The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia 0824838203, 9780824838201

Citation preview

3DFLÀF,VODQGV0RQRJUDSK6HULHV

The Kanak Awakening The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia

DAVID CHAPPELL

The Kanak Awakening

Pacific Islands Monograph Series 27

The Kanak Awakening The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia

David Chappell

Center for Pacific Islands Studies School of Pacific and Asian Studies 8QLYHUVLW\RI+DZDL¨L0îQRD University of Hawai‘i Press

•

Honolulu

© 2014 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chappell, David A., [date] author. The Kanak awakening : the rise of nationalism in New Caledonia / David Chappell. pages cm. — (Pacific islands monograph series ; 27) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3818-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. New Caledonia—History—Autonomy and independence movements. 2. Nationalism—New Caledonia. 3. Kanaka (New Caledonian people)—Politics and government. I. Title. II. Series: Pacific islands monograph series ; no. 27. DU720.75.C47 2013 320.54099597—dc23 2013016765

Maps by Manoa Mapworks, Inc., and Cartographic Services, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Design by University of Hawai‘i Press Design & Production Department Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

To Atelemo Moleana, whose warm friendship and sage insight will be greatly missed.

CENTER FOR PACIFIC ISLANDS STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I Terence Wesley-Smith, Director PACIFIC ISLANDS MONOGRAPH SERIES Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, General Editor Jan Rensel, Managing Editor EDITORIAL BOARD Hokulani Aikau Lola Quan Bautista Alex Golub David Hanlon Robert C Kiste Jane Freeman Moulin Puakea Nogelmeier 7\.îZLND7HQJDQ The Pacific Islands Monograph Series is a joint effort of the University of Hawai‘i Press and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i. The series includes works in the humanities and social sciences that focus on the insular Pacific. A list of other volumes in the series follows the index.

Editor’s Note

As an undergraduate student at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in the late 1980s, I was actively involved in the student movement for the decolonization of New Caledonia. Like most of the other student activists, I was largely motivated by the perception that colonialism was “evil” and decolonization was the ideal. The USP Students Association (USPSA) made it one of its missions to champion the decolonization of Pacific Island territories still under colonial rule. I was also a member of USP’s Wantok Students Association, with members from Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia (wantok, from the English phrase “one talk,” can refer to people who speak the same language or who share a set of Melanesian cultural values). The Wantok Students Association was particularly interested in pushing for the independence of New Caledonia. The Kanak were, after all, our Melanesian wantoks. At that time I did not fully appreciate the complexities of decolonization, especially how the histories and experiences of colonial powers and territories were so intertwined that shaking off the shackles of colonialism was not a simple matter. Also, I did not fully grasp the daunting task of creating national identities in multicultural and multiethnic societies. This is often compounded, as in the case of New Caledonia, by the existence of settler populations. In Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia, David Chappell examines these issues. He provides a comprehensive narrative of the rise of Kanak nationalism in the period after World War II. Although the book focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, it tells a broader story about how the rise of Kanak nationalism is connected to a long history of anticolonial movement that is rooted in Kanak cultures. It was also influenced by movements and discourses outside of New Caledonia, especially in metropolitan France. The author locates the New Caledonian experience within broader discussions of colonialism, decolonization, nationalism, and nation building. Drawing from careful and detailed research, Chappell tells a complex story of the interactions between the French and the Kanak, between the Kanak and caldoches (white settlers), and among Kanak of different genvii

