French President Emmanuel Macron, May 24, 2024, during his trip to the Pacific archipelago.
AFP
Everything opposes them in the conflict which is igniting New Caledonia, except the lightning passage of Emmanuel Macron, which offers a common certainty: on the independence and non-independence dams, the time for dialogue proposed by the French president will not be enough to erase “resentment”.
“It’s nice of you to try.”
Planted on the makeshift dam which serves to protect his housing estate from potential rioters, in Nouméa, Pierre (assumed first name as for all the Caledonians mentioned) has few illusions on this Friday morning. He of course heard the French president, the day before, promise that the electoral reform which ignited the powder in the overseas territory would “not pass in force”, that he was giving himself a few weeks to “allow appeasement” and the “dialogue”.
“Macron came. It’s nice to have tried to do something” but “I don’t see any particular progress”, he explains in front of the anarchic stack of pallets, tires and even a washing machine, supposedly stop any intrusion into the clean street in the Val Plaisance district, which opens onto the Pacific Ocean. “It seems we’re going to talk about it again in a month. And then it will continue,” he laments. “In the meantime, things are not going to get better, the population is probably suffering on both sides.” His “side”: that of the Caledonians of European origin, very largely in favor of reform.
Emmanuel Macron satisfied no one
“It would frankly surprise me if it calms people’s minds because there are people who have lost everything here and who will really remain with a lot of resentment over everything that has happened, everything that has happened. happened, what was said,” says Nathalie, 43, a resident of the archipelago for barely a year and a half.
On the roadblocks held by the independence camp, which promises to continue blocking the island until the text is abandoned, the general opinion converges: by pleading appeasement, Emmanuel Macron, who gave himself a few days to bring down the barricades, satisfied no one. “As long as there is no independence (for New Caledonia), there will be no security,” says a dam manager in a northern district of Nouméa, who refuses to decline his identify.
The 51-year-old man is a member of the Kanak community, the indigenous people of the archipelago, conquered and colonized in the 19th century. “Those who respect the Kanak people can live in peace with us but the extremists, we invite them to take the plane to Tontouta”, the international airport of Nouméa, he immediately poses, referring to the most radical non-independenceists.
“Berlin Wall”
“We are not racist, we ask for respect,” he clarifies. “The loyalists are the ones who left their country, France. If they want to be there, they have to adapt. We respect the French people, not the French colonial state,” he continues. To illustrate the depth of the local divide, which the government is giving itself a month to heal, the Kanak roadblocker suggests taking a look around him.
“So, take a good look,” he calls out, pointing to a wall that separates his disadvantaged neighborhood from a wealthy area. “What is this wall? Is this the Berlin Wall? Is this what living together is like here, at the end of the two political agreements (Matignon and Nouméa, editor’s note)? Is this the future? Is this the peace agreement?” Although he does not believe in a political solution if the core of the reform is maintained, he agrees that something must “be reborn after the fire”: “It is truth and justice.”
A man killed by a police officer
A seventh person, a 48-year-old man, was killed on Friday, for the first time by a member of the police, in New Caledonia. While they were driving in Dumbéa, north of Nouméa, two police officers were “physically attacked by a group of around fifteen individuals” and one of them used his weapon, explained the Nouméa prosecutor Yves Dupas.
The police officer, “on whom traces of blows were noted”, was placed in police custody and the prosecution opened an investigation into intentional homicide by a person holding public authority.
(afp)
