AFP

An 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck off the Alaskan peninsula late Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey said, generating small waves but no major tsunami.

The earthquake hit 56 miles (91 kilometers) southeast of the town of Perryville, the USGS said.

The quake struck at 10:15 pm Wednesday (0615 GMT Thursday). Perryville is a small village about 500 miles from Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city.

The US government’s National Tsunami Warning Center immediately issued a tsunami alert for south Alaska and the Alaskan peninsula.

It initially warned of hazardous waves over the next three hours.

But after nearly three hours the maximum height detected by the center was eight inches (21 centimeters) and it downgraded the tsunami threat alerts to advisories.

Tsunami warning sirens had been broadcast across Kodiak, an island with a population of about 6,000 people, along Alaska’s coastline.

Small waves hit the coast of Kodiak, according to a broadcaster on local radio station KMXT. She said authorities had lifted evacuation orders, with no reports of any damage.

“This is the largest earthquake to happen in the Alaska region since 1965,” Michael West, state seismologist with the Alaska Earthquake Center, told Alaska Public Media. 

Alaska is part of the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.

Alaska was hit by a 9.2-magnitude earthquake in March 1964, the strongest ever recorded in North America.

It devastated Anchorage and unleashed a tsunami that slammed the Gulf of Alaska, the US west coast, and Hawaii.

More than 250 people were killed by the quake and the tsunami.

A 7.5 magnitude earthquake also caused tsunami waves in Alaska’s southern coast in October, but no casualties were reported.

As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smouldering forests from burning even more.

Members of Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometre (three-mile) trench they had dug at the edge of the village of Byas-Kyuel to keep an approaching wildfire at bay.

Wearing respirators against the acrid smoke, the men lit strips of rubber tyre they hung from sticks, then tapped them onto the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start a controlled burn.

The team has lost track of how many blazes they have tackled since late May — mostly successfully, sometimes not — as Yakutia suffers through yet another ever-worsening wildfire seasons.

“We held one property for eight days but it burned in the end because the tractors never got to us,” Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they use shovels to dig trenches instead.

But even more than equipment, the 35-year-old brigade leader has another urgent plea: “We need more people.”

Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of Yakutia’s swampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia’s annual fire season.

Vast areas of Russia have been suffering from heatwaves and droughts driven by climate change in recent years, with numerous temperature records set.

It is the third straight year that Yakutia — Russia’s coldest region and bordering the Arctic Ocean — has seen wildfires so vicious that they have nearly overwhelmed the forest protection service. 

– Limited manpower –

The group of about 250 full-time staffers and 150 summer contract workers, who track the fires by air and drop in by parachute or on off-road trucks, is responsible for a region roughly five times the size of France.

Their goal, said Yakutia’s chief pilot observer Svyatoslav Kolesov, is to put out the fires entirely. But they also have to contend with blazes that overwhelm their manpower.

The number of firefighters in the region is far from adequate, Kolesov told AFP, recalling that when he started in 1988 the group had around 1,600 people before facing cuts over the years.

Kolesov, who monitors fires from daily flights and issues instructions to teams on the ground, said that because of limited resources the group will often keep an eye on a new blaze until it becomes sizeable. Only then will it send in a team.

“And if the fires spread quickly and soon cover a large area, then we try to save inhabited areas and strategic objects,” he said.

Environmentalists have long argued that Russia underfunds its forest fire fighting capabilities.

The country’s environment ministry is itself open about the policy, in 2015 issuing a decree that allows regions to ignore blazes if the cost of fighting fires outweighs the expected damages. 

“We’ve said for years that Russia needs to increase its budget to fight wildfires by at least three times,” Grigory Kuksin, the head of Greenpeace’s wildfire unit in the country, told AFP.

– ‘Everything would burn’ –

In early July, Russia mobilised its defence and emergencies ministries to help Yakutia battle the wildfires, while dozens of volunteers also took up the fight.