viii

Editor’s Note

erations and from different parts of New Caledonia. The book tells of the interconnections between politics and culture and how that influenced contemporary New Caledonian society. This is an astute examination of the rise of nationalism, the causes of the violence of the 1980s, and the complexities of nation building, and the continuing search for a New Caledonian identity. The book is organized chronologically, providing an insightful analysis of the rise of nationalism, the events and factors that influenced it, and the continuing discussion about sovereignty and a national identity. It begins with a broad archaeological and anthropological overview of Kanak cultures and societies and their interactions with foreigners over the centuries. It then examines the history and nature of French colonialism and how and why the post–World War II development of local self-government in New Caledonia was interrupted and reversed in the 1960s. Around the same time, a small cohort of Kanak students who attended universities in France were exposed to and experienced the May 1968 student-worker uprising. This influenced them intellectually and politically and inspired the establishment of the Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves) movement. These students became the pioneers of the “Kanak awakening” of 1969 that marked the beginning of nationalist movement in the territory. The rise of nationalism in New Caledonia was therefore a result of a combination of ideas, cultures, and movements with connections to both the colonial territory and the colonial power. It was also a movement that prompted debates and the formation of political blocks with varying opinions about the proper paths to sovereignty. The violence and missed opportunities of the 1980s are manifestations of the intensity of these political differences among New Caledonians and between New Caledonia and metropolitan France. The negotiated accords of 1988 and 1998 provided for the cessation of violence and a referendum on independence after 2014. Today, New Caledonians continue their discussions about national identity and building a nation in a globalizing world quite different from that of the 1960s and 1970s. In his conclusion, Chappell reflects on the legacy of the rise of nationalism and implications for the future. Kanak Awakening represents the culmination of many years of work and illustrates Chappell’s brilliant ability to collect and provide a balanced interpretation of a large amount of primary and secondary sources. As one of the external reviewers of the manuscript stated, the originality and scholarship of this book “is beyond question.” Reading it has enhanced my understanding of New Caledonia’s histories, its colonial experiences, the rise of nationalism, and the continuing discussions about its future. Although much has previously been written about the violent events of the 1980s, this book locates those events within a broader historical and conceptual context, making it valuable not only to those interested in New

Editor’s Note

ix

Caledonia but also to those interested in the broader issues of colonialism, nationalism, and nation building. I wish I had had this book to read before I took to the streets of Suva in the late 1980s. I would have had a better appreciation of the complexities of colonialism, decolonization, nationalism, nation building, and the future of this Pacific Island nation in the making—and my placards in support of New Caledonia’s independence would have been more colorful and my slogans more perceptive. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka

Contents

Illustrations Preface Abbreviations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction Self-Determination Interrupted Building Castles in China The Kanak Awakening Visions of Sovereignty Two Nations, One Country? The Kanak Revolt Kanaky New Caledonia? Nation Building in Perspective

References Index

xiii xv xix 1 24 56 86 117 149 176 206 234 253 281

Illustrations

Map New Caledonia Figures 2.1 Jean-Paul Caillard in 2001 and in May 1968 3.1 Graffiti in Noumea in July 1969 3.2 Nidoish Naisseline with Foulards Rouges at his 1972 trial 3.3 Nidoish Naisseline portrayed as crucified by French colonialism 3.4 Nidoish Naisseline portrayed as comparable to Chief Ataï of 1878 Kanak revolt 3.5 Nidoish Naisseline as member of Congress of New Caledonia, 2001 4.1 Surrender plaque on Governor Olry monument, Place des Cocotiers, Noumea 4.2 Nidoish Naisseline and Jean-Jacques Bourdinat spray painting the plaque in 1974 4.3 Déwé Gorodé and Marie Moenteapo under arrest in 1974 4.4 Déwé Gorodé as vice president of New Caledonia in 2000 4.5 Elie Poigoune under arrest in 1974 4.6 Elie Poigoune as president of the League of the Rights of Man and Atelemo Moleana 6.1 Newspaper cover story about July 1982 settler riot in the Territorial Assembly 6.2 Hope before the storm: Nainville-les-Roches Roundtable participants, July 1983 7.1 Militants in Palika office, including Charles Washetine and Sylvain Pabouty Table Congress of New Caledonia Seats Won, 1989–2009

