Diplomatic quarrel between Algeria and France continues. After a rejected expulsion, the incarceration of the writer Boualem Sansal, threats to visas …, this is the question of French nuclear tests conducted in Algeria in the 1960s which resurfaced last week, occasionally Adoption by the Council of the Nation (the equivalent of the Senate) of a law relating to the management, control and elimination of waste, Thursday, January 23.
The Minister of the Environment and the Quality of Life, Nadjiba Djilalisaid after his adoption that France had to “fully assume its historical, moral and legal responsibilities in the elimination of this radioactive waste and recognize the enormous damage it has caused to our country and to the populations of Adrar, reggane, in ekker and other regions “. And that it will be necessary to “include these claims clearly and explicitly in the national environmental legislation in order to guarantee the rights of current and future generations to a healthy and lasting environment”.
“You have to come and clean”
In these regions, France carried out seventeen nuclear tests between 1960 and 1966, the radiation of which had impacts on the health of the inhabitants of these regions and the environment. Algeria has long demanded that France recognize its responsibility in this waste and that it reveals the precise cards of nuclear waste locations. ICAN International Antinuclear Association noted last year that, “after more than 64 years since these tests, France continues to deal with these questions with great confidentiality, by invoking national defense and security secrets. It always refuses to disclose the specific cards which would reveal the locations of nuclear waste And which would make it possible to precisely identify the landfill sites of this waste. ” During a speech on the state of the nation pronounced on December 29 before the Algerian Parliament, the president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, said that “France has become a nuclear power, and left disease in Algeria”. “You have to come and clean, I don’t want your money, I have nothing to do with your money,” he added.
On Thursday, January 23, after the adoption by the Council of the Nation of the text of law relating to the management, control and elimination of waste, the Minister of the Environment and the Quality of Life, Nadjiba Djilali , therefore depressed the nail by specifying that this new law “bears strong messages linked to historical and environmental justice”, evoking “the deleterious effects of nuclear explosions carried out by the colonizer in the south of the country”.
If the Morin law has allowed, since 2010, the compensation of victims of French nuclear tests, according to ICAN France, “French law requires the claimant of compensation to meet criteria that are very difficult to fulfill, to have his victim status “. Thus in 2022, a single Algerian national had been compensated in ten years.