Paris’ Horridly Short Memory : Will the government of France never learn?

Ten years ago, French agents sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand, killing a photographer on board. The result was an international black eye for France, which was embarrassed into apologizing and paying reparations to Greenpeace. The environmental group’s moral status soared. The French minister of defense resigned, and the chief of the secret service was fired.

Now, with an unerring nose for bad P.R., France has again outraged the world, this time through an absurdly heavy-handed operation to protect its newly revived nuclear testing program against intrusion by Greenpeace. Sunday, on the 10th anniversary of the Auckland crime, 150 French navy commandos stormed the 180-foot Rainbow Warrior II as it steamed into France’s 12-mile exclusion zone around the Moruroa atoll test site in French Polynesia.

Heavily armed, black-masked commandos found 30 unarmed Greenpeace crew members. With their overpowering force, the French could merely have boarded the ship quietly and escorted it out of the area. Instead, commanders ordered a fierce tear-gas attack--even as French radio listeners heard it all on a phone call from the ship. The commandos reportedly smashed up parts of the ship and removed 11 crew members for a time. At least there were no deaths, so Frenchmen on official duty will not again have to be shamed by manslaughter charges, as those who sank the ship in New Zealand were.

But once again there is international outrage. South Pacific nations angrily denounced the assault, as well as France’s plans for eight underground nuclear tests. A long dormant debate over nuclear power has been revived in France. European neighbors are mortified.

President Jacques Chirac, in lifting his nation’s moratorium on testing, said that France needed to perform certain technical tests before signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that outlaws all underground testing. Let us hope that the United States, which has so far expressed only mild “regrets” over French testing, will now be emboldened by Sunday’s clumsy mistake to pressure our longtime ally to join the community of civilized nations when it comes to nuclear bombs.