xxii

57 87 112 113 113 114 126 132 135 135 136 136 184 187 215

208

xiii

Preface

You never know how the past will turn out. Bob Dylan

When I first visited Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia, an old caldoche (settler) in Vallée du Tir told me, “Politics? There’s too much politics here for a small country.” The prospect of complexity appealed to the academic historian in me, but I was not on a simple treasure hunt for research data. I recognized a familiar pattern in human behavior. In 1968, I had joined the US Peace Corps to teach English in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), a former French colony in West Africa that faced the daunting task of building a nation out of dozens of local ethnic groups. More than a generation later, I was teaching modern Pacific Islands history at the University of Hawai‘i, and I wanted to learn more about New Caledonia, a French Overseas Territory near Australia. It is a multiethnic society that had suffered violence in the 1980s among indigenous nationalists, France, and pro-French immigrants. Africa’s struggle to build stable plural societies within artificial borders and foreign state structures was shared by culturally diverse Melanesia in the Pacific. The ethnic tension in New Caledonia also reminded me of Hawai‘i, where indigenous people are a minority, so I was testing my own views on decolonization. I was also carrying personal and political baggage in my research on New Caledonia. I had applied to the US Peace Corps in 1968 not only because my university studies focused on Africa but also to avoid military conscription into the American war in Vietnam. My studies of history had convinced me that Vietnam was not simply a case of Communist expansion in the Cold War but an example of Third World nationalism. That rising force often expressed itself in leftist rhetoric because overseas colonies tended to be ruled by capitalist powers. Anticolonial rebels needed outside help (often from the socialist bloc) and alternative approaches to development. I vividly remember sitting in my local draft board office, at the age of twenty-one, across from a young woman who listened to my plea to teach in West Africa. I found myself feeling silent resentment over the fact that as a woman she was in no danger of being drafted to kill or be killed in a misguided war. xv

xvi

Preface

She looked at me as if I were a naive child and decided, “All right, we’ll let you do your thing for two years. Then you can come back and do our thing.” My “thing” soon placed me in front of six middle-school classes, each with fifty African students, who wanted to know the answers to such questions as why America had stolen Muhammad Ali from Africa to make him join its army and whether it was true that every time an American woke up, he took a rifle and shot someone from his window. I learned a lot about perspective from them and their families. One evening in 1969, while I sat with my hosts around a campfire in a rural village, a radio announced that the Americans had just landed on the moon! Everyone looked up at the bright disk in the sky, and a man asked me why anyone would want to go there? Did it make sense for me to say that the United States did it to beat the Soviets or to collect rocks? I referred to one of their stories about an old man who was always beating his drums on the moon to distract wayward children: we went up there to bring him down to earth, I said. They all laughed, saying that he was very dangerous, and passed me some more palm wine. As it turns out, an indigenous story in New Caledonia says their ancestral creator spirit, Bumé, came from the moon. I now wanted to understand the genesis of the 1980s “Events,” as the French called the indigenous uprising in New Caledonia. Specifically, I was investigating the radical Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves) of 1969. Some of them had participated in the May 1968 student-worker revolt while attending universities in France. When they returned to their colonized homeland, they sparked an independence movement. We were of the same generation, separated by national borders but immersed during our formative years in a worldwide quest for progressive change and in idealistic opposition to racism, inequality, war, imperialism, and conformity. Two specific links are quite striking. First, the war in Vietnam had helped to fuel a nickel mining boom and new immigration in New Caledonia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. France wanted to monopolize profits from that boom because it regarded nickel as a strategic resource. Second, the French colonial governor, Laurent Péchoux, had suppressed the nationalist movement in Côte d’Ivoire in the early 1950s. In 1958, when Charles de Gaulle returned to power, he sent Péchoux to begin dismantling New Caledonia’s political autonomy (Le Borgne 2006, 235). By 1969 the regression was complete, despite repeated objections by the democratically elected Territorial Assembly. The radicals called it a “recolonization,” and their protests opened up a new political discourse on national liberation and respect for indigenous identity. Finally, my PhD advisor at the University of Hawai‘i from 1987 to 1991 was Brij V Lal of Fiji, whose country had also experienced indigenousimmigrant tensions and had just had its first military coups. He practiced “committed” scholarship, using his professional training to research and explicate the historical roots of current issues. His approach followed in

