When, in the small hours of Thursday, a bleary-eyed Emmanuel Macron emerged from 25 hours in the presidential plane flying from Paris to Nouméa, riots and looting had been raging for more than a week around the capital of the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, with six dead, including two gendarmes.
In this context, le Président’s first words, on the tarmac of La Tontouta airport, may not have been the most tactful. “A return to calm cannot mean backtracking,” he said, widely interpreted as a refusal to stop the constitutional amendment that started all the trouble.
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech at New Caledonia’s High Commissioner residency in Noumea.Credit: AP
Night after night, French news has shown torched houses and businesses, over the tinny voices of local residents on the telephone from their besieged homes. “We are afraid to get out; there is no food left to buy anyway, and if we leave, our homes will probably be looted and destroyed,” one said.
In the ongoing blame game, it’s hard not to point to Macron himself as the arsonist in chief. He’s the one who set in motion a parliamentary vote in Paris, approving a constitutional amendment that would allow recent arrivals in the territory to vote in local elections.
He then dismissed weeks of protest marches from Kanak citizens, the indigenous population of New Caledonia, remote as they were from the fulcrum of politics in the capital, 17,000 kilometres away. Last week, the marches turned violent.
French President Emmanuel Macron visits the central police station in Noumea.Credit: AP
Macron was not yet 11 years old in 1988 when, after several years of rising violence, including a bloody hostage-taking, François Mitterrand’s then PM Michel Rocard hammered out accords that brought peace back to the islands, initiating a 10-year-long process.
One of its mainstays were assurances to the Kanaks that they would not be turned into a powerless plurality on their ancestral land. Hence the local voting restrictions. Their significant curtailing is now about to be turned into law: this is seen as a betrayal.
“There isn’t a single mistake they haven’t made,” a top French civil servant familiar with the situation says. “It is inconceivable the president wasn’t warned how unstable the islands are. Tourism, especially from cruise ships, has vanished over the years, scared off by reports of unrest as well as the lack of tourist infrastructure. So have the profits from the nickel industry, devolved to Kanak interests in 2008.”