Letters

Boycott French Wines

Many of us feel increasingly outraged by France's insistence on weapons testing in French South Pacific colonies. The peoples of these islands, as we know, resist strongly and wish to declare the South Pacific a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Australia and New Zealand support them.

I believe a palpable measure of protest would be a boycott by all wine-loving peace activists against French wines. Instead, let us support the New Zealand economy by buying the wonderful New Zealand wines on those occasions when we buy imported wines. Australian wines too are excellent. Both these nations have a more admirable stance on the nuclear issue than most.

A letter to the French Embassy explaining one's boycott would be appropriate.

Joanne Santa Barbara, Lynden, Ontario

NATO Training Flights

NATO will make a final decision sometime late this year about the construction of an $800 million Tactical Fighter Weapons Training Centre in our homeland, Ntesinan in the Québec-Labrador peninsula. We will be doing everything in our power, using peaceful means, to stop the military training activities on our land. If approved, the NATO base will bring to our homeland air-to-air (dogfighting), air-to-sea manoeuvres, expanded low-level flying, bombing ranges, and air combat ranges.

Present training activities are disturbing the wildlife and making life miserable for our people who live in regions where low-level flying is occurring. The NATO base would make life in the flying zones virtually uninhabitable due to

sonic booms (which in some parts of the southern U.S. smash windows and crack walls in houses);
increased low level flying;
the presence of 3-4 bombing ranges with intensive flying;
the possible use of toxic defoliants to maintain bombing ranges, which would enter the food chain and contaminate fish and wildlife on which the Innu depend for their subsistence;
the presence of significant levels of electro-magnetic radiation generated by AWACS and by jamming and counter-jamming equipment on the aircraft and ground stations.

This Innu territory has never been ceded to the Canadian state and is therefore rightfully the property of the Innu people

The kinds of training activities that are occurring at the moment and which will be expanded if the NATO base is built, are part of a NATO war strategy known as "Deep Strike." (AirLand Battle is the U.S. terminology.) This strategy is destabilizing and will lower the threshhold for a nuclear war.

The three studies now being done on the impact of the military will not be complete until after NATO makes a final decision about whether to build the base in Goose Bay. What good can they do then? We have additional documents for those of you who are interested. Call me at 709/497-8362.

Ben Michel, Sheshatshit, Labrador A0P 1M0