In the Vallée-du-Tir neighbourhood of Nouméa, capital of New Caledonia, the sun had been up for three hours but the night was not yet over. Stones and tear gas grenades were still flying through the air. Sitting on an upturned tin of paint at the head of the main road, an elderly woman was warning the few cars heading past that they should turn back: “It’s too dangerous down there, shouldn’t go there, everything’s smashed.”
Overnight on May 14th-15th, Nouméa was ablaze for a second night running. More than 30 shops and industrial buildings were burned down since Monday, as well as dozens of vehicles, and a house – whereas until then the targets were exclusively economic sites. “It’s sad to end up with this,” said a Kanak woman, in her forties, from Vallée-du-Tir. “But what should the young do? You can see the gap between those who run the country and us, here, with our minimal salary.” To spend any of it sparingly now, locals will have to walk some distance – the chemist’s shop was gutted and the few grocery stores that were not hit are closed-up.
In this low-income neighbourhood, as in others like Magenta and Normandie, the daily frustrations of a section of the Kanak population spilled over as the clock ticked down on a decisive moment for the institutional future in New Caledonia. For the constitutional reform driven by French interior and overseas territories minister Gérald Darmanin aims to undo one of the most important measures in the process of the decolonisation of the archipelago, namely the freezing of the electoral register as decided in 2007 by then French president Jacques Chirac.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The reform, after it was approved by the French parliament late Tuesday (by 351 votes in favour, 153 against), must now be approved by a special congress of the lower and upper houses, to be held in Versailles, and which President Emmanuel Macron has announced for the end of June.
If it is then definitively adopted, the legislation will allow those adults who have been resident in New Caledonia for 10 years or more to vote in provincial elections in the archipelago, which are due to be held before December 15th.
Until now, under the terms that emerged from the so-called Nouméa Accord negotiated principally between the French government and representatives of the indigenous Kanak population, those entitled to vote in the provincial elections were restricted to people who were resident adults in 1998, and their children. This was to give a greater political representation to the Kanak people, who have become a minority of the total population – which today totals 271,000 – since France annexed the archipelago in 1853 and the arrival since of settlers of European (and mostly French) origin, who are nick-named “Caldoches”.
Today, the Kanaks represent 41% of the population, although they are a majority in the poorer northern province of Grande Terre, the largest island, and the Loyalty Island province. The “Caldoches” are concentrated in the economically dominant southern province of Grande-Terre, where Nouméa is situated.
The latter are largely in the so-called “loyalist” camp who support French rule of the territory (although it is semi-autonomous after a number of powers were devolved under the Nouméa Accord). They see the reform approved by parliament this week as re-establishing democracy, and as a logical step following the three referendums on independence (held in 2018, 2020 and 2021) which all resulted in a victory for the loyalists. After garnering 47% of the vote in 2020, the pro-independence (mostly Kanak) movement boycotted the third and last referendum in 2021 in protest over the refusal of the authorities to postpone the date of the ballot to allow for the period of Kanak mourning following the worst of the Covid epidemic.
The move now to unfreeze the electoral register is regarded by the pro-independence camp as a return to the old colonial populating policies. “We mothers cried when we heard that,” said the Kanak woman in Vallée-du-Tir. “We don’t want to go 40 years backwards.” She meant back to civil war, which this week appeared ever closer.
The Nouméa Accord, which handed greater political power to Kanak representatives, was the ultimate result of a bitter and bloody campaign for independence in the 1980s, and which reached a climax in 1988 in a hostage-taking of French gendarmes by Kanak rebels. That siege, in a cave on the local island of Ouvéa, ended with the deaths of 19 of the rebels, and two gendarmes.
“We can still return to normal life,” said Stéphane Thiama, a Kanak originally from Houaïlou, on the east coast of Grande Terre. Thiama was manning a barricade with other pro-independence Kanaks in the Vallée du Tir, close to Nouméa. “We have to move forwards, work together, be united. I have mates who’ve lost their shops. It’s complicated.” Their roadblock, letting vehicles through one by one, was in peaceful protest at the reform. “The youngsters don’t understand what’s happening,” he added. “It’s going to degenerate.” He said he is against violence, but he warned that if the electoral reform is promulgated the situation will inevitably become out of hand. “If it goes through at Versailles, well then, it will be civil war."
On the other side of the hill from where Thiama and his friends were manning their roadblock, the Magenta neighbourhood was getting cleaned up. Here, the second night of rioting was less severe than the first. Local inhabitants, carrying spades and brooms, were clearing the roads of stones and piles of ashes. In front of a small supermarket, which had been vandalised but escaped arson, around 30 people had formed a queue. But fearing the calm was that before another storm, locals in the nearby neighbourhood had set up their own roadblock.
Closing down the three roads that run into Ouémo, a small, well-off peninsular district attached to the larger peninsula on which sits Nouméa, about a hundred people, mostly men, had set up a militia, as also is the case in numerous other neighbourhoods. “Our group of citizens was set up with the help of certain political figures [editor’s note: loyalists] who have a bit of influence, to prepare ourselves, to block, to act, to guard against an eventual arrival,” said Hugo, 32, one of the leaders of the group. “It’s purely pacifist, initially. It’s preventive.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
It is their numbers that are part of the intended dissuasion aimed at the young Kanak rioters, along with weapons, in the form of bats and clubs. The firearms are kept out of sight. “We’ll try not to use them,” said another of the group, Sébastien. “But if it has to be, we won’t have the choice.” Another man, whose name was withheld, spoke of “the slow mechanism of rising pressure, which pushes [people] into doing things one wouldn’t in normal times”.
“We’re born here,” added Sébastien. “I don’t know where we’d go.” Also in the group was Hugo, who said he believed the rioting was the result of people being “manipulated” by the pro-independence Kanak politicians. “It’s been 40 years of lies on their part. We promised them nothing and offered them everything,” he said, referring to the measures introduced in favour of a greater economic balance between Kanaks and Caldoches. Given the differences between both groups, he said, the end-result “is going to be complicated”.
It was in the middle of the afternoon local time when Louis Le Franc, the French high commissioner, announced the first death. “A rioter has died following a bullet wound,” he announced, adding that the shooter was an inhabitant who said he fired in self-defence. In the evening, Le Franc announced a second death, but gave no further details. The day before, a pregnant woman, who was prevented from gaining access to a hospital, lost her baby. In the space of two days, 61 gendarmes and police officers have been injured, and 177 people arrested, according to interior ministry figures. “The situation is insurrectional,” said the high commissioner. “We’ve entered a deadly spiral. If the call for calm is not heard by everyone, there will be many deaths.”
Within hours, the death toll had risen to four – three young Kanaks and a gendarme who had been shot in the head.
In face of the ongoing disruption, Vaimu’a Muliava, a member of the local government commented: “People who have to have dialyses cannot be treated and will perhaps die, others need to be operated and will probably be unable to. What have we become? Animals?”
Daniel Goa, a Kanak mayor and head of the largest pro-independence party, the Union calédonienne, called for calm. “If I ask our youngsters to go back to their homes, I also ask the state to repatriate its police and military cowboys,” he wrote. “In face of you are simply young adolescents who want to shout their thirst for freedom, for dignity, who want equal opportunities.”
Meanwhile, the French presidency announced that Emmanuel Macron had tasked Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and interior minister Gérald Darmanin with organising a meeting in Paris with the “representatives of the pro-independence and non-independence political forces”. Following the adoption by the National Assembly, the lower house, of the constitutional reform, Macron pledged that the congress at Versailles, where it would be submitted to a final vote by both houses, will be held “before the end of June”.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version, updated with added reporting, by Graham Tearse