Flotilla honours Rainbow memory

By HELEN TUNNAH

Seventeen years ago the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior sailed into the Waitemata Harbour on her way to protest against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Three days later, on July 10, 1985, French secret agents bombed her at Marsden Wharf, killing a Portuguese photographer.

Yesterday, on the anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior's arrival, another Greenpeace protest flotilla comprising five vessels left Auckland, sailing for the Tasman Sea to intercept a shipment of rejected nuclear fuel being taken from Japan back to Britain.

Two more vessels, held up in the Bay of Plenty by squally weather, were to join the fleet today at Opua, and protest boats have also set sail from Vanuatu and Australia.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Bunny McDiarmid said it would take two to three weeks to reach the middle of the Tasman and a possible rendezvous with the two armed British ships carrying the uranium and plutonium oxide fuel.

She said a symbolic chain of protest would be formed across the ocean.

The shipments have proved intensely embarrassing for Britain's state-owned nuclear power company BNFL. Its two ships are carrying potentially weapons-usable material first shipped to Japan three years ago but now rejected after revelations that BNFL falsified documentation about it. Prime Minister Helen Clark, who visited the flotilla before it left yesterday, said the ships' movements would be monitored by Air Force Orions, which would also monitor the safety of the protest flotilla.

While the British and Japanese Governments have been told the ships are not welcome, under international law the Government cannot ban them from entering New Zealand waters.

The shipments are the first since the September 11 attacks on the United States, sparking fears they pose terrorist as well as environmental risks.

Henk Haazen was on board the Rainbow Warrior 17 years ago, and yesterday set sail on board the Tiama.

He said it was astonishing to still be protesting over nuclear issues 17 years on.

"I would like to think that we're winning," he told the Herald.

One of the seven boats leaving New Zealand is flying the French flag.

It has Pascal and Valerie Bussereau and their three teenage children on board.

Speaking through an interpreter, Mr Bussereau said French people were also concerned about nuclear shipments.

"We were sailing around the world and we welcomed an occasion to show our unhappiness about nuclear shipments," he said.

"We always talk about this issue but we hardly do anything. So we thought, let's do something."

The youngest protester is Jack Blomfield-Barnell, 9, who is sailing with his parents, Rick Blomfield and Robin Barnell, of Russell, on the 15m sloop Phantom.