“Our brothers are dying, we've lost lots of friends, all of our young people know how to tie a knot to hang themselves and you....you speak to us of steering groups that don't exist!” This was the robust approach to France's junior minister with responsibility for overseas territories, Ericka Bareigts, from a young resident of French Guiana who was full of despair at the policies handed down from Paris.
Although it seems very topical, given the recent strikes and strife in French Guiana, this scene in fact took place some months ago, in December 2016 in Paris. On that day a delegation of young Amerindians from Guiana had come to the French Senate building in Paris to give evidence about the epidemic of suicides that is affecting their community in the west of this French département or county in South America. The young speaker was Christophe Pierre who, having made the long journey from his home to the French capital, was in an angry mood.
In particular Christophe Pierre was disillusioned by what he saw as the derisory solutions that the overseas territories minister had just proposed to tackle the continual tragedies in his community in the Amazon. This was, in his words: “The arrival of a delegation of civil servants from the CFA [editor's note, the family benefits office], from Pôle Emploi[the employment centre] and the state on a dugout on the [River] Oyapock.” The image of civil servants, armed with administrative forms, going up the river to meet indigenous peoples highlights the utter disconnect between the plight of these French citizens overseas and the standard institutional response about access to rights.
The episode could merely be anecdotal, even absurd, were it not for the fact that out of all France's overseas territories it is now French Guiana which is up in arms, just a few weeks before France's presidential election. Several Amerindian associations have joined protesters who are calling for greater security and more resources for all inhabitants of the area. It was perhaps because she recalled this unfortunate exchange in December – indicative of so many misunderstandings over the years - that Ericka Bareigts chose to issue an apology to the people of the region as she sought to negotiate a settlement.
The fragile social balance that exists in France's overseas département's and territories could equally well have fallen apart in Mayotte near Madagsacar, in New Caledonia, Polynesia or La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. However, French Guiana has history for this: in 2008 people staged huge demonstrations against the extremely high cost of living there. These protests then spread to France's départements in the Caribbean and then on to those in the Indian Ocean. Already at that time people were fed up with the general state of affairs in those areas; the jobless figures, the poor housing and the level of illiteracy. The protests lasted several months and led to the holding of special assemblies in 2009 to air the grievances of local people and to 2011 being made 'Overseas Year'.
Six year on and nothing has been done. The key social indicators compiled by the statistical organisations have not improved at all. “More than one worker in five is unemployed overseas,” wrote the statistical agency INSEE in 2015. In some territories the number of people without work has risen by 24% since 2012. This has pushed the average jobless rate in overseas territories to double that of metropolitan France.
In Paris Parliamentarians regularly point out that “applied to [mainland] France this rate would produce more than ten million unemployed”. Young people are particularly vulnerable: on La Réunion, for example, the proportion of under-25s without work is more than 50%. These figures have a bearing, too, on the the fears about law and order and crime that have been raised in recent days by protestors in French Guiana.
Other figures complete this damning portrait: for example, those that show that the overseas territories are 30 years behind the rest of France based on the Human Development Index. The French government and Parliament have known all this for a long time. Such figures were endlessly repeated by the minister Ericka Bareigts during the recent debate on the so-called 'Real Eqality' law that was voted through by French MPs in October 2016. This measure had long been promised by President François Hollande – for whom the overseas electorate voted in massive numbers in 2012 – and is aimed at “closing the development gap” between mainland France and the overseas territories, though not in the short term. The aim is to reach that point in a generation or around 25 years.
“A rise in basic pensions, union representation, automatic handing out of social benefits from the CAF: we're in the process of putting the finishing touches to social equality,” enthused Ericka Bareigts at the time of the legislative debate in the National Assembly. “Our territories are not begging for anything, we're embarking on a new stage of convergence,” she added, stating that the 1946 law that had created the overseas départements of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion and French Guiana had “not resolved everything”. The right-wing opposition ultimately voted for the measure without signing up for it in its entirety.
However, this piece of legislation adopted at the end of the Hollande presidency reads more like a shopping list of grievances from elected representatives overseas than a change in paradigm for these struggling areas. “The way this proposal was put together seems altogether debatable, we lost a lot of time before tackling such an important subject, while the inequalities have greatly deepened in the past five years,” said MP Philippe Gosselin, from the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) party, during the debate. He also spoke of “serious inadequacies, particularly on economic issues”.
