French interior minister Gérald Darmanin, visiting Corsica where rioting has followed the serious assault in a mainland jail of a nationalist figure by a fellow prisoner, has said that Emmanuel Macron, if re-elected in presidential elections next month, could offer autonomy to the Mediterranean island which has been under rule from Paris since the 18th century.
The French parliament on Thursday adopted a reform of the organic law that sets out the new measures of autonomy granted by Paris to French Polynesia. Importantly, the legislation includes, for the first time in such a text, a finely tuned recognition that the French nuclear tests were imposed on the South Pacific territory – where a total of 193 bombs were exploded underground, at sea and in the open air over three decades, beginning in 1966 – and the “radiation-induced illnesses” these have provoked. Julien Sartre reports.
