The three years that built up to the current crisis – Technologist

The story began with a failure. In her office, on October 28, 2022, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne had been hoping for a nice group photo. But half the guests had turned down the invitation. Of New Caledonia’s political leaders, only the loyalists – the hardliners and the moderates – were there. The pro-independence members of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), the gray-headed leaders who have fought every battle since the 1970s, had put aside their quarrels to jointly refuse the invitation. Dialogue was out of the question; at least not like this.

Dialogue was supposed to be the key ingredient to close the two-decade transitional political process launched in 1998 with the Nouméa Accord. France is looking for a sequel to the major document organizing decolonization: The agreement fully recognized the Kanak identity for the Indigenous community, established autonomous institutions, and promised economic rebalancing. It pushed back the walls of the French Constitution to offer the Pacific territory and its 270,000 inhabitants a status with many exemptions from the rule of the Republic.

The 1998 text reads: “At the end of a 20-year period, the transfer to New Caledonia of sovereign powers, access to an international status of full responsibility and the organization of citizenship as a nationality will be put to the vote of the populations concerned.” Furthermore: “The electorate for local elections will be restricted to people who have been established for a certain length of time.” Here lies the incendiary subject in the former settlement colony, the one at the heart of all balances between Europeans and Kanak.

Headache

Since the end of 2021, the French state, pro-independence factions, and loyalists had stopped talking to each other. Following the first two independence referendums in 2018 and 2020 provided for in the agreement, the third was boycotted. The FLNKS was calling for it to be postponed until after the 2022 presidential election, but President Emmanuel Macron did not make that choice. “He is the president who has courageously held the three referendums on independence,” said his office. On December 12, 2021, New Caledonians did, of course, still choose to remain in the Republic, but with turnout of only 43.9%. The “French state’s referendum,” as rejected by the pro-independence president of the local parliament, Roch Wamytan, resulted in a headache.

The French government believed that the time was right to write the future because New Caledonia had changed a great deal since the quasi-civil war of 1984-1988. With peace, it had prospered and become more mixed. A Caledonian sentiment had developed, uniting in the “country” all the victims of history, descendants of the Kanak, convicts, or the exploited natives of the colonial empire. “We’re more Caledonian than French,” said even the loyalists.

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