But the lack of funds for the Aerial Forest Protection Service — the only group wholly dedicated to fighting wildfires, according to Kolesov — are evident on the ground.

Brigade leader Zakharov said he asked officials repeatedly for a quad bike that never arrived so his men didn’t have to patrol their trench on foot.

“I lent most of my equipment to a team at a nearby fire,” he explained.

Later he received the all-terrain vehicle, but not before officials during a recent planning meeting disparaged the progress his team of five full-time staffers and eight summer contractors had made.

“What right do they have to criticise us?” Zakharov said, adding he had stormed out before the meeting had ended.

“Our guys have been working in the forest for a month straight. Anyone would start getting tired.” 

The brigade leader and his men were planning to fight on nonetheless. After Byas-Kyuel, they planned to move straight on to the next fire without taking a break. 

“If we weren’t around,” Zakharov said, “everything would burn.”

An 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck off the Alaskan peninsula late Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning.

The earthquake hit 56 miles (91 kilometers) southeast of the town of Perryville, the USGS said. 

The quake struck at 10:15 pm Wednesday (0615 GMT Thursday). Perryville is a small village about 500 miles from Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city.

The US government’s National Tsunami Warning Center immediately issued a tsunami alert for south Alaska and the Alaskan peninsula.

It initially warned of hazardous waves. About two hours later it gave an update that the forecast maximum height of any tsunami would be less than one foot (30 centimeters) above tide levels.

Tsunami warning sirens were broadcast across Kodiak, an island with a population of about 6,000 people, along Alaska’s coastline.

The warning center said any potential tsunami would hit Kodiak about 11:55 pm.

That time passed without any tsunami, according to a broadcaster on local radio station KMXT.

Videos posted on social media by journalists and residents in Kodiak showed people driving away from the coast as warning sirens could be heard.

A tsunami watch was initially issued for Hawaii, meaning residents were required to stay away from beaches, but was lifted about two hours later.

Five aftershocks were recorded within 90 minutes of the earthquake, the largest with a magnitude of 6.2, according to the USGS.

Alaska is part of the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.

Alaska was hit by a 9.2-magnitude earthquake in March 1964, the strongest ever recorded in North America.

It devastated Anchorage and unleashed a tsunami that slammed the Gulf of Alaska, the US west coast, and Hawaii.

More than 250 people were killed by the quake and the tsunami.

A 7.5 magnitude earthquake also caused tsunami waves in Alaska’s southern coast in October, but no casualties were reported.

As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smouldering forests from burning even more.

Members of Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometre (three-mile) trench they had dug at the edge of the village of Byas-Kyuel to keep an approaching wildfire at bay.

Wearing respirators against the acrid smoke, the men lit strips of rubber tyre they hung from sticks, then tapped them onto the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start a controlled burn.

The team has lost track of how many blazes they have tackled since late May — mostly successfully, sometimes not — as Yakutia suffers through yet another ever-worsening wildfire seasons.

“We held one property for eight days but it burned in the end because the tractors never got to us,” Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they use shovels to dig trenches instead.

But even more than equipment, the 35-year-old brigade leader has another urgent plea: “We need more people.”

Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of Yakutia’s zswampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia’s annual fire season.

Vast areas of Russia have been suffering from heatwaves and droughts driven by climate change in recent years, with numerous temperature records set.

It is the third straight year that Yakutia — Russia’s coldest region and bordering the Arctic Ocean — has seen wildfires so vicious that they have nearly overwhelmed the forest protection service. 

– Limited manpower –

The group of about 250 full-time staffers and 150 summer contract workers, who track the fires by air and drop in by parachute or on off-road trucks, is responsible for a region roughly five times the size of France.

Their goal, said Yakutia’s chief pilot observer Svyatoslav Kolesov, is to put out the fires entirely. But they also have to contend with blazes that overwhelm their manpower.

The number of firefighters in the region is far from adequate, Kolesov told AFP, recalling that when he started in 1988 the group had around 1,600 people before facing cuts over the years.

Kolesov, who monitors fires from daily flights and issues instructions to teams on the ground, said that because of limited resources the group will often keep an eye on a new blaze until it becomes sizeable. Only then will it send in a team.

“And if the fires spread quickly and soon cover a large area, then we try to save inhabited areas and strategic objects,” he said.

Environmentalists have long argued that Russia underfunds its forest fire fighting capabilities.

The country’s environment ministry is itself open about the policy, in 2015 issuing a decree that allows regions to ignore blazes if the cost of fighting fires outweighs the expected damages. 

“We’ve said for years that Russia needs to increase its budget to fight wildfires by at least three times,” Grigory Kuksin, the head of Greenpeace’s wildfire unit in the country, told AFP.

– ‘Everything would burn’ –

In early July, Russia mobilised its defence and emergencies ministries to help Yakutia battle the wildfires, while dozens of volunteers also took up the fight.

But the lack of funds for the Aerial Forest Protection Service — the only group wholly dedicated to fighting wildfires, according to Kolesov — are evident on the ground.

Brigade leader Zakharov said he asked officials repeatedly for a quad bike that never arrived so his men didn’t have to patrol their trench on foot.

“I lent most of my equipment to a team at a nearby fire,” he explained.

Later he received the all-terrain vehicle, but not before officials during a recent planning meeting disparaged the progress his team of five full-time staffers and eight summer contractors had made.

“What right do they have to criticise us?” Zakharov said, adding he had stormed out before the meeting had ended.

“Our guys have been working in the forest for a month straight. Anyone would start getting tired.” 

The brigade leader and his men were planning to fight on nonetheless. After Byas-Kyuel, they planned to move straight on to the next fire without taking a break. 

“If we weren’t around,” Zakharov said, “everything would burn.”

An 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck off the Alaskan peninsula late Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning.

The earthquake hit 56 miles (91 kilometers) southeast of the town of Perryville, the USGS said. The US government issued a tsunami warning for south Alaska and the Alaskan peninsula.

“Hazardous tsunami waves for this earthquake are possible within the next three hours along some coasts,” the US Tsunami Warning System said in a statement.

Perryville is a small village about 500 miles from Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city.

Tsunami warning sirens could be heard on Kodiak, an island with a population of about 6,000 people, along Alaska’s coastline. 

The quake struck at 10:15 pm Wednesday (0615 GMT Thursday).

A broadcaster on local radio station KMXT said a tsunami, if it was generated, would hit Kodiak at 11:55 pm.

Videos posted on social media by journalists and residents in Kodiak showed people driving away from the coast as warning sirens could be heard.

A tsunami watch was also issued for Hawaii, meaning residents are required to stay away from beaches.

Five aftershocks were recorded within 90 minutes of the earthquake, the largest with a magnitude of 6.2, according to the USGS. 

Alaska is part of the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.

Alaska was hit by a 9.2-magnitude earthquake in March 1964, the strongest ever recorded in North America.

It devastated Anchorage and unleashed a tsunami that slammed the Gulf of Alaska, the US west coast, and Hawaii.

More than 250 people were killed by the quake and the tsunami.

A 7.5 magnitude earthquake also caused tsunami waves in Alaska’s southern coast in October, but no casualties were reported.

A shallow 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck off the Alaskan peninsula late Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning.

The earthquake hit 56 miles (91 kilometers) southeast of the town of Perryville, the USGS said, with a tsunami warning in effect for south Alaska and the Alaskan peninsula.

The US government issued a tsunami warning for Alaska’s southeast.

“Hazardous tsunami waves for this earthquake are possible within the next three hours along some coasts,” the US Tsunami Warning System said in a statement.

Perryville is a small village about 500 miles from Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city.