Preface

xvii

the tradition of participant-historian J W Davidson, who had founded the academic discipline of Pacific Islands history at the Australian National University. Davidson had served as an advisor in the decolonization of WestHUQ6îPRD DQG1DXUX %\WKHWLPH,HDUQHGP\3K',KDG published articles on nation building in Côte d’Ivoire (Chappell 1989) and comparing the ethnic tensions in Fiji, Malaysia, and New Caledonia (Chappell 1990). After being hired by the University of Hawai‘i in 1992, I continued to examine the French Pacific through research, publications, collaborative projects, and presentations, including at the Universities of New Caledonia and of French Polynesia. In this study, I offer another angle of vision on some causes and effects of the 1980s “Events” that rocked New Caledonia. As I did interviews and researched in public archives, I found that some participants were not only willing but eager to speak with me and to share their valuable private archives with me. As in Côte d’Ivoire, being a non-French outsider helped to open some doors for me. I not only shared many of the anticolonial sentiments of the “old” radicals but I also seemed to help them and other participants I interviewed to escape from what local historian Louis-José Barbançon has called le non-dit (1992), the “unspoken” social constraint in a small island society against talking too openly about painful pasts. The 1998 Noumea Accord proposed that the indigenous people and nonindigenous long-term residents should overcome the political and ethnic polarization of the past and work toward a “common destiny.” That implies reflecting on a shared, albeit contested, past. If this examination of the genesis of the turbulent 1980s can fill a historical gap and stimulate further discussion, it will have achieved its goal. I owe thanks to many people who helped me in my research, most notably Ismet Kurtovitch, director of the Territorial Archives in Nouville, and Jean-Paul Caillard, who has a particularly rich private archive; both were also activists in the 1970s. I am grateful to the Moleana and Seivert families for their hospitality, insights, and help, and I thank Billy Wapotro of the Alliance Scolaire, Sylvain Pabouty and his colleagues at Palika, Hamid Mokaddem, Louis-José Barbançon, Elie Poigoune and his colleagues at the local League of the Rights of Man, Rock Wamytan, Nidoish Naisseline, Déwé Gorodé, Fote Trolue, Henri Bailly, Max Chivot, Jean-Pierre Devillers, Jean-Pierre Deteix, Macate Wenehoua, Julien Dillensenger, Alain and Olivier Houdan, Gustave Teheo, Jimmy Ounei, Jacques Sarimin Boengkih, Lionel Cherrier, Robert Casola, Emmanuel Kasarherou, Charles Washetine, Aloisio Sako, Christophe Sand, Pierre Maresca, Paul de Deckker, Frédéric Angleviel, Jean-Yves Faberon, Jean-Marc Regnault, Nic Maclellan, Stephen Henningham, Robert Aldrich, John Connell, Adrian Muckle, John Kim Munholland, Bronwen Douglas, Jim Clifford, Max Shekleton, Michel Hema, Tino Manuohalalo, Michel Teharuru, Gaby Tetiarahi, Melanie Chait, Robert Kiste, Max Quanchi, and David Hanlon. I also thank the readers of

xviii

Preface

my manuscript for the Pacific Islands Monograph Series for their feedback, Editor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, and Managing Editor Jan Rensel. I am grateful for financial help through conference travel grants from the University of Hawai‘i and paid sabbatical leave in spring of 2001 (and 2008); for travel aid from the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies; and for travel aid and pay from the government of France for the dissertation defense of Philippe Palombo in 2002 at the University of New Caledonia, where I also did some teaching in 2001, and for travel aid to the 2011 Colloquium on the Destinies of Pacific Polities, held in Noumea. Any errors are my own responsibility, as are any in my translations from French-language sources.

