New York City - The Nuclear-Free Future Award

When Bruno Barrillot received the news that he would be one of
this year’s Nuclear-Free Future Award laureates, he reacted in
customary fashion: modest, self-effacing, puzzled by the jury’s
selection. His decades of work and activism were a matter of
course, nothing exemplary. Barrillot turned seventy this past
spring, a white-haired, thin Frenchman of diminutive height
with the spirited, intelligent gaze of a rebel. Few of Barrillot’s
countrymen know who he is – the ‚Little Priest’ (his nickname)
prefers to influence the course of affairs from behind the scenes,
stepping only into the spotlight as a messenger of the outcomes
he advocates. Were it not for Barrillot’s years of activism
and brilliant lobbying
efforts in Paris, the
recent French law to
compensate victims
of nuclear testing would almost certainly never have become
a reality.
Indigenous peoples of the Pacific were the frontline victims
of nuclear weapons testing by France, Britain and the
United States. The lonely atolls of the central and south Pacific
were considered ‚empty’ spaces perfect for optimizing nuclear
payloads. A French Defense Ministry report says France conducted
46 atmospheric nuclear tests from 1966-1974 and 147
underground nuclear tests from 1975-1996, with most of the
testing occurring at Mururoa. As recently as 2003, then-President
Jacques Chirac told a Tahitian newspaper Les Nouvelles de
Tahiti that the atomic tests had “no effect on health”. Against
a backdrop of island protest – Tahiti lies some 750 nautical
miles southeast of Mururoa – Chirac said: “There are no health
consequences, either in the short-term or long-term.
With the French nuclear testing compensation law, one of
Bruno Barrillot’s long-lived dreams became reality: the legislation
amounts to a confession of guilt – La Grande Nation’s
nuclear warhead testing program had indeed endangered the
health and lives of the nearly 150,000 people living in the
Pacific region. The French legislation recanted decades of disinformation
and whitewash.
Bruno Barrillot’s course in life was changed radically in
July of 1985 by the Rainbow Warrior affair. French foreign
intelligence services sabotaged the Greenpeace flagship in the
New Zealand harbor of Auckland in order to prevent the vessel
from undertaking a protest voyage to Mururoa. Two explosions
Solutions
10
sunk the ship; after the first underwater mine went off, a Dutch
photographer, Fernando Pereira, raced aboard to salvage his
equipment. The second charge sent the Rainbow Warrior to the
bottom, drowning Pereira.
Two French agents arrested by the New Zealand police on
passport fraud and immigration charges later pleaded guilty to
sinking the ship and committing manslaughter. Angered, his
trust in the government badly shaken, Barrillot, together
with Jean-Luck Thierry, nuclear expert of Greenpeace France,
and Patrice Bouveret, quickly founded the “Center for Documentation
and Research on Peace and Conflict” (CDRPC).
The mission of the organization, Barrillot tells us, is “to open
the public to alternatives to the atom by facilitating access to
concrete information conveying the attendant risks to health
and the environment.” Headquartered in Lyon, CDRPC has
developed a reputation as an expert independent research institution
on issues of nuclear policy and national security.
Earlier in life Bruno Barrillot had worked as a Priest
specializing in helping conscientious objectors negotiate the
French legal system. But when French bishops issued a collective
statement characterizing the government’s policy of
nuclear deterrence as “acceptable”, Barrillot left the church to
begin life anew as a Lyon journalist writing for the leftist publication
Libération. He was in his late forties.
On June 13, 1995, after Mr. Chirac incited global protests
by announcing that he would break a three-year moratorium
and resume nuclear testing, Barrillot’s journalistic focus
shifted towards investigating the living conditions of French
Polynesians. During his many expeditions to the islands of the
region, Barrillot assembled dossiers of personal interviews, weaving
many accounts into his CDRPR reports. One could say that
Barrillot’s research jump-started two victims of nuclear testing
organizations: in Papeete, Tahiti, Association Moruroa e tatou,
and in Lyon, Association de veterans des essais nucléaires.
Bruno Barrillot was the Director of CDRPR until 2005.
Since then he has worked throughout Polynesia on behalf of
regional goverments to help uncover the true legacy of nuclear
testing. Presently, in collaboration with an international network
of experts, Barrillot is performing lobbyist actions in a
fresh direction: to come up with a set of international standards
to parse the real consequences of nuclear weapons testing. The
'Little Priest' entertains no thought of retirement.