France has tended to ebb a bit in recent months 20 international Viewpoint • December 21, 1987 economic development on the islands. The essential power will remain in the hands of the settler right. Of the three regions that the pro-independence forces currently administer, they will at best retain two (the Iles Loyauté and the eastern coast). And even in these areas, their room for maneuver will be further restricted. The Local Executive Council will assure the predominance of the RPCR [Rally for Caledonia in the Republic, the settler party linked to Chirac's RPR in France] and the omnipotence of the French high commissioner. The territorial congress will also remain largely under the jurisdiction of the settler right.
A policy aimed at bolstering the most traditional forms of colonialism is being established. It includes relaunching European land acquisitions in the bush, military surveillance of the Kanak tribes and injections of public money to support the local market artificially, with the more or less avowed aim of eventually reviving European immigration.
Seeking to divert the independence struggle
Unlike Fabius's regionalization proposals, the present government in Paris no longer seeks to divert the independence struggle by co-opting nationalist elected officials and a fringe of its activists into the administration of regional minigovernments and economic management. Now, the aim is to use decentralized institutions to open up more and more of the bush to the local capitalist lobbies, while further marginalizing the Kanak masses economically and politically.
Fabius addressed himself to the leadership of the FLNKS [Kanak Socialist Nationalist Liberation Front], intending to use the hearing that he got to bring the Kanaks back into the institutions. Pons, taking account of new relationship of forces, is no longer interested in the corrupted clan chiefs and Melanesians who, like the Libération Kanake Socialiste (LKS) mayor of Poindimie, are ready to collaborate openly with the right in return for investment in their districts. [The LKS is a group outside the FLNKS distinguished by its reformist