Geopolitics helps reignite New Caledonia’s anti-colonial unrest

THE RECENT sharpening of international rivalries has an impact all over the world—even in far-flung parts of the Pacific. It now seems to have encouraged outsiders to pick at old wounds in New Caledonia. As the French territory was swept by rioting this month, leaving six dead including two policemen, dozens of X and Facebook posts with the hashtag #EndFrenchColonialism alleged: “French police are murderers in New Caledonia”. When Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, first denounced meddling by Azerbaijan, it appeared far-fetched. Then Viginum, an official body in Paris that monitors social-media disinformation, confirmed it had traced the posts to Azerbaijan, a regime close to Russia and angry at French support for neighbouring Armenia. The French pointed to interference not just from Baku but from Moscow and Beijing.

It is a measure of how seriously France takes the troubled nickel-rich islands, and any hint of meddling in its affairs, that Emmanuel Macron, the French president, on May 21st unexpectedly cleared his diary and set off from Paris for Nouméa, the capital. The territory is central to France’s ambition to act as an Indo-Pacific power, not least since the AUKUS deal in 2021 between Australia, America and Britain scuppered a bilateral strategic accord it had signed to supply submarines to Australia. France has been increasingly worried about China’s influence in Pacific countries. In the words of Claude Malhuret, a centrist French senator: “China is waiting for New Caledonia to fall into into its hands like a ripe fruit.”

The disturbances had already prompted France to impose a state of emergency, for at least 12 days, on May 16th. Hundreds of police and soldiers were flown in. The airport was briefly closed and rioters’ barricades had to be removed from the road to the capital. New Zealand and Australia sent military planes to evacuate travellers. To outcries from civil-liberties groups, the French temporarily banned TikTok, a Chinese-owned video app, amid claims that rioters were using it to co-ordinate.

Presidential aides say that Mr Macron, who was initially planning to spend just a day on the island, wants both to show solidarity with residents and to see if he can get rival political groupings to sit down together. The latest flare-up was sparked when the National Assembly in Paris passed a law on May 14th expanding the electoral franchise. At present, French citizens who arrived in New Caledonia after 1998 do not have the right to vote at provincial elections, which legislators in Paris consider discriminatory. Mr Darmanin says it is time to introduce “a minimum of democracy” by unfreezing the electoral rolls and opting instead for a sliding ten-year residence requirement.

Kanak (indigenous) political leaders, however, see the measure as an effort to undermine their political strength. The 1990s agreement to freeze the rolls, they say, recognised that for decades Paris had skewed the electoral numbers by offering big financial incentives to French civil servants to relocate to New Caledonia.

The deal was the product of a complicated history of resentment and recrimination. France was once reviled across Oceania: for its decades of nuclear tests on Mururoa atoll; for the bombing of the Greenpeace vessel The Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985; and for its colonial rule in New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The Mururoa tests stopped in 1996 and, after a protracted conflict in the 1980s, France in 1988 reached a political settlement in New Caledonia with the pro-independence Front National de Libération Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS).

Renewed in 1998 in an agreement known as the Nouméa Accord, the deal promised economic “rebalancing” to stimulate the emergence of a Kanak middle class, devolution of powers from Paris, a power-sharing local executive and, critically, three referendums on independence, originally to be held 15-20 years later. France shed its status as the bête noire of colonial powers, and in 2016 Australia and New Zealand welcomed New Caledonia and French Polynesia into the Pacific Islands Forum, membership of which was once reserved for the decolonised.

If written into the French constitution, which requires a three-fifths majority at a joint sitting of the lower and upper houses in Versailles, the new law on widening the electoral franchise would supersede the voting provisions of the Nouméa Accord. In any case, say the French, the three referendums were held, all rejecting independence: by 56.7% in 2018, 53.3% in 2020 and 96.5% in 2021. Pro-independence politicians argue that the third referendum was invalid because the Kanaks, around 40% of the New Caledonia population, did not vote because they were burying their dead from covid-19—hence the big majority. In any case, the Nouméa Accord stipulates that after three referendums won by “no” voters, negotiations must be held between loyalists, the FLNKS and France. Until then, “the political organisation set up by the 1998 Agreement will remain in force.”

Before leaving Paris, officials suggested that Mr Macron might set up some form of unspecified “commission” to try to unblock the political stalemate. It now seems unlikely that the vote in Versailles could take place as scheduled in late June. The presidents of both chambers have suggested it should be delayed. Pushing it through now would indeed seem to hark back to the bad old days of French high-handedness. In the 1980s and 1990s, France became deft at brokering agreements between rivals in its distant Pacific territory. But since 2021, it has tilted markedly to the loyalist side. It needs to recover some of the lost spirit of accord. ■