A 7.5 magnitude earthquake caused tsunami waves in Alaska’s southern coast in October, but no casualties were reported.

Alaska is part of the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.

Alaska was hit by a 9.2-magnitude earthquake in March 1964, the strongest ever recorded in North America. It devastated Anchorage and unleashed a tsunami that slammed the Gulf of Alaska, the US west coast, and Hawaii.

More than 250 people were killed by the quake and the tsunami.

More than 60 years since France started its nuclear tests in Algeria, their legacy continues to poison relations between the North African nation and its former colonial ruler.  

The issue has come to the fore again after President Emmanuel Macron said in French Polynesia on Tuesday that Paris owed “a debt” to the South Pacific territory over atomic tests there between 1966 and 1996. 

The damage the mega-blasts did to people and nature in the former colonies remains a source of deep resentment, seen as proof of discriminatory colonial attitudes and disregard for local lives.

“Diseases related to radioactivity are passed on as an inheritance, generation after generation,” said Abderahmane Toumi, head of the Algerian victims’ support group El Gheith El Kadem. 

“As long as the region is polluted, the danger will persist,” he said, citing severe health impacts from birth defects and cancers to miscarriages and sterility.

France carried out its first successful atomic bomb test deep in the Algerian Sahara in 1960, making it the world’s fourth nuclear power after the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.  

Today, as Algeria and France struggle to deal with their painful shared history, the identification and decontamination of radioactive sites remains one of the main disputes.

In his landmark report on French colonial rule and the 1954-62 Algerian War, historian Benjamin Stora recommended continued joint work that looks into “the locations of nuclear tests in Algeria and their consequences”.

France in the 1960s had a policy of burying all radioactive waste from the Algerian bomb tests in the desert sands, and for decades declined to reveal their locations.

– ‘Radioactive fallout’ –

Algeria’s former veterans affairs minister Tayeb Zitouni recently accused France of refusing to release topographical maps that would identify “burial sites of polluting, radioactive or chemical waste not discovered to date”.

“The French side has not technically conducted any initiative to clean up the sites, and France has not undertaken any humanitarian act to compensate the victims,” said Zitouni. 

According to the Ministry of the Armed Forces in Paris, Algeria and France now “deal with the whole subject at the highest level of state”. 

“France has provided the Algerian authorities with the maps it has,” said the ministry.

Between 1960 and 1966, France conducted 17 atmospheric or underground nuclear tests near the town of Reggane, 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the capital Algiers, and in mountain tunnels at a site then called In Ekker. 

Eleven of them were conducted after the 1962 Evian Accords, which granted Algeria independence but included an article allowing France to use the sites until 1967. 

A radioactive cloud from a 1962 test sickened at least 30,000 Algerians, the country’s official APS news agency estimated in 2012.

French documents declassified in 2013 revealed significant radioactive fallout from West Africa to southern Europe. 

Algeria last month set up a national agency for the rehabilitation of former French nuclear test sites. 

In April, Algeria’s army chief of staff, General Said Chengriha, asked his then French counterpart, General Francois Lecointre, for his support, including access to all the maps. 

– ‘We respect our dead’ –

Receiving the maps is “a right that the Algerian state strongly demands, without forgetting the question of compensation for the Algerian victims of the tests,” stressed a senior army officer, General Bouzid Boufrioua, writing in the defence ministry magazine El Djeich.

“France must assume its historical responsibilities,” he argued.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, however, ruled out any demands for compensation, telling Le Point weekly that “we respect our dead so much that financial compensation would be a belittlement. We are not a begging people.”

France passed a law in 2010 which provided for a compensation procedure for “people suffering from illnesses resulting from exposure to radiation from nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara and in Polynesia between 1960 and 1998”.

But out of 50 Algerians who have since launched claims, only one, a soldier from Algiers who was stationed at one of the sites, “has been able to obtain compensation”, says the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

No resident of the remote desert region has been compensated, it said. 

