in the tribe of Tiendanite, this vote “will remain like a big stone in the face of everyone”

It is “necessarily someone strong” who drove the seven wooden posts into the ground, because “it would withstand a cyclone”. The plywood boards were cut to size “election signs”. The only voting booth will be placed there, at the end of the courtyard, “once we have pulled the tables and pushed the benches”. An inhabitant of the Tiendanite tribe, perched in the middle of nature in northeastern New Caledonia, plays the scene: people will enter “by this side” and will have to go “straight to the register”. A few days before the third and last independence referendum set for Sunday 12 December, “gentlemen” from the town hall of Hienghène, the town located about thirty minutes from dented paths, came “to verify” that the few hundred voters of the tribe can participate in the ballot “in a compliant manner”.

Jean-Paul, who can see the tribe’s polling station from his small tin house, still wonders if “all that” will be used a lot. “I will not vote, me, launches this 50-year-old Kanak, barefoot, work T-shirt on his back. The instruction is not to move on the day of the vote, so I will not move. Or maybe I’ll go hunting deer and pig. ” The “order” that he intends to respect, she comes “From up there”, independence leaders who have made it known that they did not wish to participate in this final referendum since the French state refused to postpone it. The Kanak Liberation Party (Palika) saw a “political provocation”. Worse, a “declaration of war” from Paris. There are no words strong enough “to denounce the absurdity of a self-determination consultation without the colonized people”.

In their eyes, “impossible” to make a “fair campaign” in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic. The archipelago, which lived without the virus for a year and a half, was indeed caught up in September. And violently: 270 dead in six weeks for a population of 271,000 inhabitants. Among the victims, a majority of Kanaks. “The virus has entered our tribe, grumbled Jean-Paul, piece of wood in hand. There were no deaths here, but sick people, yes, several. “ An inhabitant of the tribe has passed away not long ago, “an old man”, “not because of the Covid”. He was buried, “but the period of mourning has not yet been able to begin due to health restrictions.”

“With us, the Kanaks, the funeral rituals, it lasts several days, several weeks. We really don’t have the head to play politics at the moment.”

A boy driving a pickup, shoulder-length brown hair, still shaken by the bumps in the road, rolls down his window: “What am I doing on December 12th? Nothing, I will stay at home”, he cuts, before setting off again on the dirt road, leaving behind a cloud of dust. In this independence bastion, which voted 100% for the “yes” in the two previous referendums, the participation rate should really drop this time: 20%? 30%, 40%, 50%? It was 96.97% in 2020 and 92.55% in 2018.

Here, in this cradle of the Kanak soul, each word of the State takes on a particular resonance. It is because a scar thirty-seven years old has not yet completely disappeared: the 5 December 1984, ten members of the tribe were shot dead by anti-independence who ambushed them as they returned from a political rally. We are then at the very beginning of “events”, as the inhabitants call these years of violence, often bloody, between separatists and loyalists.

The carcasses of their bullet-riddled cars are still on the side of the road, so as not to forget. These few verses have been engraved on a black marble slab: “You passerby, keep in mind / May the conquest of Kanaky, in letters of blood be written forever. ” The bodies of the victims lie in a cemetery, on the heights of the tribe, to the left of a chapel. “All this happened nearby, in the valley, described, Jean-Philippe Tjibaou, 47, eyes directed towards theyam plantations. I was 10 years old at the time, people heard the sounds of guns 10 kilometers around, we found 500 empty cartridge cases, 500! We’ve been living with our widows ever since. ” The pain of losing a loved one knows him “too much” : he is the eldest son of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the leader emblematic of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), who will be assassinated by one of his family four and a half years later, on May 4, 1989, on the island of Ouvea.

It is besides in front of the house which saw his father grow up that he wants to receive us. “You ask me if we should maintain or postpone the referendum? I especially believe that the simple fact of asking the question shows that we are still not understood., he sums up slowly, his fingers in his gray goatee. Neither the State, nor the loyalist non-separatists. The Matignon accords were thirty-three years ago. And what has happened since 1988? We have the impression that the Kanaks are still not respected. Have we advanced? Almost not, at least not enough. “

“People we have to ‘make people’ with seem to have discovered that our grief is important. They don’t understand us. No, they don’t want to understand us.”

Jean-Philippe Tjibaou

to franceinfo

And yet, on December 12, he will put his ballot in the ballot box. “I thought about it, thought about it a lot, and I decided that I was going to vote white. It’s a way, I find, to be active despite everything, to remain citizens, not sheep. To say: ‘ It’s missed your thing. ‘We get the feeling that they messed up our vote by holding it down. “