Abbreviations

ACF/AKF ACM ADCK ADRAF AE AECH AICLF AJCP ALNC CACI CAFAT CE CNDPA CRS EDS FCCI FDIL FI FLNKS FN FNSC Frolika FULK GAIAC GCFRP GFKEL INCO LDH-NC LKS MLC MPC MSG NAM

Association des Canaques en France (later, Kanak) Melanesian Cultural Association Agence de Développement de la Culture Kanak Agence de Développement Rural et d’Aménagement Foncier (land reform office) Avenir Ensemble Association des Étudiants de Nouvelle-Calédonie et des NouvellesHébrides Association des Indigènes Calédoniens et Loyaltiens Français (Protestant) Association des Jeunes Canaques à Paris Association of Lycéens of New Caledonia Comité d’Action contre Indépendance Caisse des Allocations Familiales et des Accidents de Travail Calédonie Ensemble Conseil National des Peuples Autochtones Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (riot police) Entente Démocratique et Sociale Fédération des Comités de Coordination Indépendantistes Front de Développement des Îles Loyauté Front Indépendantiste Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste Front National Fédération pour une Nouvelle Société Calédonienne Front de Libération Kanak Front Uni de Libération Kanak (Uregei) Groupe d’Action pour l’Indépendance Accélérée de la Calédonie Groupe Calédonien de Formation et de Réflexion Politique Groupe des Femmes Kanak Exploitées en Lutte International Nickel Company (Canada) Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, New Caledonia branch Libération Kanak Socialiste Mouvement Libéral Calédonien Mouvement Populaire Calédonien Melanesian Spearhead Group Non-Aligned Movement

xix

xx NSC Palika PSC/PSK PSF PT RDO RPC RPCR RPR RUMP RURALE SEHNC SLN SMSP SOENC UC UDF UDR UICALO UJC UMNC UMP UO UPARNC UPM USOENC USTKE WCIP

Abbreviations Nouvelle Société Calédonienne (later FNSC) Parti de Libération Kanak Parti Socialiste Calédonien (later, de Kanaky) Parti Socialiste de France Parti Travailliste (Labor Party, affiliated with USTKE) Rassemblement Démocratique Océanien (Sako) Rassemblement pour la Calédonie Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la République (J Lafleur) Rassemblement pour la République (Gaullist) RPCR–UMP Ruraux Unis pour une Réforme Agraire Libérale et Egalitaire Société des Études Historiques de la Nouvelle-Caledonie Société Le Nickel Société Minière du Sud Pacifique Syndicat des Ouvriers et Employés de la Nouvelle-Calédonie Union Calédonienne Union pour la Démocratie Française Union des Démocrates pour la République (H Lafleur) Union des Indigènes Calédoniens Amis de la Liberté dans l’Ordre (Catholic) Union des Jeunesses Calédoniennes Union Multiraciale de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Uregei) Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Chirac) Union Océanienne (Hema) Union Pacifiste et Anti-Raciste de Nouvelle-Calédonie Union Progressiste Multiraciale (later, Mélanesienne) Union des Syndicats des Ouvriers et Employés de Nouvelle- Calédonie Union Syndicale des Travailleurs Kanaks et des Exploités World Council of Indigenous Peoples

Introduction The events of November 1984 didn’t just happen—although it is by no means clear exactly what conjuncture of circumstances caused them to take the form that they did. Michael Spencer, It’s Not All Black and White (1988, 182) To the refusal of self that colonialism imposes on us, we oppose the acceptance of self. Nidoish Naisseline, Cité Nouvelle, No 525, 1970.

