Mad Max in paradise: New Caledonia in turmoil

At 5.30pm on May 13th Nancy Travers, a small woman with an ash-blonde bob, was driving back to her home in a leafy, seaside suburb of Nouméa, the capital of the French territory of New Caledonia. For more than a week, the poor, indigenous Kanak minority had been protesting against French rule. Now, at the end of a long promenade lined with coconut palms, Travers came to a roundabout. Roughly a hundred young protesters gathered in the road, dancing and chanting, “This is our place, this is our country!”

The nickel-rich islands were annexed by France in 1853, but their status has been in limbo since a long civil war in the 1980s, during which French troops and local militias killed dozens of Kanaks. Eventually, both sides agreed to hold three referendums on the territory’s independence. According to the terms of the Nouméa Accord, an agreement made in 1998, New Caledonia’s electoral rolls were to be frozen until all the votes were held, making it impossible for recent arrivals from France to affect the result. The last of these referendums, held in 2021, seemed to be an overwhelming victory for those who wished to remain part of France. But Kanak leaders had boycotted the vote after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, refused to delay it amid the covid-19 pandemic. They argued that customary mourning rituals for those who had died had prevented them from participating.

Late last year, France proposed a constitutional amendment that would unfreeze the electoral rolls, arguing that the Nouméa Accord had expired. Critics say it is acting heavy-handedly in pressing ahead with such a controversial change without building consensus.

Travers lives in Nouméa with her husband, 11-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son, and works as an administrator for the national airline. For Travers, whose family traces its ancestry to French settlers who moved to the colony in the 19th century, the protests were little more than an inconvenience. She was used to them: they would paralyse the city for a few days, then fizzle out.

As Travers nosed her Subaru through the crowd, dozens of people approached the car, draping the multicoloured flag of Kanaky – the indigenous name for New Caledonia – over her bonnet and windscreen. “We won’t move!” several shouted. “Get out!”

Farther down the road, protesters had set several piles of tyres alight, sending smoke scudding towards a nearby church. Even then, Travers remained unconcerned. “I know that we live with people who want their country back,” she said. “I respect it. I want to live here, I don’t want France to leave us. I want us to remain a French country. But I can understand, I’m someone who has an open mind.”

Shortly after navigating through the crowd, Travers arrived home. Her neighbourhood was quiet. But as she lay in bed that night with her husband, a French migrant who would be enfranchised by Macron’s constitution amendment, her phone began to ping with notifications from Facebook.

Earlier that evening, she learned, the protests had turned violent. Rioters set alight a soft-drink factory, risking a catastrophic hydrogen detonation. Recordings taken by Nouméa residents showed fire streaking out of nearby schools and people screaming in the streets. One friend sent her a video of locals trying to evacuate dogs and cats from a veterinary practice that was engulfed in flames. For hours, Travers scrolled through photos of the destruction. As she fell asleep, she could hear dull rumbling. She assumed it was thunder. Later, she realised it had been a series of explosions.

The next day, Travers drove to the supermarket to stock up on supplies. When she arrived, the car park was full of vehicles adorned with the Kanak flag. Inside, the shelves were bare: no milk, no fruit, no soup. She began to fixate on the Kanak vehicles outside, mentally cursing the drivers for both the unrest and the lack of food. “That was a strange feeling,” she recalled. “I was, like, what are they doing here? I don’t want to feel this. I don’t want to look at them like they’re all the same.”

When she got back home, a neighbour ran up to her in tears. “They’re coming! They’re coming!” she sobbed. Travers ran inside, grabbed her son and his iPad, and pulled him upstairs. “Just go to the attic and stay safe. If something happens, just stay there. Do not get out,” she told him. Then she rushed outside to confront the would-be attackers. Soon after, her husband found her on the street, half-crazed. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked. “They’re coming,” she said.

Her husband tried to reassure her that no protesters were nearby, then took her inside and fetched their son from the attic. That night, Travers couldn’t sleep. She found a baseball bat and a hammer, then stepped onto their house’s terrace, where she could peer through the palm trees and mangroves towards Nouméa. She sat there for hours while her husband and son slept, gripping the weapons and watching distant explosions spread streaks of black smoke across the sky.

For much of the past half century, New Caledonia had been a backwater, best known as a holiday destination and retirement spot. But in recent years, intensifying geopolitical competition in the Pacific between America and its allies and China has made it a strategic asset to France. (French officials have claimed that Russia and Azerbaijan, incensed by France’s support of its enemy Armenia, have stirred the unrest.) Moreover, the territory’s vast reserves of nickel – essential to the production of electric batteries and other green technologies – have become valuable as the world races to decarbonise.

Eleven miles north of Nouméa, near the small coastal town of Paita, Fabrice Valette spent the first two days of the riots sheltering at home with his girlfriend and nine-month-old son. On the third day, as the violence continued spreading, Valette realised they had only a few days’ worth of milk left for their baby.

Valette, a 40-year-old computer scientist who works for New Caledonia’s largest mining company, had heard that a pharmacy on the other side of Paita was open. At around 9am he decided to go there to find some milk. As he drove along a motorway dotted with the skeletons of burned-out cars, he passed through a small roadblock manned by two cheerful protesters who waved him along.

When Valette arrived at the pharmacy, he saw that someone had pulled a thick metal grate down over the doorway. He fumed at his bad luck, then slowly turned the car around. The uneventful drive had given him confidence: he switched on a sports podcast and took a shortcut back to the motorway.

But as he approached it from a back street, he saw another roadblock. This time, around 20 Kanaks in balaclavas had rolled a few large boulders onto the road, then fortified the barricade with burnt-out cars and wooden pallets. It was too late to turn around. Instead, Valette slowed down to speak to them.

