Posted by: John Phoenix
The Kanak inhabitants of the islands before the French seized it and colonised it in 1853, want control of their homeland returned to its inhabitants. They want sovereignty for their islands, although today the Kanaks only comprise 40% of the population. The remainder are settlers, for the most part either from mainland France or from other former French colonies, who have been arriving, uninvited by the Kanaks, over the last 170 years.
When Napoleon III decreed that New Caledonia belonged to France, its native inhabitants had not yet divided into classes. They knew nothing of private property. They had no written language. Their economic system was that known as primitive communism where all shared what little wealth there was, and constant warfare took place between tribes over access to means of subsistence. Early contact with Europeans had introduced smallpox that had been ravaging all South Sea communities and reduced populations by almost half.
When France laid claim to the islands, they cleared the Kanaks off all the best land and settled them in reservations that covered only some 10% of the area the Kanaks had previously occupied. They treated Kanaks as slave labour, shipping many of them to work on projects abroad in countries such as Australia or Fiji. The French then designated the islands as a penal colony, importing over several years some 20,000 convicts there, including the people who had fought in the Paris Commune. They were deployed in the nickel mines, nickel having been discovered there in 1854, work from which the Kanaks were originally excluded. The Kanaks, primitive though they were, had a warrior tradition and fought back hard for years against the French invasion and the harsh conditions imposed on them (there were major revolts in 1878, 1917 and between 1976 and 1988) but clearly could not prevail against the superior firepower and manpower that France was able to mobilise for the purpose of pacifying them. Even the communard ex-convicts were mobilised to fight against them.
It was of course not in settler interests for there to be a constant state of warfare with the indigenous population, as a result of which periodic efforts were made to grant concessions to the Kanaks in order to reconcile them to French rule. However, there was no getting away from the fact that the interests of the Kanak and those of the settlers were irreconcilable. The settlers wanted more and more land both for themselves and, later on, for cattle. They also wanted to mobilise Kanaks to work for them – in nickel mines, after convict labour was abandoned, and on their farms – at the lowest possible cost, forcibly taking Kanaks away from their own work producing their own means of subsistence. Force was on the side of the settlers, enabling them to take over land and requisition labour at will. The Kanaks were despised as primitives, subjected to an apartheid regime and discriminated against at every turn.
Nevertheless, the arrival of the colonisers was not entirely negative, much like the colonisation of Britain by the Romans. They arrived without invitation and for the sole purpose of enriching themselves, carried away many slaves and treated the people with contempt. But it is hard to deny that the Roman occupation benefited Britain in many ways. The people of New Caledonia were dragged out of primitive society into the modern world. As the Kanaks learnt of the advantages on offer in other parts of the globe, their own desire to partake of these benefits increased year on year. In 1946 they were finally granted French citizenship so that theoretically they were legitimate equals of the settlers at last. However, the discriminatory practices continued as did, of course, the ill effects of their previous official subjugation. The land outside the reservations was still monopolised by settlers, as were all the best jobs. And they were still universally despised.
It was clear that true equality for the Kanaks was and is impossible so long as New Caledonia does not receive its independence and its policies are all dictated, or at least approved, by France. Even the United Nations has recognised that New Caledonia needs to be decolonised by placing it in 1946 on the UN’s list of Non-Self-Governing Territories in need of Decolonisation.
France, however, is determined to hang on by hook or by crook. Since the uprising of the 1980’s, which forced it to make concessions to the Kanaks in order to secure peace, it has been marking time with promised referendums on independence, which never result in a majority in favour of independence because the settlers almost all oppose it.
More on the uprising of the 1980s
In January 1985, LALKAR wrote the following:
“Since rigged elections took place in New Caledonia on 18 November [1984], the Kanak minority in these islands – a French colony since 1853 – have been in rebellion against the French settler regime. This started with the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), representing 43% of the population who are Kanaks, boycotting this election, destroying voting forms, attacking town halls and setting up road blocks to ensure success of the boycott.
“The election was won by the French settler unionist party, the Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la République, representing the French settlers who make up 37% of the population.
“When Mitterand’s ‘socialist’ government came to power in France, it did so on the promise of self-determination for New Caledonia – or Kanaky to give it the name preferred by its original inhabitants. However, Mitterand reneged on this promise as on most of his other promises to the French working class. Nevertheless the rebellion of the Kanaks is making the islands virtually ungovernable. The French government had to send squads of riot police to try to maintain order.
“The riot police and the local settlers have been on the offensive against the Kanaks. On 6 December, French settlers murdered ten Kanaks, including two brothers of Jean Marie Tjibaou, the leader of the FLNKS and President of the Provisional Government of Kanaky (proclaimed by the FLNKS on 25 November). The settlers have also attempted to bomb Tjibaou’s house. However, the Kanaks have been arming themselves by raiding the houses of settlers who own guns.
“Huge nickel deposits are the attraction of New Caledonia as far as French imperialism is concerned. For this reason it is manoeuvring to avoid giving the territory its independence, manipulating the chauvinism of the settlers for this purpose.”
The unrest continued until a. peace deal was reached in 1988. The clashes took the form of a quasi-civil war between independence fighters and loyalists, resulting in the deaths of 80 people, culminating in the 1988 bloodbath known as the Ouvéa cave attack when separatist militants killed four gendarmes and took 27 hostage.
