The continuation of the referendum in New Caledonia arouses anger in the Pacific – archyde

by Kirsty Needham

SYDNEY (Reuters) – The French government’s decision to hold New Caledonia’s third independence referendum on Sunday, despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the call for a boycott of pro-independence parties, is strongly criticized in the Pacific Islands.

The Melanesian Spearhead Group (GFLM), which brings together Vanuatu, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and which hosts the FLNKS, the main New Caledonian independence party, called on the countries of region not to recognize the result of the vote.

Paris justifies maintaining the consultation by implementing the Noumea agreement signed in 1998, which provides for the holding of three self-determination referendums if the results of the first two are negative.

In 2018 and 2020, during the first two elections, the “no” to independence won 57% and 53% respectively, and Sunday’s vote is therefore the ultimate chance for separatists to win their case.

But arguing the difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, supporters of independence accuse France of refusing to postpone the referendum to 2022 to strengthen the loyalists’ chances of victory.

The Kanak separatists say they have been deprived of door-to-door health restrictions and also protest against the fact that the holding of consultations does not respect the traditional mourning period for the families of the 300 people who died as a result of a contamination with COVID-19, on a total population of 270,000 inhabitants.

Roch Wamytan, independentist Kanak customary chief and president of the Congress of New Caledonia, the island’s deliberative assembly, was moved Thursday before a United Nations commission on decolonization.

The former secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum (FIP), the New Papua Guinean Meg Taylor, for his part sent a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron, co-signed by the former leaders of several micro-states of the Pacific (Tuvalu, Kiribati, Palau and the Marshall Islands), in which she warns him of the risk of violence if the referendum is maintained on the scheduled date.

WHAT LEGITIMACY?

Observers from the United Nations and the FIP, which include the two great regional powers, Australia and New Zealand, arrived in Noumea for the ballot. France has sent for its part 2,000 police and gendarmes as reinforcements.

The Nouméa accord was concluded in 1998 to end a conflict that had claimed 80 lives in a decade.

GFLM Acting Director General George Hoa’au told Reuters France was “uncomfortable with decolonization” and said “this kind of relationship with indigenous people is not acceptable in the 21st century “.

“Will the process be legitimate if people do not participate in it?” He asked, referring to the call for a boycott of the separatists.

While acknowledging that the date of December 12 is not consensus, a spokesperson for the French overseas ministry replied that it was “the duty of the State to organize this election” and stressed that the pandemic was in retreat on the island for a month. The refusal of the separatists to participate in the referendum will not erase the result of the three successive consultations, he assured.

Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who will be present on site, has promised to start a dialogue with all parties the day after the election.

Thierry Santa, who chaired the government of New Caledonia until this summer, however finds it difficult to establish such a dialogue between now and the presidential election in France next April.

The chairman of the loyalist Rassemblement party told the Islandsbusiness.com news site that Australia’s decision to tear up the agreement with France for the purchase of submarines in favor of an alliance with the states United and the United Kingdom, had weighed on Paris’ attitude towards New Caledonia.

(Report Kirsty Needham in Sydney, French version Tangi Salaün, edited by Nicolas Delame)