Rainbow Warrior

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Rainbow Warrior is the name of a series of ships operated by Greenpeace. The first ship was sunk by the French foreign intelligence agency (DGSE) in Auckland harbour, New Zealand, on 10 July 1985. The current ship using the name was launched in 1989.

1 The first Rainbow Warrior
- 1.1 The bombing
2 Rainbow Warrior in the arts
3 The current Rainbow Warrior
4 The name
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] The first Rainbow Warrior

The first Rainbow Warrior, a craft of 40 metres and 418 tonnes, was originally the MAFF trawler Sir William Hardy, launched in 1955. She was acquired for £40,000 and was renovated over four months, then re-launched on April 29, 1978 as Rainbow Warrior. She was named after a Native American prophecy that stated "When the world is sick and dying, the people will rise up like Warriors of the Rainbow....". The engines were replaced in 1981 and the ship was converted with a ketch rig in 1985.

Rainbow Warrior was used as a support vessel for many Greenpeace protest activities against seal hunting, whaling and nuclear weapons testing during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In early 1985 she was in the Pacific campaigning against nuclear testing. At the beginning of the year she evacuated some Marshall Islanders who were living on an atoll polluted by radioactivity from past American nuclear tests at the Pacific Proving Grounds.

She travelled to New Zealand to lead a flotilla of yachts protesting against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. During previous nuclear tests at Mururoa, protest ships had been boarded by French commandos after "trespassing" into the shipping exclusion zone around the atoll. For the 1985 tests Greenpeace intended to monitor the impact of nuclear tests and place protesters on the island to do some monitoring, in violation of the law. The French Government infiltrated the Canada-based organisation and discovered these plans.

[edit] The bombing

Main article: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior

The Rainbow Warrior, then captained by Peter Willcox, was sabotaged and sunk just before midnight NZST (1pm BST, 8am EDT) on July 10, 1985 by two explosive devices attached to the hull by operatives of French intelligence (DGSE). One of the twelve people on board, photographer Fernando Pereira, drowned when he attempted to retrieve his equipment.

The New Zealand Police immediately initiated a murder inquiry into the sinking. With the assistance of the New Zealand public and an intense media focus the police quickly established the movements of all of the bombers. On July 12 two of the six bombers, posing as Swiss tourists and carrying Swiss Passports, who had operated under orders were found and arrested. At trial they pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were eventually sentenced to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment. Most of the others were identified and three were interviewed by the New Zealand Police on Norfolk Island to where they had escaped in the yacht Ouvea. They were not arrested due to lack of evidence that would satisfy the Australian authorities. Ouvea subsequently sailed, ostensibly for Nouméa, but was scuttled en route with the personnel transfering to a French naval vessel. Most of the terrorists remained in French government service.

In September 1985 the French minister of defense Charles Hernu resigned and prime minister Laurent Fabius admitted, on television, that agents of the French secret service had sunk the boat on orders.

After the conviction and imprisonment of the two French agents France threatened to block New Zealand exports to the European Economic Community (EU) unless the two were released. In June 1986, in a political deal with the then Prime Minister of New Zealand David Lange and presided over by the United Nations Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, France agreed to pay compensation of NZ$13 million (USD$6.5 million) to New Zealand and 'apologise', in return for which Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur would be detained at the French military base on Hao atoll for three years. However, the two spies had both returned to France by May 1988, after less than two years on the atoll. Mafart having ostensibly travelled to France for medical treatment (without returning at the conclusion at the treatment) and Prieur having become pregnant after her husband had been allowed to join her.

In 1987, under heavy international pressure, the French government paid $8.16 million compensation to Greenpeace. In 2005 Admiral Pierre Lacoste, head of DGSE at the time, admitted that the death weighed heavily on his conscience and said that the aim of the operation had not been to kill. He acknowledged the existence of three teams: the crew of the yacht, reconnaissance and logistics (those successfully prosecuted), plus a two-man team that carried out the actual bombing and whose identities have never been officially confirmed [1].

In September 2006 the French newspaper Le Parisien identified Gérard Royal, brother to Ségolène Royal the leading Socialist presidential candidate, as being the person who actually planted the limpet mines. On the twentieth anniversary of the sinking it was also revealed that the French president François Mitterrand, himself, had given authorisation for the bombing.[2].