The law on 'Real Equality', though ambitious, is not the first attempt to sort out the overseas territories' problems via grandiose plans and legal frameworks. One earlier attempt was the law on overseas economic development known as LODÉOM adopted in 2009. Its measures were chiefly aimed at the “tax exemption of productive investment” in the overseas areas, a policy dear to the hearts of business bosses in all these areas and one that came at an annual cost of four billion euros to the treasury. Other attempts at “economic regulation” were to follow.
Crisis in thinking
The so-called “Future Pact”, which has been the current government's main negotiating weapon in the current French Guiana crisis, is based on the same principles as earlier initiatives. This entails pumping millions of euros of public money into projects so that the level of infrastructure overseas is as good as it is in mainland France. In 2010 the voters in Guiana were themselves sufficiently trusting of this old development model for them to restate their attachment to the French Republic, voting against greater autonomy. In opting for closer co-operation with Paris and against more autonomy they ruled out greater say over issues such as tax, home affairs and development options.
But this trust has since given way to disappointment. The standard development model has increasingly stuttered over the years. And despite the discussions that began back in 2013 the “Future Pact” has still not been signed.
“An entire way of thinking is in crisis,” says Françoise Vergès, consulting professor at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College at the University of London, who specialises in slavery, overseas territories and decolonisation, and who is the author of 'Le ventre des femmes, capitalisme, racialisation et féminisme' ('Women's Bellies, Racialization and Feminism') published by Albin Michel in 2017. “Let's accept that the Guyanese get what they're asking for – some secondary schools, middle schools etc … and afterwards? What professions will these children go into? The problems will soon resurface. It's the way the French Republic thinks that causes a problem,” she says. “The overseas [territories] are not cut off: in Guiana, and on La Réunion or Mayotte, 80% of trade, including in food, is with France. At the same time the migration pressure is enormous, coming from countries such as Brazil in South America and the Comoros and East Africa in the Indian Ocean. And France can't do anything about that as the migration movements aren't answerable to Paris!”
The issue of migration has been a final blow delivered by globalisation following the application of outdated development models to the overseas territories. In Mayotte or Guiana, where the borders are porous, the problem is exacerbated and the inhabitants sometimes resort to violence. That was the case in 2016 in Mayotte when some angry citizens groups turned on the the immigrant population, who came from neighbouring islands, and carried out some illegal expulsions.
Faced with this deadlock, none of the candidates in this year's presidential election in France are proposing any radical change in relationships between the overseas territories and their neighbours or with France itself. Overall, candidates have displayed a mixture of indifference and lack of knowledge with the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron recently appearing to mistake French Guiana for an island. Meanwhile Marine Le Pen was accorded a warm welcome on Mayotte in the Indian Ocean in November 2016, a sign of how tensions over immigration and the issue of citizenship have become important locally because of the migratory pressures. The scenes of her being greeted enthusiastically at a local market there would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
It is difficult to imagine that faced with similar extreme problems of immigration, an economy in such a poor shape and mass unemployment, mainland France itself would have stayed passive for so long. “You have to be aware that a lot of this news would be classified under the heading of the theatre of the absurd if it were not so tragic,” says Françoise Vergès. “The state regularly promises expulsions and the despatch of extra police to control Mayotte's frontiers: but once you've had a clear-out and put up the barbed wire, then what? The people still feel abandoned because real change would represent something too profound.”
The overseas territories were also a major news story during the presidential election of 1988 when a group of French gendarmes, military officials and a prosecutor were held hostage by separatists in a cave on the New Caledonian island of Ouvéa. The handling of the crisis, which led to the deaths of 19 hostage-takers and two of the rescuers, became an issue between President François Mitterrand and his right-wing challenger Jacques Chirac before the second and decisive round of that year's election. Mitterrand was re-elected and and process of irreversible decolonisation was begun. This process will culminate in 2018 in a referendum in New Caledonia in which the people will vote on whether they want independence. It remains to be seen whether the current problems in French Guiana will also one day herald the possibility of a change in status.
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- The French version of this article can be read here.
English version by Michael Streeter