[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 143 (Thursday, September 14, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H8912]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      FRENCH COLONIALISM IN TAHITI IN THE EVE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

  (Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Mr. Speaker, despite international pleading, 
protests, and appeals, France resumed nuclear testing in the South 
Pacific on September 5, 1995, at Morurua Atoll, exploding a nuclear 
bomb 10 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Sixty 
miles away, 3 days before, on the island of Tureia, Tahitian children 
splashed and played in the ocean waves, unaware that a man named Chirac 
would forever mar their innocent way of life.
  Chirac's decision to promote nuclear proliferation, at the expense of 
a peaceful people, is a chilling commentary on man's inhumanity to man. 
If fact, it is an atrocity, a crime against humanity, not unlike the 
French Government's earlier decision to forcibly deport 75,000 of its 
own French citizens to Nazi concentration camps where it is said that 
only 1,000 of those deported survived.
  France's resumption of nuclear testing, especially in waters other 
than its own, is nothing less than a classic example of rancid 
colonialism; an old world ideology politicized by dominant cultures as 
a means to marginalize, oppress, and make expendable the lives of some 
200,000 Polynesian Tahitians. Every enlightened French citizen should 
be ashamed that such atrocity reigns in the hands of its current 
leader, President Chirac.

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