BY MALCOLM McALLISTER
AUCKLAND, New Zealand - Following the September 6 protests that greeted Paris's first underground nuclear test in French Polynesia in four years, French riot police targeted a group of proindependence trade unionists with a particularly brutal assault. Six unionists, detained for several months, are facing trials on frame-up charges of involvement in rioting.
Dressed in full combat gear and toting guns, police burst into the offices of the A Tía I Mua union in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, on September 9. They bashed and handcuffed the 16 people who were in the offices and then threw them into a police van. The cops used electric truncheons on the unionists.
At the police station, the labor activists were dragged from the van and forced to kneel with their heads on the concrete for 45 minutes, under orders not to move, talk, or complain. The cops batonned and kicked those who couldn't get into the required position. During their 35 hours in custody the unionists were kicked, punched, and kept awake by sudden noises and music at full volume. The authorities never gave them food or drink. A post office union official, Henri Temaititahia, had to be hospitalized from the assault.
Six of the 16 were held under arrest for several months before being released on bail. Their lawyers lodged 15 claims of cruel and inhumane treatment with the Papeete courts and a claim against the French state was registered with the United Nations Committee on Torture.
A regional antinuclear conference of rail unionists, scheduled to be held in Tahiti, was shifted to Wellington, New Zealand, because of the continued detentions. Forty delegates from the East Japan Railway Workers Union - some of whom lost relatives in the U.S. nuclear destruction of Hiroshima in 1945 - marched to the French Embassy there on November 28 to protest the nuclear testing and the detention of the unionists in Tahiti. On their return to Japan they held a reportback rally of 2,500. The day before their rally one of their officials was beaten and crippled by rightists who favor the rearming of Japan.
Malcolm McAllister is a member of the Engineers Union in Auckland, New Zealand.