By INTERNATIONAL WORKERS LEAGUE – FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

Since May 13, political discontent and social tensions that had been mounting for several months in New Caledonia (Kanaky) have taken an insurrectional turn. Once again, the Kanak people, colonized by France for over 170 years, are rising up against the domination of French settlers (the Caldoches) and the French colonial metropole that supports them.

For French imperialism, this archipelago on the other side of the world is a major producer of nickel and serves as a gateway to the Pacific and the Far East. Macron and his imperialist lackeys have decided to take measures to put off the possibility of political independence for Kanaky sought by the Melanesian population. On one side, there are strikes, barricades, and confrontations with forces of the colonial order; there is increasing repression on the other. Kanak youth are at the heart of the uprising.

Kanaky has been a French colony since 1853, named New Caledonia by its colonizers and their supporters. Dispossessed of their highest quality land, the Kanak people were corralled, repressed, and massacred when they rose up against their colonizers. The last great Kanak rebellion occurred in 1984-88. After the colonial order was reestablished through state violence under Mitterrand and then Chirac, colonizers played a game of negotiations that culminated in the Matignon Accords (1988) and the Nouméa Accord (1998), organizing transfers of territorial control and positing the possibility of Kanaky’s political independence after a series of three referenda projected to occur 20 years in the future, on the basis of a stabilized electoral body.

The first two referendums took place in 2018 and 2020, with the anti-independence vote coming in at 56% and 53%, respectively. Against the will of pro-independence supporters, Macron pushed for the third referendum to be held in December 2021, during the height of the COVID crisis, which made a normal campaign impossible. This electoral farce resulted in a 96.5% vote against independence with only 43% voter participation. Macron rejoiced in the outcome of this farce. Since then, he and his camp—notably, the Republicans (Les Républicains, LR) and National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN)—have decided to dismantle the Nouméa Accord.

The scandalous votes in the Senate and Assembly for the constitutional plan to modify Kanaky’s electoral body aim to make its independence even more improbable, if not impossible, by giving voting rights to the territory’s residents of ten or more years, who were denied suffrage under the Nouméa Accord, and who generally oppose independence. This system of colonial settlement aims to make the Kanak people a minority in their own homeland. And this system is not new. In 1972, Prime Minister Pierre Mesmer, wrote:

“In the long term, indigenous nationalist claims will only be avoided if communities from outside the Pacific make up the demographic majority. It goes without saying that no long-term demographic effect will be achieved without the systematic immigration of women and children.” This is precisely the aim of the recent vote for the expansion of the electoral body, a policy that has yet to pass through Congress.

The new Kanak rebellion is entirely legitimate. In particular, it emerges from the youth, who understand very well what this brutal reaffirmation of French colonialism entails. We owe them our full support, even if some pro-independence organizations are caught in the trap of institutional logics and hypocritical offers to “dialogue” from Macron, and are turning their backs on this insurrectionary upsurge.

It’s disgraceful, but perfectly logical that Macron’s regime supports the Zionist colonization of Palestine and Israel’s system of apartheid while buttressing the system of repression in Kanaky. The situations in Palestine and Kanaky share the same foundation of colonialism, which is inscribed in the DNA of French imperialism. With the state of emergency and the dispatch of French gendarmes, CRS, RAID, GIGN and the army to Kanaky, the Macron government is issuing its repressive forces a colonialist license to kill, supported locally by supplementary Caldoche militias.

• Down with the legal push to change the electoral body in Kanaky!
• Down with French colonial state repression!
• Full support for the Kanak uprising!
• Self-determination for the Kanak people, as the only people who may legitimately decide their destiny on the Caledonian Archipelago!
• Down with colonialism everywhere!

Photo: Overturned car following protests in Nouméa, the capital of Kanaky, on May 16. (Delphine Mayeur)