Ordered in 1955, launched five years later and armed in 1963, the French aircraft carrier “Foch” is about to meet the same laborious end as its twin, the “Clemenceau”. Leaving on August 4 from the Brazilian coast, she was heading for Turkey to be dismantled there, after five years of inactivity. But for fear of the environmental consequences of such a project, the grumbling Turkish environmentalist convinced his government to refuse the entry of the ship into the territorial waters of the country. On August 26, the Turkish Minister of the Environment therefore interrupted what was to be the final voyage of the military vessel, when it was already off the coast of Morocco.
As a reminder, the “Foch” was sold to Brazil in 2000, after 37 years of service to the French Navy. There, he is renamed “Sao Paulo” and survives as best he can for the Marinha do Brasil. In 2014, the Brazilians plan to restore it to last until 2039, before realizing the magnitude of the task and giving up. In 2017, the ship was decommissioned and Brazil sought to get rid of it. In 2021, it is the company Cormack Maritima, acting on behalf of the Turkish shipyard SÖK Denizcilik, which seizes the hull of the ship for the modest sum of 1.6 million euros. Very quickly, environmentalists and unions gang up to protest against this acquisition which smells of asbestos…
However, Ankara delivers an authorization to Brasilia on June 7, 2022, giving hope for a “happy” end for the “Foch”. Two months — and numerous demonstrations — later, the Turkish Ministry of the Environment is requesting the delivery of a new “hazardous substances inventory” in Brazil, to which the latter responds briefly: “Too late”. The ship was due to arrive at the port of Izmir on September 10.
Finally, on Friday August 26, Environment Minister Murat Kurum officially announced that “the ship will not be allowed to enter Turkish territorial waters”. “The cancellation of the Turkish ministry is a very direct result of the citizen mobilization of recent weeks”welcomes the lawyer Arif Ali Cangi, member of the collective of environmental associations and professional chambers of Izmir who launched a legal action against the ministry.
This is how the “Foch” suffered the same fate as its twin before it, which had been turned back from Indian waters for the same reasons, some twenty years earlier. These days, it’s hard to imagine that ecological barriers would come down. However, the Opex360 site quotes the words of the senior French official Alain Juillet to underline a paradox: “The Clemenceau affair is emblematic in this respect. The Americans have just removed asbestos from an aircraft carrier and sank it in Pearl Harbor, but no NGO has issued the slightest criticism. On the site where the Clemenceau was to be dismantled, a very large British troop carrier, the Sir Galahad, asbestos like all warships, is being cut up, but Greenpeace activists did not protest when it passed through the Suez Canal “he lamented in 2006.
Two possibilities are now available to “Foch”: either Brasilia urgently communicates the documents requested by Ankara, or it turns around and waits for a new procedure to be launched…