FRANCE was accused last night of using the aircraft carrier that was once the pride of the navy to dump toxic waste on the Third World.
Le Clémenceau, which was decommissioned in 1997, is being towed to an Indian breakers’ yard for the removal of tonnes of dangerous asbestos. But the move has provoked the fury of ecologists, a row between Paris and Egypt and a court case in Delhi.
Environmental groups will today ask the Indian Supreme Court to ban the ship, which would force the French Defence Ministry to tow her home to Toulon, where she started her journey on December 31. On January 5 the court’s monitoring committee on hazardous wastes advised judges to bar the ship from Indian waters on the ground that she violated international environmental treaties.
Le Clémenceau’s journey has already been interrupted twice. On Thursday two Greenpeace activists boarded the ship off the Egyptian coast and climbed its mast. Then she was blocked at the Suez Canal for four days when Egypt said the asbestos constituted toxic waste requiring special authorisation.
Cairo relented only yesterday after President Chirac contacted President Mubarak to plead for the ship to be allowed to continue on her way to the Shree Ram Scrap Vessel breakers’ yard in Alang, Gujarat.
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The French authorities appear determined to get rid of the vessel after an initial attempt to remove the asbestos ended in fiasco.
In 2003 France sold Le Clémenceau to a Spanish scrap merchant on the understanding that she would be decontaminated in Gijon. But when the vessel was spotted heading for Turkey, the French Navy was forced to intervene and reclaim possession.
After an unsuccessful search for an another scrap merchant, Le Clémenceau was returned to Toulon, where the French Defence Ministry says 115 of the 160 tonnes of asbestos aboard were removed. But the head of Technopure, the company responsible for the decontamination, estimates that there are still 70 tonnes of pure asbestos and 1,000 tonnes of materials containing asbestos on board.
Environmentalists say the Alang breakers’ yard is ill-equipped to handle such waste, but the French Defence Ministry insists that the managers there have been trained to French standards.