On November 10th, 2023, the European Court of Human rights also called Strasbourg rejected claims of compensation of relatives of victims who died as a result of the nuclear tests carried out by France in the Algerian Sahara and in Polynesia. These people, who include three widows and their children, hoped to be compensated for damages caused by the death of their loved ones after exposure to ionizing radiation. Unfortunately for them, the so-called Court of European Human Rights dismissed their claims because of timing. According to the Court, their decision was justified by the statute of limitations. The court highlighted the fact that the 2010 Morin law regulating compensation for illnesses related to nuclear testing does not include relatives of victims, because common law rules on liability must apply with a limitation after four years. The court estimated that at least four years have passed between this first request and the new one, which is why it issued a ruling of prescription. The plaintiff’s lawyer has however said that the families will continue to fight.

When it comes to human rights, Europe and the West like to pitch themselves as the number one defenders but as Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame started, they are the biggest abusers of human rights and we have seen this play over and over again. When a third-world country, say from Africa commits what the West deems as a violation of human rights, they are always at the forefront looking for ways to punish that country. However, when they are the ones who violate human rights, they look for ways to get away with it, and 99 percent of the time they succeed. Isn’t this denial of compensation claims by families of the victims of France’s nuclear testing in Algeria, a violation of human rights? Such hypocrisy.

But this is not the first time that the families of Algerian victims of French nuclear testing have demanded compensation and have been denied.

It all began on February 13th, 1960, when France tested its first nuclear bomb in the Tanezrouft area, a portion of the Sahara that straddles Algeria and Mali, some 30 miles south of Reggane. Called blue jerboa, after the left hue of the tricolor French flag and a small rodent living in the Sahara, the nuclear bomb had a blast capacity of 70 kilotons — or more than four times the strength of Little Boy, the U.S. bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The first question is why did France decide to test its nuclear bomb on Algerian soil and not in France. Didn’t they know that there would be grave consequences for the citizens? Obviously, they did but couldn’t care less because Algeria was just a colony at the time and therefore its people were insignificant.

Now, just 45 minutes after the atomic bomb was detonated, President Charles de Gaulle sent a very interesting message to his army minister. The message reads “Hoorah for France. This morning she is stronger and prouder. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you and those who have achieved this magnificent success” Can you imagine this? The detonation of the plutonium-filled bomb and the subsequent 16 explosions of nuclear weapons in Algeria, whose effect is still felt till today was just for France to show that it had power and development.

While President Charles de Gaulle was busy being excited, the atmosphere on the ground where the explosion took place was anything but that. The bomb had been placed on top of a 100m-tall tower before the explosion. Witnesses recount feeling the ground shake and, when permitted to face the blast, seeing a gigantic mushroom cloud. The extreme temperatures near the blast transformed the sand into black shards. And guess what, the detonation of such a powerful weapon in south-western Algeria was justified by General Charles Ailleret, who was in charge of the operation and said “the total absence of all signs of life” was “essential in choosing the site”

However, just dozens of, there were more than 6000 inhabitants living in the town of Reggane. France can’t possibly say they were not aware, can they? Within two years after France tested the first nuclear bomb and despite the outrages, France still went on to test four nuclear bombs above ground in Tanezrouft. Even after Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, at the end of an eight-year revolutionary war that left hundreds of thousands dead, the French maintained a military presence in the region and tested 13 nuclear bombs underground, in a facility beneath the Hoggar mountains, 400 miles southeast of Reggane. But even the underground tests caused pollution.

During the detonation of the bomb known as Beryl, for example, radioactive matter was spewed into the atmosphere because the underground shaft at the blast site was not properly sealed. As the explosion shook the mountain range above, monitors quickly urged the officials away from the zone as the bomb had opened fissures in the mountain and nuclear waste seeped into the air. You can imagine how disastrous that has been for the inhabitants living in that area. France finally halted testing in Algeria and shifted its operation to French Polynesia. As they left, they buried a range of contaminated objects throughout the two areas — metal from remote-controlled towers that activated the bombs, engine parts from planes that flew into Gerboise Bleue’s mushroom cloud to gather radiation data and military-grade trucks placed in the blast radius to act as barometers of its power. But Saharan winds later swept away the sand covering these nuclear tombs.

Southern Algerians, the vast majority of whom were never informed by the French about residual radiation hazards and in some cases, the testing dates, began stripping the items for resources. According to Larbi Benchiha, a French-Algerian journalist, “the fact that people were not aware of the dangers of this material for years is criminal. Reports, including a pair of decade-old documentaries by Benchiha suggest the testing left an indelible scar on local communities. Unaware of the danger, they collected once-buried scrap metal uncovered by desert winds and turned them into jewelry and kitchen utensils.

It took about a decade before the first medical issues erupted across the area and they continue to this day. These medical issues include “Babies born with atrophied limbs; cancers of the liver, stomach, and skin; and cases of temporary blindness among those who saw the brutal flash of light as it ripped through the Maghreb at about 6:30 a.m. “Many of those who were contaminated have already passed away due to unknown medical causes. They were told they had rare illnesses but they didn’t really know the specific nature of their illness,” Altogether, between 27,000 to 60,000 people from communities surrounding the test sites were affected.

Dear fellow Africans, doesn’t this count as crimes against humanity? Of course, it does but was France sanctioned for it? The answer is No. They were only criticized which led the French administration in 2010 to set up a compensation plan for victims of its nuclear testing campaigns in Algeria and French Polynesia, which set aside approximately $11 million to be divided among recipients. This compensation plan was passed under the Morin law that came with some conditions. The law required claimants to have been residents of the region while the tests were taking place and only recognised certain illnesses. Victims have to prove they meet a number of criteria to be approved. They need to have been diagnosed with one of 18 radiation-associated diseases, mostly cancers, and be able to demonstrate that they spent time in a specific area delineated by CIVEN with latitude and longitude coordinates. Then they have to estimate monetary values that correspond to how much the suffering has harmed their health and professional life. This meant that a lot of victims did not qualify.

Out of more than 1,600 claims filed under a decade-old French compensation law that finally acknowledged health problems from the tests, only 51 have come from Algeria, according to France’s nuclear compensation commission, CIVEN. According to the CIVEN Director Ludovic Gerin, the reason for this is that most of the Algerian claims did not meet the compensation requirement. So, for a grave mistake made by France, victims of the nuclear blast still had to meet some requirements which a lot of them could not meet. It’s obvious that France doesn’t truly want to pay the compensation, else there would not be any conditions to be met.

What France did to Algeria both in testing nuclear bombs and denying victims of the nuclear blast is a crime against humanity. It is time for them to be held accountable for it but who will?

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