Greenpeace to Challenge France in Court Over Sinking of Ship

David McTaggart, the Canadian president of Greenpeace, announced Thursday that his environmental organization will challenge the French government in the courts over the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand.

At a news conference here, McTaggart ridiculed an official French government report that cleared France and its intelligence agents of responsibility for planting the mines that wrecked the ship July 10. He added that former White House counsel Lloyd N. Cutler will assist Greenpeace with its challenge.

McTaggart said that the report by Bernard Tricot, a respected conservative who once served as chief of staff in the offices of President Charles de Gaulle, “was an insult to your intelligence and to mine. . . . A ship on a peaceful mission was attacked and sunk in a very neutral port, and a nonviolent crew member was murdered with at least five trained, underwater French commandos close by, and Tricot says they were taking pictures. That’s bizarre. . . . The Tricot report speaks for itself. It’s pathetic.”

Without disclosing the details of Greenpeace’s legal strategy, McTaggart said that Cutler, who served as counsel under President Jimmy Carter, has agreed to serve without pay, helping Greenpeace fight the French government in French, New Zealand and international courts.

‘Friend of the Court’

The Greenpeace president said that his organization wants Prime Minister David Lange of New Zealand to bring the issue before the World Court in The Hague and will act as a “friend of the court” supporting New Zealand if Lange does so. McTaggart also talked of taking the case before the European Court of Human Rights.

“Someone is going to pay for the Rainbow Warrior,” he said. “Someone is going to pay the children of Armando Pereira (the Portuguese photographer killed in the blast). Someone is going to repay the people of New Zealand what it has cost them.”

In dismissing the Tricot report, McTaggart was in tune with his audience. Ever since the report was released Monday, the French press has expressed a conviction that Tricot was naive, at best, in concluding that the five French agents arrested or sought by New Zealand police in the bombing were sent by France to spy on Greenpeace but not to bomb its ship.

The Rainbow Warrior was to have sailed to France’s South Pacific nuclear testing site at the head of a protest flotilla.

Political Crisis Defused

Despite press skepticism, the Socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Laurent Fabius appears so far to have defused the political crisis over the Greenpeace affair with the publication of the Tricot report. Many conservative politicians are reluctant to say anything that might harm France’s intelligence service or its nuclear bomb program.

The Gaullist party of former Premier Jacques Chirac, now mayor of Paris, said it will not comment since it does not want to involve French foreign and nuclear policy in an internal political debate. Former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing said that he will not comment because he believes, “whether it be wrong or whether it be right, it is my country.”