In a study released a year ago, “Radioactivity Under the Sand”, ICAN France urged Paris to hand Algeria a complete list of the burial sites and to facilitate their clean-up.

The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons obliges states to provide adequate assistance to individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons.

It was signed by 122 UN member states — but by none of the nuclear powers. France argued the treaty was “incompatible with a realistic and progressive approach to nuclear disarmament”.

ICAN France in its study argued that “people have been waiting for more than 50 years. There is a need to go faster. 

“We are still facing an important health and environmental problem that must be addressed as soon as possible.”

Scores of pickers move along a raised platform of rubbish, scooping up pieces of plastic with iron hooks, alongside cattle and hundreds of egrets also scouring the trash.

The smell is rancid atop what the pickers dub “Yemen” — a volcano-like mound of multicoloured refuse in the sprawling Mbeubeuss landfill, on the edge of Senegal’s capital Dakar. 

Dump trucks tip trash onto the platform that towers over a suburb of the West African metropolis, as pickers lunge towards the fresh piles of garbage.

“Everyone is enriching themselves,” says Laye Niaye, a security guard, watching men, women and children wade through the trash.  

Dakar, a growing city of over three million people, produces hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste a year. 

Almost all of it ends up in Mbeubeuss, a landfill about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the centre which has a notorious reputation as an environmental hazard.

Pickers set fire to the rubbish to find valuable metals, for example, spewing noxious fumes onto neighbouring residential areas. 

The landfill is also so big — estimated at 115 hectares (285 acres) — that it is difficult to control, with several informal villages within the site.   

After decades of chaotic management, the Senegalese government plans to transform the open-air dump into a waste-sorting centre over the next few years.

But the move threatens a thriving local economy. 

About 2,000 pickers ignore the stench and the fumes and make money by scavenging for plastic, iron and aluminium among the rubbish. 

They sell the recyclables to wholesalers, who then resell to companies. 

Mouhamadou Wade, a sinewy 50-year-old who has worked on the site for 30 years, explains what makes a good picker: “You have to be a hard man: Tough, courageous and determined”.

But like many of his cohort, he is concerned. “The waste centre is not good for pickers,” Wade says.

– ‘Always the losers’ –

Waste-picking is dangerous, dirty and hard. But those who excel at it can be well rewarded. 

A 2018 study conducted by Wiego, an NGO focussed on women’s informal employment, showed that a quarter of pickers in Mbeubeuss earn above 100,000 CFA francs (152 euros, $180) a month.

A minority earn more than twice that sum, but many earn far less.

Senegal is a poor nation of 16 million where about 40 percent of people live on under $1.90 (1.70 euros) a day, according to the World Bank.

Souleiman Diallo, 40, is loading bales of plastic onto a wholesaler’s truck. 

“It’s very difficult,” he says, adding that he’s on the dump because “there’s no work” elsewhere.

Pape Ndiaye, the spokesman of the pickers association, says it has become harder to earn a good living because of fierce competition and stagnant wholesale prices.  

“It’s the middleman that hurts us,” says the 66-year-old, reclining in a makeshift hut surrounded by plastic bottles.

Though the pickers perform a vital environmental service, he says, they “are always the losers.”

– Plastic fumes –

For Abdou Dieng, who runs Mbeubeuss for Senegal’s waste-management agency UCG, fires and smoke are the main concern.

He becomes agitated when he sees smoke rising from a platform that was recently sealed with gravel and sand — the result of a fire set by a picker to flush out valuables.

“Once I get my hands on him I’ll cause him a lot of problems,” vows Dieng, surveying the steaming mound. 

The young official was brought in last year to reduce the dump’s environmental impact.

“The people were revolting” because of the plastic fumes wafting over city neighbourhoods, he says.

Dieng has reduced fires by limiting dumping to managed platforms, and by punishing wrongdoers. 