Also, in 2005 following release of UK government papers, it was confirmed that the French government tried to use French media to imply that the UK's MI6 was involved in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior [3].

Rainbow Warrior was refloated on 21 August 1985 and moved to a naval harbour for forensic examination. Although the hull had been recovered the damage was too extensive for economic repair and the vessel was scuttled in Matauri Bay in the Cavalli Islands, New Zealand on 2 December 1987, to serve as a dive wreck and fish sanctuary. The move was seen as a fitting end for the vessel. Indeed, the hull is now covered with a large colony of vari-coloured sea anemones.[4]

The original masts of the Rainbow Warrior currently stand outside the Dargaville Museum.

[edit] Rainbow Warrior in the arts

The band Tiger Lillies wrote a song, Bumhole, about French nuclear testing in Polynesia and explosion of the Rainbow Warrior.
The song 'Rainbow Warrior' is sung by 1980s hard rock band Europe.
The first Rainbow Warrior is commemorated in a song, also called Rainbow Warrior, by Cobalt 60 on their album "Twelve", released in 1998.
New Zealand artist Don McGlashan wrote a song called Anchor Me in the mid-1980s, possibly influenced by the Rainbow Warrior bombing. In July 2005, some artists on the current music scene collaborated to remake the song to commemorate the bombing.
New Zealand band The Bats have a song called Green about Greenpeace and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior on their 1993 album Silver Beet.
The glam metal band White Lion's album Big Game included a track named "Little Fighter" (music video here) about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
Argentinean metal band Rata Blanca wrote a song to honour the ship called Guerrero del Arco Iris which is the translation to Spanish of the ship's name.
In a story arc of the comic strip Bloom County the penguin Opus, on a quest to find his mother, mistakes the Rainbow Warrior for a cruise ship to Antarctica.
Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific (1989), by Pacific author David Robie, has several chapters about the Rainbow Warrior and French military strategies in the region from an indigenous Pacific independence struggles perspective. [5]
An updated memorial edition of the 1986 book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, by shipboard author David Robie, reporting in text, photographs and cartoons on the final nuclear-free mission to Rongelap and Moruroa Atoll, was published in July 2005. [6]
Geffen Records released a double album, Greenpeace Rainbow Warriors, in 1989 and included songs from various noteworthy artists such as U2, INXS, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, and Peter Gabriel.
German speedfolk band Fiddler's Green has a song Raindow Warrior, devoted to the ship's history, on their 1995 album King Shepherd
Dominion of the Sword by British folk singer Martin Carthy. From album Right of Passage.
Faroese folk metal band Týr mythicized the ships' history in Rainbow Warrior on the album Eric the Red (2003).

[edit] The current Rainbow Warrior

The current Rainbow Warrior is a three-masted schooner (sailing ship) that was built from the hull of the deep sea fishing ship Grampian Fame. Built in Yorkshire and launched in 1957 she was originally 44 metres long and powered by steam. She was extended to 55.2 m in 1966. Greenpeace gave the vessel new masts, a gaff rig, new engine and a number of environmentally low-impact systems to handle waste, heating and hot water. She was officially launched in Hamburg on July 10, 1989, the fourth anniversary of the sinking of her predecessor.

[edit] The name

The name Rainbow Warrior comes from the book Warriors of the Rainbow by William Willoya and Vinson Brown, (1962, Naturegraph Publishers). According to The Greenpeace Story (Prentice Hall) Greenpeace plankholder Bob Hunter found a copy of the Warriors of the Rainbow and first read it 1971 during a voyage on rough seas of the North Pacific where the name Greenpeace was also conceived. The book describes what the authors say are Hopi prophecies of warriors who would be mankind's key to survival. The legend says these warriors would appear at a dark time when the fish would die in the streams, the birds would fall from the air, the waters would be blackened, and the trees would no longer be; mankind as we know it would all but cease to exist. Widely repeated accounts of the legend recorded in the Naturegraph book say "They will be called The Warriors of the Rainbow, Protectors of the Environment." Other accounts attribute the legend to a Cree woman, as told by a non-enrolled Oklahoma woman who says she is of Cherokee heritage.[7][8][9][10][11][12]