French wipe the slate clean

for two Islands leaders

Two former political leaders in France’s Pacific territories were amnestied under a law passed by the French Parliament at the end of June.

The men are Pouvanaa a Oopa, the Tahitian nationalist, and Maurice Lenormand, a former leader of the radical Union Caledonienne in New Caledonia.

Both men are widely thought by their followers to have been the victims of frame-ups designed to destroy them politically. Both were representatives of their territories in the French Chamber of Deputies when they were charged with crimes which led to the loss of their civil rights and worse.

Banished, imprisoned

Pouvanaa was convicted in October, 1959, of having attempted to burn down the town of Papeete following a referendum in which he campaigned —almost successfully—on a platform of “Tahiti for the Tahitians, and the French into the sea”. He was sentenced to eight years’ imprison ment and 15 years’ banishment from Tahiti, and automatically lost his civil rights.

Lenormand was convicted of “knowing a crime had been com mitted and not denouncing same”— the crime being the dynamiting of the office of his own news sheet, L’Avenir Caledonien, in April, 1962.

After appealing to the highest French

court, he was given a suspended sentence in January, 1964, of a year’s imprisonment with a heavy fine, and was deprived of his civil rights for five years.

Pouvanaa, who is now 73, served three years of his nine-year prison term and nine years of his period of banishment before being pardoned by President de Gaulle last November ( PIM, Dec., 1968, p. 37).

He returned to Tahiti from France three weeks later, after telling a Press interviewer in Paris that he wanted the case against him to be reopened (PIM, Jan., p. 24).

The law under which Pouvanaa and Lenormand were amnestied was one of the first to be passed in the French Parliament following the installation of President Georges Pompidou.

Anyone convicted of a political or social crime in France’s overseas territories before June 20, 1969, is amnestied so long as the crime did not involve a death or injury.

The law provides that all reference to an amnestied person’s crime be “effaced”, except from the records of the court convicting him.

Newspapers, etc., are henceforth prohibited from publishing any details of the crime, and no one is allowed to keep documents dealing with it.

Other provisions of the law are that an amnestied person may again exercise all civil rights, and may occupy any employment or dignity without prejudice.