Four dead, including a gendarme from a gunshot, and hundreds injured is the balance of two days of unrest in New Caledonia, the French archipelago of 270,000 inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean. The independentists reject the Paris project to expand the electoral body in the old colony and thus include voters who favor staying in France.
President Emmanuel Macron, after meeting the Defense and Security Council at the Elysee Palace in Paris, decided on Wednesday to decree a state of emergency in New Caledonia. The authorities have imposed a curfew. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced the deployment of the armed forces to protect airports and ports, and the ban of the social network TikTok. There are also 1,800 police and gendarmes deployed, and a reinforcement of 500 more is en route.
The protests have taken a violent turn since Monday with looting, gunshots, arson and shootings. “The situation is insurrectional,” denounced the High Commissioner of the Republic, Louis Le Franc, who warned about the risk of a “civil war.” The riots, in which mainly young people between 15 and 25 years of age participate, revive the specter of the 1980s, when New Caledonia reached a situation that is historically described as “almost civil war”, and which was deactivated thanks to the Matignon agreements in 1988, which pacified the territory for decades.
The crisis seems to have surprised the President of the Republic and his Government. And this, despite repeated warnings from the island and from former prime ministers such as Manuel Valls and Édouard Philippe, who in the past were involved in the negotiations over New Caledonia.
Macron has called on the independentists and the loyalists, supporters of New Caledonia remaining in France, to reach an agreement among themselves. Otherwise, he will convene Congress in June, made up of the National Assembly and the Senate, to definitively adopt the reform of the Constitution that will modify the electoral body in the archipelago.
The National Assembly approved the bill, previously adopted by the Senate, by 351 votes in favor and 153 against, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. The independentists interpret the vote as a provocation from Paris at an extremely delicate moment; the loyalists, as a sign that the deputies will not be intimidated by the violent. The deputies from the Macronist center, the right and the extreme right voted in favor, and the left against.
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Until now, those registered before 1998 were registered in the census for the provincial elections, which must be held no later than 2025. This excluded one in five potential voters. With the reform, if adopted, all natives and those who have resided for more than 10 years will be registered.
In New Caledonia, 41% of the population is indigenous or Kanaka, and 24% is European or Caldoche. The rest come from other territories or communities. Who appears in the census is politically explosive, because it can determine the future of the archipelago, colonized by France in 1853, registered since 1986 on the UN list of non-autonomous territories pending decolonization, and today with broad autonomy in almost all areas. matters except in the military, police and judicial.
The territory is strategic on the Pacific board, where China and the United States dispute influence, and where France wants to make itself heard. “An independent New Caledonia would, in fact, find itself under Chinese influence,” reads a 2021 report from the Strategic Research Institute of the Military School, dependent on the French Ministry of the Armies. The archipelago, if full sovereignty is achieved, would serve China to “isolate Australia” and “[le] would guarantee “the supply of raw materials, especially nickel.”
The Kanak independentists see the census modifications as a way to dilute their influence among the French from Europe who have arrived in recent years. They also reproach Macron for instead of acting as an impartial arbiter between both communities, the State acts as a lawyer for one party. And they point out the responsibilities that the president has entrusted in his government or his parliamentary majority to leaders. loyalists. They maintain that the current census is not fully democratic as it does not reflect the real population of New Caledonia.
Between 2018 and 2021, New Caledonia has held three independence referendums. He hasn’t won on three occasions. The last one, with controversy, since the independentists of the Kanako and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) with the argument that covid-19 had prevented them from campaigning in conditions of equity.
The pro-independence members of the so-called Field Action Coordination Cell (CCAT) declared in a statement that the riots “were not necessary,” but added: “They are the expression of the invisibles of society who suffer fully from inequalities and “They are marginalized on a daily basis.”
A source cited by Le Monde has indicated that two of the three civilian deaths in the riots are young Kanaks who died from Caldoche shots. Commissioner Le Franc explained at a press conference that at least one had been a victim “of someone who wanted to defend himself.” “I let them imagine what will happen if there are militias that start shooting at armed people,” he added.
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