French authorities acknowledge nuclear tests in Algeria

A Paris court urged the French authorities to recognize its responsibilities in the contamination of the individuals who were based in the areas where nuclear tests took place during the 1960s in the Algerian southern desert.

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• The acknowledgement was done through a judicial order pronounced the day before yesterday on the favor of a former French Soldier Gerard Delac who has been exposed to radiations while on duty in the region of “Regane” causing him skin cancer.
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• But the decision didn’t meet the expectations of the other victims of these experiments, because the court omitted to make a link between nuclear radiations and the different kinds of cancers that hit the French soldiers and the Algerian inhabitants who lived there at the period.
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• Still, observers consider the decision as a step forwards towards the demand for other compensations especially that a departmental chamber has urged the French government to give compensations for French soldiers in the region of Nancy in 2008. This will incite the Algerian authorities to do the same for its citizens who lived in the nuclear struck areas.
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• For his part, the head of the French Veterans Nuclear Victims Association and former soldier Michel Fergie revealed to the French “Le Monde” that some 400 thousand dossiers of former soldiers and their widows are recorded in the different association’s offices.
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• He went on saying that compensation committee has denied Gerard Delac and 11 other soldiers the right for compensation s in 2006.
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