham and John Doom that he founded Moruroa e Tatou, the association of former workers and victims who had been sent to the test sites on the atolls Moruroa and Fangataufa.
He became involved the Tahiti government’ s effort to deal with the aftermath of the French nuclear weapons tests.
But following the return to the power of Gaston Flosse, on 2013, he was dismissed as the head of the territory’s body concerned with the aftermath of the French nuclear weapons tests.
Last year, the government reinstated him.
Barrillot died In March aged 77.
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