The French Pacific territory of New Caledonia, which became a French colony in 1853, will hold a referendum next year on the proposition of self-rule. The referendum is the result of 30 years of a political process to ease tensions between pro-independence militants from the indigenous Kanak population, which make up about 45% of the archipelago’s 270,000 inhabitants, and ethnic Europeans. A key issue of the referendum will be the extent of involvement of the young generation, and in particular young Kanaks who are the worst affected by high unemployment and educational failure. Ellen Salvi reports from New Caledonia.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is at the centre of controversy over his decision to charter a luxuriously equipped Airbus plane at a cost of 350,000 euros to fly him and his staff back to France from Japan, leaving a French air force jet at his disposition to return empty, which he said was because of night-flight comfort and the need to return early to Paris before President Emmanuel Macron left on a foreign trip.
For decades there has been a string of legal and economic initiatives by France aimed at improving the lot of its overseas territories. Yet as the current crisis in French Guiana shows, these measures have failed to have a noticeable impact on the 2.7 million French people who live in those regions. Julien Sartre reports on how an outdated model of development applied to these territories still shows no signs of being updated.
The Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia and the South American territory of Guiana are both part of France. But in these remnants of the French colonial past, indigenous peoples suffer from violations and non-recognition of their human rights. France's human rights commission has now called on the country to recognise New Caledonia's Kanaks and Guiana's Native Americans as indigenous peoples and to grant them full rights, as laid out in the United Nations charter. Julien Sartre reports.
Just as New Caledonia, the furthest-flung French territory, is about to embark on the final steps for self-determination, the Quai Branly museum in Paris has timely put together a rich and wide-ranging exhibition of the art and culture of the archipelago’s indigenous Kanak population that reveals a people debunking 160 years of colonialism and redefining themselves. Joseph Confavreux outlines the political context of the show, and calls on anthropologist Alban Bensa, an authority on Kanak culture, to decode the exhibition’s vast array of exhibits.
