Agency For Rehabilitation Of Colonial France’s Nuclear Test Sites In Algeria

The Government has wrapped up the legal drafting of the National Agency for the rehabilitation, organization and functioning of the ancient sites of French nuclear tests in the south of the country, a step that renews the discourse about the experiments that colonial France conducted in the Algerian Sahara, as their catastrophic repercussions have persisted up to the present time.

The Minister of Energy and Mines, Mohamed Arkab, during a planned cabinet meeting, to be chaired by Prime Minister Abdelaziz Djerad, will expound a draft executive decree that includes the establishment, organization and functioning of the National Agency for the Rehabilitation of Old Sites for French Nuclear Experiments in Southern Algeria, according to the initial formula of this new structure as the agency’s mission is supposed to be “purely technical”.

The Government’s new move to create this agency coincided with the escalating controversy over the report drafted by historian Benjamin Stora, about memory, which neglected the file of the nuclear tests carried out by colonial France in the Algerian Sahara, prompting the director of the Armament Observatory in France, Patrice Bouveret, to express regret at not seeing Stora mentioning in his report “great significance” for the appalling health consequences for the residents of Reggane and Tamanrasset, victims of the French nuclear tests.

“We regret that the effects of the 17 nuclear tests carried out by France during the Algerian liberation war and the first five years of independence were not given more importance, as Benjamin Stora only dealt with the issue of nuclear waste left behind by France,” Patrice Bouveret said in a statement to the Algerian news agency APS.

Algeria renewed its request to France to pay compensation for its disastrous nuclear tests. This issue is one of the crimes committed by French colonialism, and it is one of the most sensitive files within what is known as the “pain of memory” shared between the two countries.

Previously, Foreign Affairs Minister Sabri Boukadoum said, on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the conduct of the first 17 nuclear tests in the Sahara: “On this day in 1960, colonial France carried out the first nuclear explosion in the Reggane region with a force of 70 kilotons, which is equivalent to three to four times the load of the Hiroshima bomb. This explosion had catastrophic radiological repercussions, with its untold damage to the local population and the environment still persisting today”.

He added, in this regard, that these health consequences cannot be considered a problem whose management rests with the Algerian health services only, as the concern mainly lies in the implementation of the numerous recommendations listed in the Stora report”.

Although in May 2009 the French Parliament issued a law named after the then Minister of Defense, Hervé Morin, regarding the payment of compensation to the victims of nuclear tests in Algeria and the Polynesia region in the Pacific Ocean, and a budget of 10 million euros was allocated during 2009 to compensate the victims, but the amount was considered by the associations, that defend the victims, as “modest” given the large number of those people affected.