After three decades of peace, France’s colonial history in New Caledonia is catching up with the government. The political crisis has been brewing since the contested 2021 referendum and is coupled with an explosive social situation, against a backdrop of discrimination and ethnic tensions, according to researchers.
Historically conquered for its natural resources, New Caledonia was also considered by France as “a settlement colony”, recalled anthropologist Benoît Trépied on France Culture on Wednesday.
Alongside a colonized indigenous people, the Kanaks, several waves of migrants followed one another: convicts brought from mainland France, settlers, Oceanian and Asian workers.
” For a long time […]the indigenous people and all the others looked at each other a bit like dogs because the society was very segregated,” underlines the researcher.
This colonial tension did not disappear with the abolition of the colony in 1946, and finally led to the “deadly face to face” of the 1980s, a latent civil war until the Ouvéa massacre.
On May 5, 1988, a military assault was launched against the Ouvéa cave in New Caledonia where Kanak separatists had been holding 27 hostages since April 22. Nineteen Kanak militants and two soldiers were killed.
“Colonial history continues to fuel the resentment of part of the population,” observes Evelyne Barthou, lecturer in sociology in Pau. “When I interview young people, there is still this transmission in the families of this colonial past, of all the abuses that were committed against the Kanaks, the dispossession of land, the rapes, the submission to forced labor “.
The situation had calmed down since the Matignon agreements, extended by the Nouméa agreement in 1998.
To build the decolonization of New Caledonia, the challenge was to “build a citizenship of New Caledonia bringing together the Kanak people and other long-established communities”, underlines Benoît Trépied.
A project of “social and political unification” within France, “but with a vocation of emancipation”, he recalls.
But at the end of 2021, a political shift began with the organization of a third referendum on independence against the wishes of the separatists.
“Since this referendum, organized in the middle of Covid and in the midst of mourning for Kanak families, the French state has clearly gone beyond its role of impartiality to take a position in favor of anti-independence activists,” believes Isabelle Leblic, emeritus research director at CNRS.
“Injustice”
But it is the desire to expand the electorate which ignites the powder, just as in the 1980s. The Kanaks fear that the arrival of 25,000 new voters, half of them born locally, will put them in a political minority while they already represent numerically only 41% of the population.
“There is no surprise in what is happening. Far from being a sanction against Europeans, the freezing of the electorate aimed to protect the Kanak population, which had already been halved in the 19th century.e century due in particular to insurrections suppressed bloodily”, comments Evelyne Barthou, also attached to the University of New Caledonia.
This political crisis is coupled with a highly flammable social situation in a territory with very armed populations, where “ethnic identities” clearly overlap “with social inequalities”, indicates Benoît Trépied, recalling that the wealth gaps in Caledonia “are much more important than in mainland France.
“There is certainly a small Kanak bourgeoisie, but 70% of the poor are Kanaks, while the metropolitans have a lot of money, a lot of power and are often in key positions,” adds Evelyne Barthou.
Among young Kanaks, “the feeling of injustice” is by far “the most widely shared feeling,” according to her.
Questions of identity, social difficulties, political context, economic crisis linked to nickel – a mineral at the heart of the local economy – and climate uncertainty are all factors fueling the revolt.
If they do not always recognize themselves in the independence representatives, young people are very politicized. During the last demonstration at the call of the CCAT, they had ensured the security of order, without overflowing, according to Mme Leblic.