New Caledonia independence referendum: a tale of France in the Pacific
Joel Penrose
Many people think of colonialism as a thing of the past. India, Australia, Canada, the USA – all of these were once colonies, and all are now countries in their own right. And though the colonial age is over, colonialism still lives on, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Baie de l’Orphelinat, Nouméa, New Caledonia (Photo: Laurent Gass Photographie, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, via Flickr)
One such place is New Caledonia, where a referendum was held last week to decide the future of the country’s independence. New Caledonia is one of 17 items on the UN’s list of ‘non-self-governing territories’, a list compiled by the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization to include nations “whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government.” New Caledonia has been on the list since 1986 and, unlike other overseas territories, has a growing independence movement, with 47% of voters supporting complete autonomy in last week’s vote.
New Caledonia in Oceania (TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
New Caledonia was first ‘discovered’ in 1774 by British explorer James Cook. He named it ‘New Caledonia’ as it reminded him of Scotland (Caledonia being the Roman name for the area north of Hadrian’s Wall). Contact with European ships only became frequent in the 1840s after it was discovered that the island harboured large quantities of sandalwood, a rare aromatic wood and one of the most expensive timbers in the world.
In 1853, New Caledonia became a formal French colony and a few dozen European settlers set up a colony on the west coast. The island became a penal colony in 1864 and, upon release, convicts were granted land to live on, as part of the effort to ‘civilise’ the island. Many of the Communards arrested after the collapse of the 1871 Paris Commune were deported there. In time, New Caledonia would become France’s largest penal colony, receiving 22,000 deportees between 1864 and the end of transportations in 1897.
Map of New Caledonia (OCHA, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
With the discovery of nickel in the early 1860s came a large influx of migrant workers, with France importing labour from neighbouring islands, as well as from Japan, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. The local Kanak population were confined to reservations, and suffered terribly from the new diseases brought over by the Europeans. It is estimated that the Kanak population more than halved between 1878 and 1920, and it didn’t begin to recover until the 1930s. A series of failed revolts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ended in further oppression of the Kanak people.
After the war, New Caledonia was rebranded as an overseas territory, and, in the following years, French citizenship was granted to the whole population, regardless of race. Though Kanaks theoretically had equal status as the Europeans, racism was still rampant, and remains so today. This was made worse by an influx of migrants during the nickel boom of the 1960s, causing the Kanaks to become a minority in their own country, although they remained the largest ethnic group.
A land distribution scheme in the 1980s resulted in the Kanaks receiving less than a third of the land and led to rioting and an orgy of violence. Gun battles and roadblocks followed.
The crisis reached its climax with the Ouvéa cave hostage taking in 1988, carried out by the FLNKS, the militant Kanak independence party. The military response was swift and ruthless and led to the deaths of 19 Kanaks, pushing the country closer to the brink of civil war.
View over Nouméa, New Caledonia (Photo: Sharon and Peter Komidar, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr)
Negotiations began with the election of a fresh French administration in 1988. The new prime minister, Michel Rocard, brought together the FLNKS and the RPCR (the conservative settler party) for a series of talks which resulted in the signing of the Matignon Accords later that year.
The accords pledged to increase investment into Kanak areas, as well as greater autonomy from the French government, and they ensured a decade of peace and stability. The Nouméa Accord of 1998 promised a 20-year transition to near-complete local governance, as well as three referendums, the second of which took place last week, on 4th October.
Though hailed as a ‘vote of confidence in the Republic’ by French President Emmanuel Macron, the referendum was hotly contested and the future of the territory is far from certain. The independence movement has been steadily gathering momentum since the last referendum in 2018 and another vote is anticipated for 2022.
Since the 1960s, the native Kanak people have found themselves a minority in their own country, unable to take a lead role in the state affairs and, though GDP is nominally very high – New Caledonia has one of the largest economies in the South Pacific – there exists a huge gap between rich and poor and between Europeans and Kanaks. Unlike other recent referendums, the central issue is that of race, and this is a problem that will take decades, if not centuries, to resolve.
New Caledonia desperately needs to confront its past and turn over a new leaf, and independence could well be the way to do this, yet at the moment the divisions are only intensifying now that independence is within the island’s grasp. It is a problem to which there is no easy answer, and a problem that proves that colonialism does exist, it is a real-world issue, and, for New Caledonia at least, there is no end in sight.
Thumbnail photo: Gérard, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr