Rainbow Warrior in NZ return, 40 years after bombing
The Greenpeace-staffed yacht will dock in the City of Sails for the anniversary in July, completing a similar journey that its precursor vessel undertook in 1985.
The Rainbow Warrior sailed south to New Zealand after helping to ferry a few hundred Marshall Islanders from an atoll polluted by US nuclear testing.
It had planned to join a flotilla protesting French tests, but the ship was blown up by undercover French agents, killing a photographer aboard.
Kiwi Prime Minister David Lange labelled the attack "a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism", for which France later apologised and paid compensation.
The biggest after-effect was confirming New Zealand's status as a non-nuclear state, with huge support for bans on nuclear-powered vessels and nuclear weapons that continue to this day.
"Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective," Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman said.
Mr Norman said the anniversary sail was not purely for commemorations on July 10, instead coming at a "pivotal moment when the fight to protect our planet's fragile life-support systems has never been as urgent or more critical".
Conservationists accuse the Chris Luxon's government with a vast array of environmental degradations: fast-tracked seabed mining and new coalmines, intensive dairy and agriculture harming biodiversity and water standards, and abandoning Jacinda Ardern-era climate plans.
"Here in Aotearoa, the Luxon government is waging an all-out war on nature, and on a planetary scale, climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat," Mr Norman said.
The ship visiting is the third iteration of the Rainbow Warrior.
The original lies on the seabed off Matauri Bay, north of Auckland, where it was scuttled to become a dive site and artificial reef.
It will host open days in Auckland when it arrives, following maintenance in Cairns, where it currently is harboured.
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