Maguette Diop, from the NGO Wiego, says Dieng has improved the landfill. Fewer people are falling ill from the fumes, he says.

In any event, Mbeubeuss is expected to close by 2025 to make way for the waste-sorting centre.

Diop is pushing for more engagement with the pickers as the landfill is wound down, noting: “There will be job losses.”

In June, President Macky Sall pledged to help the waste pickers. 

But Wade, the dump veteran, says everyone is worried. “We don’t know what we will do tomorrow,” he says. 

As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smouldering forests from burning even more.

Members of Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometre (three-mile) trench they had dug at the edge of the village of Byas-Kyuel to keep an approaching wildfire at bay.

Wearing respirators against the acrid smoke, the men lit strips of rubber tyre they hung from sticks, then tapped them onto the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start a controlled burn.

The team has lost track of how many blazes they have tackled since late May — mostly successfully, sometimes not — as Yakutia suffers through yet another ever-worsening wildfire seasons.

“We held one property for eight days but it burned in the end because the tractors never got to us,” Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they use shovels to dig trenches instead.

But even more than equipment, the 35-year-old brigade leader has another urgent plea: “We need more people.”

Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of Yakutia’s swampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia’s annual fire season.

Vast areas of Russia have been suffering from heatwaves and droughts driven by climate change in recent years, with numerous temperature records set.

It is the third straight year that Yakutia — Russia’s coldest region and bordering the Arctic Ocean — has seen wildfires so vicious that they have nearly overwhelmed the forest protection service. 

– Limited manpower –

The group of about 250 full-time staffers and 150 summer contract workers, who track the fires by air and drop in by parachute or on off-road trucks, is responsible for a region roughly five times the size of France.

Their goal, said Yakutia’s chief pilot observer Svyatoslav Kolesov, is to put out the fires entirely. But they also have to contend with blazes that overwhelm their manpower.

The number of firefighters in the region is far from adequate, Kolesov told AFP, recalling that when he started in 1988 the group had around 1,600 people before facing cuts over the years.

Kolesov, who monitors fires from daily flights and issues instructions to teams on the ground, said that because of limited resources the group will often keep an eye on a new blaze until it becomes sizeable. Only then will it send in a team.

“And if the fires spread quickly and soon cover a large area, then we try to save inhabited areas and strategic objects,” he said.

Environmentalists have long argued that Russia underfunds its forest fire fighting capabilities.

The country’s environment ministry is itself open about the policy, in 2015 issuing a decree that allows regions to ignore blazes if the cost of fighting fires outweighs the expected damages. 

“We’ve said for years that Russia needs to increase its budget to fight wildfires by at least three times,” Grigory Kuksin, the head of Greenpeace’s wildfire unit in the country, told AFP.

– ‘Everything would burn’ –

In early July, Russia mobilised its defence and emergencies ministries to help Yakutia battle the wildfires, while dozens of volunteers also took up the fight.

But the lack of funds for the Aerial Forest Protection Service — the only group wholly dedicated to fighting wildfires, according to Kolesov — are evident on the ground.

Brigade leader Zakharov said he asked officials repeatedly for a quad bike that never arrived so his men didn’t have to patrol their trench on foot.

“I lent most of my equipment to a team at a nearby fire,” he explained.

Later he received the all-terrain vehicle, but not before officials during a recent planning meeting disparaged the progress his team of five full-time staffers and eight summer contractors had made.

“What right do they have to criticise us?” Zakharov said, adding he had stormed out before the meeting had ended.

“Our guys have been working in the forest for a month straight. Anyone would start getting tired.” 

The brigade leader and his men were planning to fight on nonetheless. After Byas-Kyuel, they planned to move straight on to the next fire without taking a break. 

“If we weren’t around,” Zakharov said, “everything would burn.”

More than 60 years since France started its nuclear tests in Algeria, their legacy continues to poison relations between the North African nation and its former colonial ruler.  

