Anti-nuclear and pro-independence activists rampaged through Papeete's main airport, leaving a trail of burned-out cars and glass shards to protest France's nuclear weapons test at Mururoa atoll.
At least 13 people were injured in Wednesday's melee, including two policemen in serious condition, the French High Commissioner's office said.After sunset, hundreds of protesters marched from the airport to downtown Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, smashing shop windows, looting clothing stores, setting a perfumery ablaze, and stoning the territorial assembly building among others.
A rioter threw a firebomb through the window of the territorial assembly, but it was quickly extinguished. Dozens of other fires, including one that forced the evacuation of the Royal Papeete Hotel, were out or under control by midnight, authorities said.
French paratroopers and French Foreign Legionnaires landed at the airport Wednesday evening to secure it, freeing 80 riot police to head downtown.
By early Thursday, authorities said relative calm had returned to streets that hours before had resembled a combat zone.
About 1,000 protesters swarmed over the runway Wednesday before about 300 police intervened, firing tear gas and throwing stun grenades in an attempt to disperse the crowds.
Demonstrators used a front-end loader to smash through the airport building. They set fires and shattered airport windows and the windshields of parked cars with stones.
A black pall of smoke hung over the area as firefighters struggled to put out the fires raging all around the airport.
By evening, part of the airport building was gutted and blackened, the offices and shops inside looted and burned. The skeletons of about 50 burned-out cars and trucks littered the surrounding area.
Damage to the airport was estimated at $11 million, said the office of French High Commissioner Paul Ronciere.
"The Polynesian people have been pacifists and calm for many years, for 17 years, and we've had enough of it," said Nelson Ortas, the campaign manager for independence leader Oscar Temaru.
The protests were triggered by the French government's underground test blast Tuesday beneath Mururoa atoll, some 750 miles southeast of Tahiti.
Tuesday's nuclear test, one of up to eight that France contends are necessary to develop computer simulations that will make further detonations unnecessary, sent tensions soaring in the region, dramatically boosting support for French Polynesia's small independence movement that has been calling for an end to France's almost 155-year-old colonial rule.
There were signs Thursday that France might be bending at least a bit under the force of a global backlash.
Defense Minister Charles Millon repeatedly spoke of "these six tests" on French television Wednesday evening. And the leftist newspaper Liberation reported Thursday that the tests might end by mid-November instead of May as planned.
Fourteen ships carrying environmental protesters continued surrounding Mururoa on Wednesday, but French naval vessels patrolled to prevent further in-tru-sions of the 12-mile exclusion zone around the atoll.
The protest fleet formally complained Wednesday about harassment by French naval warships, jets and helicopters.
"They've been acts of absolute terrorism," said Peter Williams, a New Zealand lawyer skippering his own yacht, the Aquila D'Oro.
"You don't endanger people, you don't come diving in with jet planes 100 meters (yards) above a small boat and hover close with helicopters and cross (yacht's bows) with frigates and patrol boats," he said.
Another protest boat, carrying German and Belgian legislators, Pacific parliamentarians, and journalists from Australia, Europe and Japan, collided with the vessel that was towing it to the Cook Islands after breaking down a week ago on its way to Mururoa.
Both the Fiji-owned Kaunitoni and the Cook Islands patrol boat Te Kukupa, which was towing it, sustained only superficial damage, said Stuart Huggett, a protest organizer.