festival revisited

That Papeete arts festival revisited

Your correspondents C. W.

Webster writing from Auckland, and J. Taumihau writing from Papeete (PIM Dec. ’B5), take issue with our account of the Festival of Pacific Arts (PIM Sep. ’B5) held in Papeete last July.

C. W. Webster complains that “it is not true that the French Government paid the fares for all foreign delega tions. ” We never said it did, but only those of countries who faced difficulties meeting the steep costs of the air travel involved.

As for J. Taumihau, nobody has ever contested that the festival was made possible from French funding. The fact that some of these funds were chan nelled through the South Paci fic Commission is neither here nor there: every official in the territory, from the leader of the Territorial Government Gaston Flosse down, made no bones about the fact that the prime aim of staging the festival in Papeete was political a bid to soften regional opposition to France’s nuclear testing at Moruroa.

J. Taumihau says that the “good hand” given to the New Caledonian delegation at the festival was based on the fact that its members did not “share the separatist views of the

Flnks.”

Writing in this way, J. Taumi hau seems to place no store at all on the fact that, according to official estimates, 80 per cent of New Caledonia’s Melanesian community voted in the

September, 1985, elections in favor of parties supporting inde pendence for the territory. One must ask oneself: which kind of festival delegation would have been more truly representative of the views and feelings of New Caledonia’s Melanesians one sponsored by the FLNKS, or the small anti- FLNKS group that came here?

It is hard to see what the FLNKS must do to win so much as simple, sober recognition of its political reality from some people. Here in French Polynesia, for example, no less a figure than Gaston Flosse still finds it possible to refer to the FLNKS as “a handful of terror ists” despite all it has done to display the strength of its grass roots political influence. It seems that your correspondent J. Taumihau is of like mind.

Marie-Therese And Bengt

Danielsson

Paea Tahiti

New Caledonian artistic troupes rehearse for the Festival of Pacific Arts which was to be held there in December 1984. Most observers of the Pacific scene feel it was a pity that New Caledonia’s festival was cancelled at the last moment, and moved to French Polynesia where it was held in July '85.