The issue has come to the fore again after President Emmanuel Macron said in French Polynesia on Tuesday that Paris owed “a debt” to the South Pacific territory over atomic tests there between 1966 and 1996. 

The damage the mega-blasts did to people and nature in the former colonies remains a source of deep resentment, seen as proof of discriminatory colonial attitudes and disregard for local lives.

“Diseases related to radioactivity are passed on as an inheritance, generation after generation,” said Abderahmane Toumi, head of the Algerian victims’ support group El Gheith El Kadem. 

“As long as the region is polluted, the danger will persist,” he said, citing severe health impacts from birth defects and cancers to miscarriages and sterility.

France carried out its first successful atomic bomb test deep in the Algerian Sahara in 1960, making it the world’s fourth nuclear power after the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.  

Today, as Algeria and France struggle to deal with their painful shared history, the identification and decontamination of radioactive sites remains one of the main disputes.

In his landmark report on French colonial rule and the 1954-62 Algerian War, historian Benjamin Stora recommended continued joint work that looks into “the locations of nuclear tests in Algeria and their consequences”.

France in the 1960s had a policy of burying all radioactive waste from the Algerian bomb tests in the desert sands, and for decades declined to reveal their locations.

– ‘Radioactive fallout’ –

Algeria’s former veterans affairs minister Tayeb Zitouni recently accused France of refusing to release topographical maps that would identify “burial sites of polluting, radioactive or chemical waste not discovered to date”.

“The French side has not technically conducted any initiative to clean up the sites, and France has not undertaken any humanitarian act to compensate the victims,” said Zitouni. 

According to the Ministry of the Armed Forces in Paris, Algeria and France now “deal with the whole subject at the highest level of state”. 

“France has provided the Algerian authorities with the maps it has,” said the ministry.

Between 1960 and 1966, France conducted 17 atmospheric or underground nuclear tests near the town of Reggane, 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from the capital Algiers, and in mountain tunnels at a site then called In Ekker. 

Eleven of them were conducted after the 1962 Evian Accords, which granted Algeria independence but included an article allowing France to use the sites until 1967. 

A radioactive cloud from a 1962 test sickened at least 30,000 Algerians, the country’s official APS news agency estimated in 2012.

French documents declassified in 2013 revealed significant radioactive fallout from West Africa to southern Europe. 

Algeria last month set up a national agency for the rehabilitation of former French nuclear test sites. 

In April, Algeria’s army chief of staff, General Said Chengriha, asked his then French counterpart, General Francois Lecointre, for his support, including access to all the maps. 

– ‘We respect our dead’ –

Receiving the maps is “a right that the Algerian state strongly demands, without forgetting the question of compensation for the Algerian victims of the tests,” stressed a senior army officer, General Bouzid Boufrioua, writing in the defence ministry magazine El Djeich.

“France must assume its historical responsibilities,” he argued.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, however, ruled out any demands for compensation, telling Le Point weekly that “we respect our dead so much that financial compensation would be a belittlement. We are not a begging people.”

France passed a law in 2010 which provided for a compensation procedure for “people suffering from illnesses resulting from exposure to radiation from nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara and in Polynesia between 1960 and 1998”.

But out of 50 Algerians who have since launched claims, only one, a soldier from Algiers who was stationed at one of the sites, “has been able to obtain compensation”, says the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

No resident of the remote desert region has been compensated, it said. 

In a study released a year ago, “Radioactivity Under the Sand”, ICAN France urged Paris to hand Algeria a complete list of the burial sites and to facilitate their clean-up.

The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons obliges states to provide adequate assistance to individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons.

It was signed by 122 UN member states — but by none of the nuclear powers. France argued the treaty was “incompatible with a realistic and progressive approach to nuclear disarmament”.

ICAN France in its study argued that “people have been waiting for more than 50 years. There is a need to go faster. 

“We are still facing an important health and environmental problem that must be addressed as soon as possible.”