Assassinations, ambushes, massacres, gunfights at roadblocks and rural homesteads, destruction of property, the influx of thousands of French riot police and paratroopers to defend white settlers and mining firms from armed blacks in Rastafarian dreadlocks—such dramatic news images typified reporting on the Kanak uprising in New Caledonia in the 1980s. In rhetoric reminiscent of the Algerian independence war of the 1950s, the conservative metropolitan newspaper Le Figaro attacked the Socialist regime in Paris for allowing a “Caledonian disease” of criminal terrorist disorder to threaten France. A local loyalist Melanesian leader, Dick Ukeiwé, blamed the “infiltration of Marxism in this part of the world through links between the [Kanak Liberation Front] and Libya, Cuba and the Soviet Union.” Le Figaro portrayed the indigenous rebels as “savages” living in the “stone age” who obeyed the “law of the jungle,” and reporter Thiérry Desjardins asserted, “there is no Kanak culture or civilization” (Spencer 1988, 180–185). Yet behind such sensationalist stereotyping lay a long history of foreign labeling and colonialism. The term “Pacific” itself came from Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, because he felt relieved to escape the storms off Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Europeans created such names for their own mapping (Kirch 2000). By the eighteenth century, the vast island world in the heart of the Pacific that ancient voyagers had first settled and linked together with exchange systems was called “Polynesia” (many islands); it later became the eastern part of “Oceania.” In the 1830s, northwest Oceania became “Micronesia” (tiny islands) because of its many coral atolls, though it also has large volcanic islands, and the southwest became “Melanesia,” a racial label meaning islands of dark-skinned peoples. In culturally diverse Melanesia, 1

2

Introduction

Europeans created “new” place-names for convenience, including “New Caledonia,” named after Scotland by British explorer James Cook in 1774. The term kanaka, a Hawaiian word for “person,” traveled around the region in shipboard and plantation pidgin and became canaque in French. Descendants of colonial settlers in New Caledonia would later call themselves calédoniens, while “Melanesian” was often a more polite label than canaque for the indigenous people. In the 1970s, local nationalists revalued “Kanak” (an invariable term, whether singular or plural) as a unifying identity formation because the indigenous people spoke thirty languages. Etymology and polarized politics ultimately pitted Pacific “Scots” against Melanesian “Hawaiians.” But the 1980s Kanak uprising was not simply about timeless ethnic markers, “tribal” warfare, or the Cold War. Three historical changes had pushed New Caledonia to the breaking point. First, from 1959 to 1969, France unilaterally withdrew previously granted self-governing powers from the territory in order to keep control of local nickel mining, which it regarded as a strategic resource. The democratically elected majority in the Territorial Assembly called that regression a betrayal of trust. An analogy might be if the US Congress had revoked Hawaiian statehood and pushed back the clock to the territorial period before 1959. Second, in violation of United Nations General Assembly resolution 2621 (1970), the French state and its local administration deliberately encouraged new immigration during a nickel-mining boom in order to marginalize supporters of self-government. Kanak were already a slight demographic minority, and many felt that their identity as a people was in danger of extinction. Third, in response to these two structural changes, young New Caledonians returning from university studies in France, who had experienced the May 1968 student-worker uprising, felt that powerful outside interests and a flood of migrant opportunists were extinguishing local progressive voices and recolonizing the country. They formed a protest group, the Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves), in what became known as the Kanak Awakening (Réveil Canaque). Increasing political, ethnic, and economic polarization thus culminated in the pro-independence revolt of the 1980s. Together with widespread opposition to French nuclear testing in the Tuamotu atolls near Tahiti, the Kanak struggle to decolonize also aroused anti-French sentiments around the Pacific. Despite the revocation of local self-government and the artificial creation of a loyalist majority through orchestrated migration, pro-French settlers seemed unwilling to believe that their metropolitan-educated offspring could turn toward anticolonial behavior on their own. Criticisms of state repression in New Caledonia or of nuclear testing in French Polynesia were attributed to intrusive global leftism or to an “Anglo-Saxon” conspiracy to seize France’s colonies (NR 1986, Doumenge 1990). A local-born history professor at the University of New Caledonia also critiqued “Anglo-Saxon” writing about his country for having “in their mirror the situation of first

