Jonathan Milne: Unmasked Rainbow Warrior spy should be stripped of her Legion d'honneur medal
Friday, 7 July 2017
OPINION: Most New Zealanders do not remember the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. On July 10, 1985, they were small children, or not even born.
They do not remember the confused horror at the news that two explosions had ripped gashes in the hull of the Greenpeace ship, killing photographer Fernando Pereira while others were lucky to escape alive.
And they do not remember the perversity of the deal struck with the French Government for this abhorrent piece of state-sponsored terrorism: a paltry $13 million compensation, an apology begrudgingly delivered in person years later, and the promise that the only two agents apprehended would serve just three years of their 7 to 10-year prison sentences on the tropical Hao Atoll, a 'Club Med' style military base in French Polynesia.
They do not remember that after just 17 months, Alain Mafart was smuggled home with an alleged stomach condition, a condition that didn't hinder the upwards trajectory of his military career.
**RAINBOW WARRIOR SPECIAL INVESTIGATION:
* Rainbow Warrior spy admits: 'We're the terrorists'
* 32 years after Rainbow Warrior, unrepentant French spy Christine Cabon is found
* Top police investigator: I'd like to talk with Christine Cabon**
They do not remember that France sent over Captain Dominique Prieur's husband as head of security; a few months after the departure of Mafart, she too returned home to France, pregnant. She returned to a hero's welcome, to a promotion and to national honours.
They do not remember our own Government agreeing to this limp slap on the wrist for France, fearful that if we protested it might imperil our lamb and dairy trade with the European Union.
Crime upon crime, indignity on indignity.
Yet maybe there is something to the blissful ignorance of younger New Zealanders, born after 1980. Little is to be achieved by dwelling on old injustices. Just as Greenpeace explains it is celebrating the end of Pacific nuclear-testing and looking to the future; just as Prime Minister Bill English refuses to comment on today's revelations from French undercover agent Christine Cabon lest it sour relations with France; maybe it is time to put the past behind us.
It's hard though, when we discover that Cabon returned home to a Legion d'honneur, one of the highest medals in France; that she was granted a sinecure army desk job, and then a comfortable retirement and no doubt a fat pension. This is the agent who went undercover in Greenpeace and betrayed the trust of those who befriended her, staying late in the office to rifle through plans and schedules to help orchestrate the attack on the Rainbow Warrior.
Today, Cabon's dismissal of New Zealanders as somewhat naive, so far removed from the brutal realities of the world that we cannot understand the security challenges facing Western democracies, is just another insult. 'It's a country where war never happened,' she says. 'For the New Zealand Government and its population, the Rainbow Warrior affair was the first and perhaps the only violent action taken on its soil. For them, it is an exceptional historic event. A friendly country attacked them. For them, it's a trauma.'
The apology extracted from France in the UN-mediated settlement was sullen and churlish. If France wishes to show it genuinely regrets the 1985 bombing, there is one simple and meaningful action it must take: France must strip Christine Cabon and the other Rainbow Warrior saboteurs of their Legion of Honour medals
There is nothing honourable in the cowardly assassination, by combat divers in the dark of night, of a defenceless peace activist in a friendly nation.
Then, we might forget.
Every year at Anzac Day we make a promise to our heroes: We will remember them.
The terrorists who sunk the Rainbow Warrior are no heroes. It would be good to consign these men and women to the ignominy of mere footnotes in history.
We should not remember them.