Two young men approached the right side of the car and pointed out a narrow path through the roadblock. Valette grabbed his phone to turn off his podcast. The movement caught the eye of a different teenager, who stumbled over to the vehicle as if drunk, shouted that Valette was filming them, and pulled open the car door.

For a moment, they stared at each other. Then the teenager reached down to grab a rock. Valette managed to shut and lock the door, then watched protesters crowd his vehicle, slamming their fists against the car’s bonnet and threatening to smash it with rocks.

As they did so, six older Kanaks at the barricade intervened. One man grappled with the teenager who had opened Valette’s door, while another leaned down, indicated a narrow path through the roadblock, and told Valette, “Go this way. Escape.” Shaking from adrenaline and fear, Valette sped off, pulled onto the motorway and headed home. “I was lucky,” he told me later.

Most French residents watched the riots through phone screens, sheltering behind locked doors. “The whole city is burning,” said Pierre, who lives in central Nouméa and asked that his last name not be used for fear that rioters might target him in retaliation. From his balcony he could see protesters torching vehicles and erecting barricades. At night he listened to the clatter of sporadic gunshots. Pierre, like many New Caledonians, worried that the territory was sliding into another civil war. “I experienced, back in 1984, the events that happened at that time,” he said. “Nothing has changed. The violence is still here.”

On the second night of protests, two Kanak men aged 20 and 36 and a Kanak girl aged 17 were shot dead by unknown attackers in northern Nouméa. Authorities later said the 20-year-old, Jybril Salo, had been shot in the back. That same night, in a suburb of the city, a 22-year-old French policeman was shot dead after he took off his helmet to speak to some protesters.

As the death toll grew, Macron declared a state of emergency. “All violence is intolerable,” he said, “and will be subject to a relentless response.” The French army was mobilised and hundreds of police officers were flown to the territory.

Kanak leaders denounced Macron’s moves as hypocritical and short-sighted. “In just one day he blew up 30 or 40 years of peace in New Caledonia, which shows how much he cares about the situation,” said Jimmy Naouna, a spokesperson for the independence movement. As the riots unfolded Naouna spent much of his time roaming Nouméa’s streets and speaking to people on the barricades. In the chaos, even the movement’s leaders could exert little control: when he and other pro-independence figures asked the protesters to remain peaceful or take down roadblocks, the demonstrators shrugged them off.

“The only way to solve the situation in New Caledonia is through addressing the question of self-determination,” said Naouna. Otherwise, “every generation will pick up the flag and ask for its independence.”

Newly arrived French police in armoured vehicles began pushing Kanak protesters out of neighbourhoods with rubber bullets and rubber grenades. As clashes spread, some French residents took matters into their own hands. On the sixth day of unrest, protesters at a barricade in the north of the territory threw a rock at a speeding car driven by a drunk French resident. The driver went home, grabbed his son and two guns, and went back to the roadblock. While his son pleaded with him to stop, the man shot at the barricade at least 12 times, hitting a bystander sitting nearby. The protesters returned fire, killing the man and injuring his son.

Such violence intensified the anger felt by many Kanaks. “They live in a bubble and they don’t see our determination,” said Emmanuel Tjibaou, the son of a Kanak leader who was assassinated for negotiating an end to the civil war. The current wave of protests began at a memorial service for Tjibaou’s father at which Tjibaou had called upon activists to honour his father’s sacrifice by continuing to pursue independence.

For months, Kanak leaders had issued warnings that Macron’s constitutional proposal was inflammatory. “The French government didn’t hear it. The loyalist camp didn’t hear it,” said Tjibaou. “And now that we express it in the streets, they send troops.”

On Wednesday morning Travers decided to take her son to her mother’s home in Anse Vata, a suburb at the other end of the city, where her daughter had been staying since the unrest began. Travers had heard that many of the French police were quartered there – it suddenly seemed like the safest place to be.

Travers’s husband stayed behind and joined a local militia, one of a number formed by residents across the city. The group had built barricades at the entrance to their neighbourhood and implemented a sentry system to ensure someone could raise an alarm if protesters approached.

On the way to her mother’s apartment block, Travers saw that the streets were speckled with scorch marks; two supermarkets had been torched. “Everything was burned,” she said. The beachfront surf shops and cafés of Anse Vata were almost devoid of locals, and were filled instead with French police and gendarmes.

A few days after arriving, the family took Travers’s mother’s dog for a walk. As they ambled beneath a clear night sky, they heard a low rumble. Then they saw 30 vehicles rolling towards them. Each was full of policemen returning to their quarters after a day of suppressing protests. Many of the vehicles’ windows were shattered and their sides were covered in dents. “Thank you,” Travers said as they rolled past. Her mother applauded them.

Although Travers used to pride herself on having an open mind towards independence, her feelings have hardened. “The French have done a lot of things for them. I’m really angry with them because they’ve burned all that we’ve done,” she said of the Kanak protesters. “I’m trying to trust them, but every day there’s something new, there’s bad news. Sometimes I’m thinking, do we have to move from New Caledonia to be in a safe place?”

On May 23rd, ten days into the riots, Macron flew to New Caledonia and announced that he was delaying parliamentary consideration of the constitutional amendment to give time to negotiate a political solution to the crisis. Five days later, he lifted the state of emergency. But a strict curfew remains in place – as does the garrison of security forces. And the main point of contention does not look like it will be resolved soon. Kanak leaders insist on a pathway to self-determination; Macron has repeatedly said that he believed the discussion about independence is over.

“The life that we had before will never be the same. I will never be able to trust any more of those people,” said Pierre. Tjibaou, meanwhile, believes Kanak anger over French intransigence means further violence is likely. “If you fight against colonisation, violence is your companion.” ■

Pete McKenzie is a freelance journalist based in Auckland, New Zealand