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Media battle

starts ahead

of French test

PAPEETE, (Tahiti): The French government and Greenpeace opened a media war in Papeete on Tuesday, with rival press booths and news briefings to explain their version of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

France fired the first shot when local morning television ran a film showing French Minister for Overseas Territories Jean Jacques de Peretti scuba diving in the lagoon at Mururoa atoll, France's main nuclear test site, a few days ago.

Peretti was shown 40 metres (120 feet) underwater at the site of France's last nuclear test in 1991, holding a radioactivity meter made by a New Zealand anti-test activist.

He told viewers the radioactivity in the lagoon was "less than under the Eiffel Tower and much less than in Sydney".

The environmental group Greenpeace fired the second volley in a small apartment overlooking Papeete harbour, where it officially opened its media centre to hold daily briefings until the first test.

Some 30 journalists from Britain, Europe, Japan and Australia, packed like sardines into a small loungeroom to hear Greenpeace was now "on standby" to move on Mururoa.

"We are out there, we are ready to go, we are closely watching the scenery to fish for any indication that the test is imminent," said Thomas Schultz, coordinator for Greenpeace's international nuclear disarmament campaign.

France has said it will detonate up to eight nuclear devices between September and May 1996.

Greenpeace also issued a book, "Testimonies -- Witnesses of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific", with a Paul Gaugin-style picture of two topless Tahitian women, one wearing a gas mask, on the cover.

The book contained interviews with people who worked on either Mururoa or nearby Fangataufa atolls. One testimony is titled "The dead are placed in metal coffins", another "He was scarcely recognisable as a human being".

According to French high commission officials there are some 40 television crews in French Polynesia and up to 150 photographers and print and radio journalists. One media group has occupied the whole wing of a hotel. And more are coming.

A few blocks from the Greenpeace office, down a small, heavily congested street, the French military swung open its media centre on Tuesday morning.-Reuter