A man stands in front a burnt car after unrest in Noumea, New Caledonia, last Wednesday. France imposed a state of emergency in the French Pacific territory for at least 12 days to boost security forces' powers in quelling disorder that had left six people dead as of yesterday. Photo / AP
Amid continuing unrest in New Caledonia, New Zealand’s Defence Force is preparing rescue flights for about 250 stranded Kiwis.
Protests in Noumea have been escalating after violence broke out over proposed changes to voter lists - with six dead as of yesterday and hundreds arrested.
Clashes between pro-independence supporters and security forces have prompted French authorities to declare a state of emergency.
Defence Minister Judith Collins says talks with the French Government are ongoing - and will determine exactly when New Zealand authorities will be allowed to head in.
It is understood only 50 people will be allowed on the aircraft each time, so several trips will be needed to bring stranded Kiwis home.
One of those is Mike Lightfoot, who told The Front Page protests started peacefully, before he and his wife found themselves trapped in a taxi slowly making its way through a crowd of demonstrators.
“It was a very scary situation. In fact, it was quite frightening,” he said. “One of the guys whacked the car with the pole on the left side of the roof and as we went through the smoke, the taxi driver accelerated away, so we got back to the hotel safely. But it was certainly an experience that you wouldn’t wish upon anybody.”
He said locals he has spoken to are also frightened, with one woman telling him her anxiety is “through the roof”.
“I honestly just wanted to give her a hug and say ‘You’ll be okay’. She said to me that she had experienced this 40 years ago, but had never experienced the violence there is this time around and she was very worried.”
It isn’t the first time New Caledonia has experienced unrest, geopolitical analyst Geoffrey Miller told The Front Page.
The immediate situation we have seen escalating was born from a constitutional amendment that looked to be passed in the lower house of the French Parliament last week, which moved to give voting rights to residents who had moved there since 1998, provided they had lived there for 10 years.
“The indigenous people of New Caledonia, the Kanaks, really saw this as rolling back the gains that they had made under what was called the Numia Accord of 1998, which essentially was a peace settlement to a civil war that had gone on in the 1970s and the 1980s.
“New Caledonia was colonised by the French in 1853. After that, what became most significant in New Caledonia was the mining of nickel, and the French brought in a lot of outside workers to do the job there ... and the indigenous people, the Kanaks, were moved on to reservations.
“So, you’ve had very much a division of the territory into the haves and the have-nots, and there have been some very wealthy people who’ve made a lot of money out of New Caledonia’s natural resources,” Miller said.
That degree of inequality in New Caledonia prompted a period of unrest in the 70s and 80s dubbed “The Events”, “a bit like perhaps ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland”, Miller said.
“That’s what led up to that peace deal in 1998. And one of the conditions of the peace deal was a three-step referendum process. So, three referendums were held in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The first two showed a narrow majority in favour of staying with France. The last referendum showed a huge majority in favour of staying with France, but only because the Kanuk people boycotted it.”
Listen to the full episode to learn more about the unrest in New Caledonia, what steps can be taken to promote calm, and what New Zealand could do to help.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Two Danish citizens and an American have also reportedly died.