AFTER 12,000 miles and five months wandering the seas of the world, rejected as a toxic pariah, the once-mighty aircraft carrier Clemenceau was hauled ignominiously back into a French port yesterday.

The 27,000-tonne ship, formerly the pride of the French Navy, was towed into Brest in the final, humiliating leg of a £20 million odyssey three months after an environmentalist outcry forced President Chirac to call it back from a voyage to a breakers’ yard in India.

Hundreds of people turned out to watch the Clemenceau emerge from the morning mist to tie up at her old berth. The return of le Clem, as the carrier was affectionately known, has symbolised Europe’s inability to dispose of ships loaded with asbestos and other toxic materials.

The Government is now taking bids for the removal of an estimated 250 tonnes of asbestos. It has promised that the Clemenceau will be gone from Brest by 2008.

Many in the port were moved by the sight of the decommissioned vessel that was the fleet’s flagship in the 1960s and 1970s but is now officially named Hull Q790.

For Greenpeace and other campaign groups, however, the return of the Clemenceau marked a victory in their campaign to prevent toxic vessels being dumped on India, Bangladesh and other low-cost destinations. The Indian Supreme Court last week ordered an investigation into whether another former French pride of the seas, the liner SS France, was too toxic to be allowed to enter the Indian port of Alang for dismantling. Greenpeace claims that the vessel contains 900 tonnes of asbestos.

Campaign groups are worried that the Clemenceau remained a hazard. “The Clemenceau is back but it has nowhere to go for proper decontamination and recycling,” said Annie Thebaud-Mony, of the Ban Asbestos group. “The European Union has banned the export of hazardous wastes to developing countries but has failed to create a solution for proper pre-cleaning and dismantling in Europe.”

President Chirac was accused of bungling when he ordered the Clemenceau to return after courts in India and Paris ruled against its disposal in Gujarat state. Now he wants France to lead Europe in establishing facilities for dismantling end-of-life ships.

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