Brutal
massacre
in Kanaky
THE MOST DRAMATIC incident in the last days of the French presidential election campaign was the massacre of Kanak independence fighters in the colony of New
Caledonia. The following article explains what was behind this, and the perspectives after Mitterrand's election.
CLAUDE GABRIEL
N OTICE had been given long in
advance by the Kanak Socialist Liberation Front (FLNKS) that it would call on Kanaks not to vote in the French presidential elections. But the situation was aggraannounced that it was going to hold a vote for president and for a new status for the territory on the same day. That amounted to cutting off any discussion or negotiation.
For several months, therefore, FLNKS had been preparing for a counterstroke on the eve of the elections to make it known that the Kanaks were not ready to yield. The plan was to obstruct the vote as much as possible by blocking the roads, isolating the polling stations and staging
The FLNKS hoped to broaden the mobilization and gradually extend unrest throughout the territory. But it did not have any plan for armed struggle as such. Their plan remained to put pressure on the French govemment in order to get speedy negotiations. So the Struggle Committee on the island of Ouvéa decided to take a group of gendarmes hostages. Unfortunately, the affair went wrong, and the FLNKS activists opened fire, killing three gendarmes before they left with a group of prisoners.
A few days later, when negotiations had started, a second group of French gendarmes were taken captive by the FLNKS 28 and put with the other hostages. The national leadership of the Front called on the International Viewpoint #141 • May 16, 1988
French government to name a mediator, as well as to annul the vote on the status of the
More or less confident that they could use the election period to put pressure on France, the FLNK activists agreed to let a French officer taken hostage serve as a gobetween. The officer was an "anti-terrorist" specialist. He provided sufficient information to get pistols to the prisoners and to storm the Kanaks' redoubt.
Press blackout during
The toll was terrible, and will go down in the list of tragedies that the FLNKS has suffered since 1984. Nineteen Kanaks were killed. And now it is being said that three of them were executed when they tried to surrender. During all these events, the press was banned from Ouvéa, and the repressive forces maintained a blackout over the en-
This assault was seen clearly as an electoralist operation. Nineteen people were deliberately killed to win Chirac a few votes. Bernard Pons, minister of the colonies, declared shamelessly that the honor of France and the French army was at stake, while the leader of the extreme right, Le Pen, called for "exterminating the rebels."
We know now that Francois Mitterrand was informed that the operation was underway. But he is continuing to play a double game, trying to win over the FLNKS by a whole series of very vague promises and at the same time to present the "French Republic" as the only guarantor of peace in New Caledonia.
In fact, on November 23, 1987, while pretending to argue against the right, François Mitterrand revised everything that he had previously said about colonialism and the advance toward independence. He
"Unserious people like the RPCR [the main settler party, the affiliated to Chirac's RPR] did not listen attentively enough to my previous statements. I have always said that independence, now, would result in the law of the strongest operating, with guns doing the talking. I told [FLNKS leader] Mr. Tjibaou... If a political choice has to lead to the domination of one ethnic group over the other, then that is the end of
Of course, Mitterrand never talked about independence "immediately" But the famous Pisani Plan was not free of ambiguity about a possible process of independence in the medium term. This was undoubtedly hypocrisy, as was revealed when the presi dent started suggesting that independence would mean chaos and the domination of "one ethnic group over the other."
Moreover, as far as violence goes, one might ask Mitterrand what he has done to stop the settlers from accumulating weapons, to dismantle the fascist networks, to find the perpetrators of the innumerable right-wing bombings, to push a commission of inquiry into the murder of Eloi Ma choro. He has done nothing, either before or after 1986 [when the right came to
Instead of playing cat and mouse with Chirac, Mitterrand might raise some ques tions about the settler extreme right and the RPCR and demand that more light be brought to bear on the little fascist world of Nouméa. But he has not tried to do anything of the sort. The president even let himself be "convinced" of the need for a spectacular reinforcement of the repressive forces in New Caledonia.
Solidarity with the Kanak
Solidarity in France has been modest. But it has not been absent. Two demonstrations of several thousand people have taken place in Paris, called, among others by the Association for Solidarity with the Kanak People and with the active support of the far left and the united-front committees that supported Pierre Juquin's candidacy. The level of solidarity is clearly not commensurate with what is at stake. But the Kanaks are not alone. There is a substantial solidarity movement in France, rooted in the memory of the Algerian war, which sees support for the FLNKS as another form of action against racism and the French ex-
In the coming months, the FNLKS will have to rediscuss its strategy. Now reelected president, François Mitterrand is going to revive the theme of dialogue There is a great danger now that the white settler population will plunge into provocations. It voted 90% for Chirac against
The president's scheme for getting the colonized and the colonizers to live to together is a natural one for a social democrat. But nothing indicates that the explosive contradictions of French imperialism in New Caledonia are going to disappear just because of the president's wishful thinking. *