Finally France was persuaded to grant concessions in the interests of peace:
“Signed on June 26, 1988, the Matignon Accords cemented reconciliation and restored peace to the island after four years of bloody near-civil war. Negotiated under the auspices of Socialist former prime minister Michel Rocard, with representatives from both the pro-independence parties (FLNKS president Jean-Marie Tjibaou) and loyalists (RPCR leader Jacques Lafleur), they were ratified by a referendum with 80% of the vote, despite a low turnout (37%).
“The aim of these agreements was to correct the socio-economic imbalances between the communities, and set out a 10-year transitional autonomous status for the territory, at the end of which a local referendum on self-determination would be held” (Les Décodeurs, ‘New Caledonia: Six questions to understand the current crisis’, Le Monde, 17 May 2024).
However, the accords demanded concessions not only from the settlers but also from the Kanaks and to that extent they pleased nobody. Jean-Marie Tjibaou and his deputy Yeiwéné Yeiwéné, who negotiated the accords on behalf of the Kanaks, were assassinated at Ouvea by a disappointed Kanak activist who regarded them as a sell-out. To the extent that 40 years later New Caledonia appears no closer to achieving independence, it certainly indicates that France was never acting in good faith but only buying time.
And now history is repeating itself.
Matignon had in fact provided for a referendum on independence to be held in 1998 after a transitional period, but in the event the referendum was postponed by agreement between both sides, presumably because neither was certain of victory. The Noumea Accord of May 1998 postponed a vote on sovereignty for another 15-20 years, but it did provide for gradual delegation of greater self-governing powers to the territory over that period, at the end of which it provided for three independence referendums to be held.
“The accords also placed strict restrictions on who could vote in provincial elections and referendums, in an attempt to give greater representation to the Kanak population.
“Successive referendums in 2018 and 2020 have seen nearly half of the population of New Caledonia vote in favour of independence. In 2021 the French government insisted on bringing forward the third independence referendum, scheduled for 2022, despite the pandemic” (Olly Haynes, ‘New Caledonians are still fighting to be free of France’, New Internationalist, 30 May 2024).
Holding the referendum during the pandemic was always going to be more of a problem for the Kanaks than for the settlers as a result of which FLNKS, the pro-independence group, boycotted the referendum, on the basis that it violated the terms of the Noumea Accords. The result was that on a 37% turnout independence was rejected by 98% of those who voted.
But France insisted that economic stability necessitated that it was done quickly and that, as there was no minimum turnout requirement in the accords, the outcome voting against independence was legitimate in spite of the fact that it quite clearly did not reflect the wishes of the New Caledonian people.
FLNKS engaged itself in lobbying for a new referendum, and its supporters took various actions to further its demands, including a militant strike at a nickel mine, all to ensure that France be encouraged to let go of its fractious colony.
French president Macron, however, decided to move in the opposite direction by promulgating a law, supposedly in the interests of ‘democracy’, to give greater voting rights to settlers. Under the Matignon accords, voting in provincial elections in New Caledonia had been denied to settlers who were only relatively recently arrived, as a result of which both those who were recently arrived in 1988 and those who have arrived since have had no vote in these elections. Macron’s proposals would have allowed some 25,000 settlers who had been settled for 10 years to be admitted to the electoral roll. The result would be a huge boost for the vote against independence.
If one bears in mind that independence ought to be granted as of right and not subjected to any kind of vote at all, whatever the Kanaks might have been forced to agree in previous negotiations, Macron’s proposals were nothing short of a provocation. And the warriors of the Kanak nation rose to the occasion:
“…the city of Nouméa and its suburbs were ablaze for almost two weeks in May. Caught up in riots reportedly involving nearly five thousand young Kanak independence activists, some two hundred buildings were burned down, mostly consisting of stores and factories, as well as public facilities, houses, schools, and libraries. In response, armed self-defence groups and militias of Europeans formed to protect their neighbourhoods, erecting more than a hundred barricades throughout the city. At least seven people died, including four Kanak” (Nathanaëlle Soler, ‘In New Caledonia, Kanak people are Defending their autonomy’, The Jacobin, 4 June 2024).
The damage has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros. The government declared a state of emergency on 15 May.
Macron was forced to back down and withdraw the legislation.
The state of emergency has now been ended, but the problems have not been resolved and the area is still suffering some degree of turmoil.
Ultimately, New Caledonia must be given its independence. Its resources must come under the control of its own people. They must be allowed to choose their own government to act in the interests of all its people, and to ensure peace and prosperity that government will have “to end the appalling asymmetry between the Kanak and Caldo [French settler] populations, which is rooted in colonial violence and conquest, access to education, jobs, wealth and power must be shared” (Eric Vuillard, ‘New Caledonia: “No colonial society can last forever”’, Le Monde, 28 May 2024). It is understandable that the settlers will be reluctant to let go their privileges, and will want to hang on to France as their guarantor, but it is high time that the last bastions of colonialism were liberated. Once New Caledonia has its independence, there will still be thorny problems to resolve in order to bring about a reconciliation of the communities, but this is a road that will have to be travelled free of interference from France or any other self-interested foreign power.