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Paris and Wellington
Key documents in the inquiry into the sinking of the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, were missing, reports said last night, as the beleaguered French Government tried to answer the remaining questions in the affair.
The new Defence Minister Mr Paul Quiles discovered the gap in the dossier the morning after his appointment, according to senior department sources, reported on the Europe 1 radio station.
The documents apparently refer to the details of financing the operation and Mr Quiles immediately ordered that the material should be reassembled. However the defence ministry did not confirm this.
Even without the missing documents, Mr Laurent Fabius, the Prime Minister, who on Sunday admitted that French military frogmen had been ordered to sink the vessel, said yesterday that he was sorry that the affair had affected relations with New Zealand.
This fell short of the New Zealand Prime Minister Mr David Lange’s demand that France should apologise for the sinking and accept moral and financial responsibility for the attack. There are, however, signs that France is prepared to do this, and it has moved swiftly towards a conciliatory attitude.
New Zealand, meanwhile, has stepped up its demands for compensation. Mr Lange said that his government would lodge an unprecedented claim for compensation for ‘an affront to sovereignty,’ as well as reparations for physical losses. New Zealand argues also that the French secret service agents who actually carried out the operation should be tried.
Mr Fabius’s statement on Sunday - that the agents who sank the Rainbow Warrior would be protected because they were just following orders - means that France cannot fulfill New Zealand’s demand for extradition.
‘There is no principle in international law which allowed the French Government to say it was responsible for the bombing, but because the people who did it were acting under orders they could therefore escape justice. This is not war; this is New Zealand in 1985. The defence of acting under orders is clearly inappropriate.’
He added that the sad aspect of the admission of French responsibility ‘is that the bombing is not fortuitous Beau Geste, but instead a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism.’
Twenty years on from the deliberate sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by France, the Guardian’s Paul Brown recalled his time spent on board the vessel before it was attacked.