Introduction

3

peoples in their own countries.” He said such authors did not contextualize French colonialism within the larger historical process of European expansion: “The Caledonian case thus seems to have been a particular site for expiating the general sins committed by colonization in the Pacific islands.” The United States, Australia, and New Zealand “became sovereign not in the name of the aborigines but in the name of multi-communal societies that more or less marginalize a certain number of migrant communities and the indigenous peoples” (Angleviel 2003a, 139). The comparative study of colonization is certainly a topic that needs more work in the Pacific, and anglophone settler countries of the region have indeed marginalized their own indigenous minorities and aroused protest movements. At first, post–World War II decolonization in New Caledonia had moved even faster than in anglophone Oceania, for example in the granting of French citizenship and voting rights after 1946, yet that progressive trend had reversed direction after the return of Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958. Meanwhile, most of the anglophone south Pacific colonies decolonized peacefully in the 1960s and 1970s. When several postcolonial secession revolts in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea and military coups in Fiji made headlines in the 1980s, some French writers then argued that the “anglo-saxons” had “abandoned” their colonies too soon by “inflicting” independence on them suddenly, whereas France had chosen to stay on as a peacekeeper and developer (de Deckker 2000, 133–135). As recently as 2002, a French geographer wrote that instability was making Melanesia into the “black hole” of the Pacific, except for French New Caledonia, despite the armed Kanak uprising in the 1980s that forced Paris to negotiate. He blamed indigenous cultures for creating their own problems rather than any changes caused by foreign colonialism or development projects (Doumenge 2002; Chappell 2005). Insulted Kanak retorted by calling him “the last white hole in Oceanian university research” (Tahiti-Pacifique Magazine, Jan 2003, 43). Near-parity between indigenous and immigrant inhabitants creates a peculiar kind of stress. Imagine, for example, if almost half the population of the continental United States, Hawai‘i, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia were indigenous: what forms of politics might result? In independent Fiji, the tension caused by such a bipolar indigenous-to-immigrant ratio provoked the country’s first military coup in 1987 because Fijians controlled the army and wanted to suppress a perceived threat to their paramountcy by Indo-Fijians. New Caledonia has had a similar bipolar ethnic ratio, but when France revoked its autonomy, local anticolonialists had no organized military card to play because the country was not independent. The indigenous Kanak kept their civil rights but felt pushed aside by immigration and had to improvise to survive. That raised the question of how the nation should be defined. Was New Caledonia a settler state that extended France around the world, as most immigrants advocated, or

4

Introduction

an indigenous-centered country in Oceania, as pro-independence parties asserted? Could it somehow become both, working toward “a common destiny,” as the Noumea Accord of 1998 has proposed? Perhaps it can through further consensual negotiations, but the legacy of the loss of autonomy and renewed immigration in the 1960s and 1970s was a structural rupture that explains why the 1980s uprising occurred when it did. That trauma has left deep scars on the generation who experienced it. In short, unilateral recolonization, after a real taste of local self-government, was a dangerously anachronistic policy. So was French nuclear testing in the region. US and British atomic bomb tests in the Pacific had already stopped before the aboveground test ban treaty of 1963. Yet that year de Gaulle told French Polynesian representatives that a scientific testing facility would solve their budget woes. French nuclear tests had to shift away from the Sahara after Algerian independence in 1962, and European protests about fallout had already forced the testing underground before the program moved to the Pacific. Yet in 1966, France began exploding atomic bombs aboveground in the fragile Tuamotu atolls. After region-wide protests over the fallout, the tests were finally moved “below” ground in 1974, into holes drilled in the porous basalt under the coral. In 1985, French secret agents even bombed a Greenpeace protest vessel in Auckland harbor in New Zealand, killing a photographer (Firth 1987). Given de Gaulle’s desire to use overseas territories to help rebuild the prestige of France after World War II (Aldrich 1993), it could be argued that Gaullist France was actually more obsessed with national rivalry than the Anglophones who were supposedly “abandoning” the south Pacific. When de Gaulle observed the first atomic blast over Moruroa lagoon, the wind ZDVEORZLQJZHVWZDUGRYHULQKDELWHGLVODQGVDVIDUDZD\DV6îPRD