Alexander Gillespie: Ship's bombing galvanised Kiwis

Crew member Fernando Pereira was killed when two French secret service agents planted two bombs on the Rainbow Warrior which was moored in Auckland.

Opinion

Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Alexander Gillespie was a Greenpeace volunteer when it happened

For two days before the Rainbow Warrior was destroyed, I and two other student volunteers were painting it in preparation for the next leg of its journey in the South Pacific, to protest about nuclear testing by the French. The problem was that public interest in the voyage was minimal.

New Zealand had been declared nuclear free the year before and people were tired of protest. Then two limpet mines changed everything.

We were not naive to terror. Our first suicide bomber, Neil Roberts, had exploded in 1982 and Ernie Abbott, our first victim of a bomb, died in 1984. The Rainbow Warrior was different.

In New Zealand, non-violent protesters expected to be locked up and abused, not murdered as was the fate of Fernando Pereira. I remember being in the Greenpeace office the day after the bombing, trying to work out what to do and no one knew what was appropriate. Eventually some of us were sent down to the wharf with a charity box, and we just stood there, silent in front of the vessel which was half submerged in Auckland harbour, trying to understand what had happened, and what would happen next.

When it became apparent that the terrorism had been committed by France, I was dumbstruck. Most of the people on the Rainbow Warrior were visitors to our land. Our hospitality and our sovereignty had been violated by professional saboteurs from a nation whose war cemeteries were full of New Zealand soldiers who had died defending their liberty.

The anger I felt from this was matched by the recognition that none of our other allies, especially the United States, came to our assistance or spoke out loudly about what happened. We were being punished for being nuclear free.

When we refused to hand back the two terrorists we had captured, we faced insurmountable trade threats from France. This was the point that New Zealand entered adulthood. We had to go it alone on an issue that came to galvanise all Kiwis. A deal was cut. The terrorists were released, an apology was issued and a compensation fund established. Even then, the French cheated on the terms of the deal, releasing the agents from their detention prematurely.

Three decades on, I look back and wonder about what was achieved.

Ironically, the terrorism was positive for our identity as Kiwis, our independence as a country, and even Greenpeace benefited from the exposure and public empathy that came with the killing and destruction.

The nuclear testing in the Pacific, which was the point about the visit of the Rainbow Warrior in the first place, eventually stopped in the mid-1990s when the Cold War came to an end. Environmentally, too, we scored some small victories in the developed world, at a time when there were only 4.8 billion people on the planet.

We learned to forgive France and rebuild our friendship, after learning that politics and people are very different and very few French people condoned the activity of their government. We have remained nuclear free.

The Utopian days of that post Cold War period are gone. There are 7.3 billion of us on the planet and we do not live happily together. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was at three minutes to midnight in 1985, is back at three minutes to midnight in 2015. Only now, we have the posturing by Russia to worry about, and the proliferation of weapons to new nuclear states and the risks of nuclear terrorism.

Although it was foreseeable that Anzus would survive, it was not foreseeable we would end up fighting religious lunatics who threaten to destabilise the entire Middle East, as part of the price for being in some type of amorphous club, outside of the auspice of the United Nations.

Terms such as climate change, ozone depletion or mass species extinction were not even in our vocabulary 30 years ago. No one would have imagined we would only have 55 Maui dolphins left, that many of our fresh water ways would be seriously threatened with pollutants, or the traffic in Auckland would be comparable to the third world.

Even in my darkest moments in 1985 following the bombing, when I was trying to fathom what would happen next, it never occurred to me that the challenges ahead were only just beginning.

• Alexander Gillespie is a professor of law at the University of Waikato.