Conquered in 1853, a French colony until 1946 and become a territory of the Republic, New Caledonia has been in the grip of violent riots for two days, due to a controversial electoral reform bringing to the surface the tormented history of this archipelago of the South Pacific Ocean.
On September 24, 1853, by order of Napoleon III, France officially took possession of New Caledonia, located 18,000 kilometers from the mainland and 2000 kilometers from Australia. The capital, Port-de-France, today Nouméa, was founded in June 1854.
The settlement of New Caledonia was marked from 1864 by penal colonization, with more than 20,000 convicts being detained there until 1897. Among them, thousands of political prisoners were deported after 1871, the year when the Paris Commune and a Kabyle insurrection in Algeria, another former French colony, were violently repressed.
“Reserves” were established for the natives, who were dispossessed of their land and subjected to compulsory labor. The exploitation of nickel, the economic lifeblood of the archipelago, today in crisis, is leading to several waves of migration, notably Asian, Tahitian and West Indian.
“New Caledonia has historically been above all a settlement colony,” observes Benoît Trépied, anthropologist and specialist in this issue, interviewed on France culture radio. “It is a distant land in the Pacific that France conquered not only to exploit the resources, but also to create a new local society. »
Kanak and Caldoches
Some 271,400 inhabitants, according to the latest census in 2019, live in the archipelago, whose exceptional lagoons are listed as UNESCO world heritage sites. Among them, 24% of the population comes from the European community, including the Caldoches, descendants of white settlers.
The Kanaks, the country’s first inhabitants, have gradually become a minority (41% of inhabitants today) in New Caledonia, a territory located at least 24 hours by flight from Paris, which has experienced several uprisings.
In 1878, a Kanak revolt broke out against the dispossession of land. Some 600 insurgents and 200 Europeans were killed, tribes were wiped out and 1,500 Kanaks were forced into exile.
If New Caledonia became an overseas territory (TOM) in 1946 and the Kanaks obtained French nationality, then the right to vote, violence opposed them to the Caldoches in the 1980s, including the taking of hostages and the assault on the Ouvéa cave in May 1988 constitute the high point. Nineteen Kanak militants and two French soldiers perished.
” Decolonization “
A month later, the Matignon agreements sealed reconciliation, through economic rebalancing and sharing of political power. They were followed in 1998 by the Nouméa Agreement which gave the archipelago a unique status in the French Republic based on progressive autonomy.
Three referendums are planned in this context. The first, in 2018, saw the no to independence win at 56.7%, which is confirmed by the second popular consultation, in 2020 (53.26% no). In 2021, the no vote won by 96.5%, but the separatists contested the validity of the vote, marked by a strong abstention in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic.
The Nouméa agreements also aim to “build a Caledonian citizenship […] in France but with a vocation for emancipation”, underlines Benoît Trépied, for whom “the heart of the problem” remains knowing “how to get out of a colonial situation other than through violence”.
The UN Special Committee on Decolonization still considers New Caledonia as one of 17 “non-self-governing territories in the world”, “whose populations do not yet completely administer themselves”.
Controversial reform
A constitutional revision providing for the expansion of the electorate to all native Caledonians and residents for at least ten years for the provincial elections, voted on April 2, 2024 in the Senate, then on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday by the National Assembly, recently set fire to the powder.
This reform, to be adopted, must be approved by the Congress in Versailles, which should meet “before the end of June”, according to President Emmanuel Macron.
If it were, some 25,000 people, half of whom were born in New Caledonia, would join the electorate, which would “profoundly modify the political balance”, according to Benoît Trépied.
“Those who come from what we call the first people consider themselves more legitimate than others, but those who arrived through the vagaries of life consider that it is also their land and that they must be treated in an appropriate manner. equal,” said the bill’s rapporteur Nicolas Metzdorf, deputy for New Caledonia (majority), on Wednesday morning on France Inter radio.
Conversely, “for the separatists, the electorate has been the mother of battles since the beginning,” analyzes Philippe Gomès, former president of the government of New Caledonia, hostile to independence. “They can’t help but think that when they leave, the French Republic wants to once again dilute them in their own country. »