The French Press Responds

Robert Aldrich examines the view from Paris.

IN A matter of weeks, New Caledonia appears to have matured from a form of violence and bloodshed to hopes of a peaceful solution to one of the Pacific’s most difficult problems. Photographs of the corpses of gendarmes and Kanak mil itants in May were followed in less than a month by photographs of Jacques Lafleur and Jean-Marie Tjibaou shaking hands in a Paris garden. What happened?

Changes in New Caledonia have al ways depended on what happens both in the territory itself and in metropolitan France. Pressure from New Caledonia has proved effective in Paris, but so too have the demands of party politics in France: under the centrist government of Presi dent Giscard d’Estaing in the 19705, the tactic was to defuse the situation by prom ises of economic development (with the Dijoud Plan).

After 1981, socialist President Francois Mitterrand initially wanted to proceed to independence in association with France the Pisani Plan.

In 1986, Prime Minister Chirac used the Pons Plan in an attempt to wipe out the pro-independence movement and once and for all affirm New Caledonia’s place in the French Republic.

The taking of hostages by the FLNKS and the killing of the gendarmes proved in a dramatic way that Pons’s efforts to extin guish the indepentantistes had failed. The Fayaoue episode showed that the Kanaks had not been coerced into silence: accord ing to Professor Alban Bensa, a French specialist on New Caledonia and sup porter of the FLNKS, the events showed the Kanaks were “ready to take hostages, to kill and to die” for their cause; “no one can now doubt their will to achieve inde pendence,” he said.

The reaction to the kidnappings, the assault on the cave on Ouvea and the deaths of Kanaks and two French soldiers, Bensa says, showed the true colours of the Chirac government. In choosing to send crack troops to New Caledonia, using sol diers rather than police to storm the cave, Pons undertook “an act of war carried out by soldiers”. Combined with the mach inations for the release of French hostages in Lebanon and the return of Major Dom inique Prieur from Hao atoll, this repre sented a blatant vote-catching strategy.

An editorial in the June issue of Kan aky, a French journal published by a Kanak support group, said the assault on Ouvea “was not a question of freeing the gendarmes taken prisoner, even less of as suring their safety, but of profiting from the affair to snatch a few votes away from the Le Pen electorate.”

Subsequently, press reports revealed

various behind-the-scenes aspects of the Gossana siege. Paris-Match, the Paris right-wing weekly, reported that Pons had been so determined to defeat the Kanaks that he had considered dropping napalm on Ouvea. Le Monde revealed that Al phonse Dianou, Wenceslas Lavelloi and “tea boy” Waina Amossa died in suspi cious circumstances: Dianou, several ob servers claimed, had been summarily executed or left to die on a stretcher.

Captain Philippe Legorjus, who led the assault, revealed in a report published in Le Monde that the French commander in New Caledonia, General Jacques Vidal, had ordered “a solution by force no matter what the consequences”, that Pons was primarily interested in political objectives and that he had refused last-minute negotiations.

Le Nouvel Observateur charged that a letter from then Minister of Defence Andre Giraud telling Vidal to avoid bloodshed, may either not have been delivered or was simply ignored. And Liberation reported the rumour that one of the soldiers whose names had not been made public involved in the assault on Gossana had been cho sen because his father, a gendarme, had died at Fayaoue.

The new Minister of Defence, Jean- Pierre Chevenement, stated that acts con trary to military honour had been com mitted and blamed the Chirac government for “a policy that led to confrontation”.

President Mitterand said he wanted to know the “whole truth” about the affair, and has ordered a “thorough and honest” investigation. These reports and the deaths on Ouvea appear to have pulled the rug out from under Chirac’s RPCR supporters in New Caledonia. After the smoke had cleared, Jacques Lafleur announced that the caldoches would have to make “sacri fices”, and Jean-Marie Tjibaou said he was willing to discuss the future of New Caledonia.

Whether their respective camps will follow their leaders remains unsure, but the alternatives to what is already being called the Rocard Plan are few.

Neither immediate independence nor the triumph of the loyalists have even tuated; neither guerrilla warfare nor bloody repression have achieved the ambitions of each side in the conflict.

President Mittenrand and Prime Min ister Rocard are trying to re-create, both in metropolitan France and in New Ca ledonia, a new consensus on the ruins of failed initiatives, discredited ideologies international concern and the deaths of more than 50 French citizens in the past four years. It will be a task of stupendous difficulty. □