 "Violence in New Caledonia: Trouble in France’s ‘treasure island’ exposes colonial fault-line")
An ‘insurrection’ in the far south-east end of the world has left France jittery in the midst of the Cannes Film Festival. Six people, including two police officers, have been killed in addition to hundreds of people wounded in riots, pillages, and acts of arson that recently affected New Caledonia. Grand Terre, the main cigarette-shaped island, is left smouldering.
The archipelago, lying between Australia and Fiji, is currently under a state of emergency with a dusk-to-dawn curfew. One thousand police personnel have been flown in from France to reinforce internal security. French President Emmanuel Macron, who reached Noumea after a 24-hour flight, stated that he did not foresee this outbreak. He has assured to keep the personnel deployed in the archipelago as long as necessary, even during the Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris later this year.
President Macron should not have been so naïve. New Caledonia has a major history of bloodshed in the 1980s, not to mention the Ouvea cave massacre (May, 1988) and the assassination of Jean-Marie Tjibaou (May, 1989), the Kanak leader who stood for the independence of New Caledonia. The current round of violence is precipitated by controversial electoral reforms recently approved by both chambers of Parliament in Paris. It enfranchises around 25,000 new migrants who have moved from mainland France to New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in this century. This is likely to further marginalise the indigenous Kanak voters. New Caledonia, as per a BBC figure, has a population of 300,000 people, including 112,000 Kanaks. However, as per a report on France 24, Macron says he will now refrain from pushing ahead with the contentious reforms.
People outside the Francophone world might be surprised at the French political interest in the South Pacific, which compels a French President to take a 16,000-kilometre-long-haul flight urgently. However, France sees itself as the leading (and only one remaining) European power resident in the Pacific. It exercises power in the region through its sovereign territories like New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, and Clipperton Island. They are remnants of the French colonialism that once tied the globe to its tentacles. “At its apogee in the 1920s and 1930s”, informs Robert Aldrich (1996), “France and its overseas domains—what some called ‘greater France’ (la plus grande France)—encompassed 11 million square kilometres of land and over 100 million inhabitants; Paris controlled the second largest empire in the world, second only to that of Britain” (Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion, P.1).
The French possessions once included jungles in Africa and South America; islands in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific; vast expanses of the Saharan desert and Antarctica; enormous territories in Indo-China and Madagascar; and toeholds in India and on the Red Sea. This columnist was born in one such former French “toehold” on the Hooghly river, viz. Chandernagore, which had merged into West Bengal in 1949 as a result of a referendum. The most famous citizen of Chandernagore was revolutionary Rash Behari Bose (1885–1945), though he was never known for fighting French imperialism as much as British imperialism with determination and tactics!
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More ShortsNew Caledonia was discovered in 1794 by Captain James Cook. “Englishman discovers, Frenchman annexes” was how Wilfred G. Burchett describes it in his eminently readable Pacific Treasure Island: New Caledonia (1941), which strangely found an Indian publisher, Thacker & Co Ltd, Bombay. Burchett informs that Admiral Febvrier Despointes first hoisted the French flag upon the island on September 24, 1853, amidst a 21-gun salute in the presence of the French evangelists who had already been active there.
Aldrich informs that the French, who subsequently extended their control to the Loyalty Islands (Ouvea, Mare, Lifou, and Tiga), justified the act on military and commercial grounds. The French perceived New Caledonia as an alternative to Guyana for building a penal settlement, as Guyana’s climate had “proved murderous to convicts, soldiers, and administrators”. Thus, between the 1860s and 1890s, France shipped thousands of convicts to New Caledonia, apart from encouraging settlement by free citizens. Colonialists hailed New Caledonia as “the only true French society of settlement other than Algeria” (Greater France, P.1).
The landmark Brazzaville Conference, held in the capital of erstwhile French Equatorial Africa between January 30 and February 18, 1944, aimed at reshaping the French empire in the aftermath of World War II. General Charles de Gaulle, then leader of the Free French forces, promised to transform the relationship between France and her colonies while presiding over the conference. Political independence, however, was ruled out. Mainland France was then under Vichy occupation, which collaborated with the Nazi regime in Germany.
The Fourth Republic (1946–58), set up in France after the conclusion of World War II, put an end to colonialism as an official policy. However, this did not remotely imply de-colonisation, as Charles de Gaulle, informs Dane Kennedy (2016), “was determined to restore French pride, which had been shattered by its defeat and occupation of Germany, and his strategy for doing so hinged on a resurgent French empire” (Decolonization: A Short History, P.38).
The colonial empire was replaced by the “French Union” in the Constitution (1946), where overseas territories would have representatives in the French Parliament. Today, France has around 13 overseas territories with an estimated aggregated population of 2.8 million. Neither was it easy for France to give up its overseas territories, as they had a significant French population there. For example, for millions of people of French origin, ‘Algeria was France’, who considered the 1962 referendum, where eight million Algerians voted for independence, an undiluted tragedy. The referendum came at the end of a bloody war of independence (1954–1962) lasting for eight years. In Vietnam (then Indo-China) and Algeria, France had to fight bloody and costly wars.
In 1956, France enacted loi-cadre, which defined a legal framework for the French government and its overseas territories. In New Caledonia, it led to the enlargement of the territorial assembly to 30 members and the introduction of an electoral system based on universal adult suffrage. The Kanaks received for the first time the right to participate fully in the political process. The territorial assembly was authorised to debate and approve the territorial budget.
Its results were obvious in the referendum vote in September 1958. New Caledonia overwhelmingly voted for remaining within the French Republic. At that time, there were more Kanaks than White French in New Caledonia. In the referendum based on universal adult suffrage, 98 per cent voted in favour of remaining with France. However, General de Gaulle’s government returned little favours for this overwhelming yes vote. As Jean-Yves Faberon (2013) observes, the French government only chipped away at New Calendonia’s self-rule. The Jacquinot laws (1963) and Billot laws (1969) made French control more expansive. The ‘Nickel boom’ period (1969–1972), which led to unprecedented growth across all sectors in the island, also attracted a large number of French men and women to New Caledonia, thus reducing the Kanaks to a minority in their own land (Politics, Development, and Security in Ocenia, P.78)
The 1970s saw growing demand for independence from Kanaks. France enacted the Strin statute, which saw further political reforms. The High Commissioner, who replaced the Governor, retained overall executive power. The Minister for Overseas Territories could dissolve both the Council and the Territorial Assembly. This, however, failed to stem the tide towards autonomy. In 1979, the Council dissolved because it refused to support the Dijoud statute, which provided for economic reforms in exchange for deferring demands for autonomy and independence for 10 years. The Dijoud statute, changed the method of elections to the Territorial Assembly and the Council, which made it difficult for small Kanak parties to win any seat. They therefore joined hands together to form Front Independantiste.
Even as violence continued in the early 1980s, the French government had to concede several reforms aimed at broadening the Kanak’s participation in the political and economic life of the island. In July 1983, the French government convened a round table at Nainville-les-Roches in northern France to work out a workable and durable solution to the island’s problem. For the first time, says an UN publication (1988), gave legitimacy of the claims of the Kanak people, who were described as the first occupants of the territory, including their innate and active right to independence (Decolonization: New Caledonia, P.4).
Consequent upon the round table, the French National Assembly adopted a new statute for autonomy, the Lemoine statute, which provided internal autonomy for five years. However, neither the Lemoine statute nor the Pisani plan had a cordial reception. New Caledonia was plunged into violence in 1985, forcing the French government to adopt a package of administrative measures to redress the conditions of Kanaks, including a land reform programme, tax reform measures, compensation for victims of civil disobedience, and educational reforms.
The Noumea Accord signed on May 5, 1998, involving both pro-France and pro-independence parties and representatives of France led by Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, has become an enduring milestone in the political annals of New Caledonia. It was enacted into an organic law by the French National Assembly on March 19, 1999. The devil, however, was in its details. Defining different electorates for different elections, i.e., local and French elections, based on years of residency, says Denise Fisher (2013), is an innovative and flexible response to Kanak concerns on the part of the French authorities within a constitutional system that claimed above all to be unitary and indivisible (France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics, P.99).
New Caledonia is too small to be a viable, independent country. The referendums held in 2018 and 2020 under the Noumea Accord threw up results favourable to New Caledonia remaining within the French republic. However, the new voting laws threaten to upset the delicate balance among the French migrants, Kanaks and Caldoches, who are descendants of early settlers from other parts of Asia-Pacific. There is an inconsistency between the principles of universal adult suffrage and local sentiments, especially when a large number of French migrants have settled on the island since the Noumea Accord was signed. One cannot deny them voting rights in local elections indefinitely. Paradoxically, France has seen occasional night-riots due to the rising population of Arabs on the mainland. The French continue to trickle into far-off Pacific islands. It requires investigation to determine whether this migration is solely on account of economic opportunities or if more Frenchmen are feeling insecure in France due to the rising Arab population.
The writer is author of the book ‘The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India’ (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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