Interview: Nuclear tests in Polynesia

  Posted on September 26, 2022 by beyondnuclearinternational

Hinamoeura Cross wants to “educate and to denuclearize memories”

By Jean-Tenahe FAATAU, outremers 360°

Now in her thirties, Hinamoeura Cross is battling leukemia. It’s an illness she has endured, and which has been part of her life, since she was 25. The leukemia diagnosis served as an electric shock, spurring the Polynesian into activism, and she has not hesitated to speak up ever since at international tribunals to denounce the thirty years of atomic tests and their consequences suffered by her country since 1966. Most recently, Hinamoeura Cross went to Vienna for the meeting on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons organized by ICAN. And during the period when, on July 2, Polynesia commemorates the first of the 193 tests that tore open its sky and lagoons, she describes her commitment, her illness and her fight to “educate and to denuclearize Polynesian memories”.