of ‘anti-France’
p. 11 · Read in the full issue
letters
Your magazine reeks of ‘anti-France’
Whether you realise it or not or whether you really even care your magazine reeks of anti-France.
Of course this has always been rigorously denied and your correspondents, notably Helen Fraser, admirably de fended. But it seems that one cannot read your magazine without stumbling over one in sult after another.
Often these are so subtle that it is probable that even the editors have been fooled.
When one reads, for exam ple: “FLNKS spokesman Eloi Machoro...” (PIM, November 1984) to describe a terrorist, yet “... Dick Ukeiwe, a Kanak elected to the New Caledonia legislature” (PIM, December 1986), to describe the demo cratically elected RPCR repre sentative to the French senate, one is flabbergasted.
This, however, has been going on for years in virtually every article concerning New Caledonia and has led to your otherwise fine journal becom ing synonymous with di sinformation, not least among the substantial Anglo-Saxon community among which I in clude myself.
So it was rather refreshing to read your January editorial “A question of attitude”. Was this a turning point? Had the editor realised the error of his ways?
And then, alas, I had to accept that the FLNKS strategy had worked. Your editorial asks us, in effect, to forget the hundreds of farms burned and ransacked, the cattle killed in the most barbarous fashion; the old men in their seventies who had their intestines ripped out;
the smashed electoral ums; the flags and associated parapher nalia copied from God knows which Caribbean or African country; the self-styled presi dents and foreign ministers of a “provisional government” con tinually flying around the world
at God knows whose expense.
But I must stop or I might be labelled a lackey of the right wing Caldoches instead of what I believe myself to be just one voice among the 70 to 80 per cent of other voices in this island who believe not just in
liberty, fraternity and equality, not just in liberal democracy, but also in journalistic integrity.
David Graham Los,
Noumea School of English, Rue de Sebastopol, Noumea.
Eloi Machoro - killed In a farmhouse siege, January, 1985.