Letters

Awake!

NEW Caledonian Europeans are living a dream. After the Ouvea bloodshed, life is suddenly easy and money flows. They could be steering towards a less comfortable awakening.

External factors are quickly catching up. The up-to-now relatively peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe, striving to take out a third of the world out of the system of a command economy, means that the Western World is obliged to help and has earmarked billions ofUS dollars to this purpose. This money will no more be available to Africa or the Pacific Island states. Australia does not have the financial strength to take over. France’s purse strings are going to be tightened, starting with the 1991 Budget.

In New Caledonia, the Tiebaghi Chrome mine is shut. The international nickel market is in the doldrums due to the heavy selling of nickel by the Soviet Union. The big tourist projects are set back a few years due to the war in the

Gulf and the new petrol crisis.

The building boom in Noumea has been sustained by a flurry of private as well as public projects. Banks are being more difficult, taking on only part of the costs in loans extended for 10 years instead of 15. Unhappily, private building has been only for luxury homes and the market is saturated. The local paper is full of sales offers ofhouses

nobody buys. Expatriate civil servants

have been building houses on bank loans

in preference to paying huge rents.

If the next winter in F ranee is colder, and the petrol bill higher, drastic cuts in the Budget might be unavoidable.

From now on, New Caledonia and French Polynesia might find themselves suffering from indifference instead of media coverage. They are no more in the news and weigh too little in world affairs.

France will transfer its nuclear testing programme to the Kerguelen islands where penguins cannot trade their natural status of passive observers for financial hand-outs. The CEA is going away step by step. The military establishment in both countries will

inevitably be scaled down and less, much less money spent.

The commercial establishment in New Caledonia is overblown, set up as if the population was over 2 million. A

complete reorganisation is overdue.

The opening of gigantic supermarkets, Euromarche and Rallye, is causing the downfall of many small traders.

The projects for the future concentrate on tourism development. But nobody in New Caledonia has taken the trouble to study the reasons for the success of Hawaii and Fiji. Traders tend to despise Australian and New Zealand tourists because they do not spend enough. This is a mistake they will only realise when

Japanese tourists come injapanese

planes, sleep injapanese hotels, eat in

Japanese restaurants, buy injapanese

stores and get around injapanese-owned buses.

Nobody is waking up. Europeans will

find themselves forgotten. Melanesians will realise that promises made will not be kept. Both will have to take a hard look at reality.

Professor Jean Finart

Paris.