New Caledonia: with the approach of the referendum, the Kanak people “still do not feel understood” – Liberation

In the Tiendanite tribe, the son of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the Kanak leader assassinated in 1989, expresses the disappointment of the separatists at the refusal of the state to postpone the referendum scheduled for December 12 in an archipelago ravaged by the pandemic .

“You passerby, keep in mind / May the conquest of Kanaky, in letters of blood be written forever.” These verses are engraved on a black marble slab in Wan Yaat, where the riddled carcasses of cars that transported Kanak independence activists rest on December 5, 1984. Ten of them had fallen under the bullets of loyalists on the return of a political meeting in the village of Hienghène. They all belonged to the Tiendanite tribe, located a few kilometers further on in this lush valley on the east coast of New Caledonia, and from which the independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou was originally from.

These days, the news echoes strangely in these places scarred by the “events” of the 1980s, during which more than 90 people lost their lives across the archipelago. This Thursday in Nouméa, the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) indicated that on December 13, the day after the self-determination referendum of the archipelago, he would visit “At the negotiating table to discuss independence and nothing else” with the state. Last week, the announcement of the continuation of this poll by the h…