‘No going back’ for New Caledonia as leaders prepare for talks

When it comes to New Zealand’s security interests, the Pacific rates highly.
‘Pacific resilience and security’ is among just 14 national security intelligence priorities, with civil unrest among the specific areas of interest for officials.
It is civil unrest in one very specific part of the region that will be high on the agenda when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon joins other rulers at their annual Pacific Islands Forum retreat behind closed doors on Thursday.
New Caledonia erupted into riots in May over constitutional reforms proposed by the French government that would have expanded the number of eligible voters for provincial elections – and according to some, diluted the voice of the indigenous Kanak people.
But the real tipping point in the territory was arguably the 2021 independence referendum, held during the Covid-19 pandemic and in the face of objections from a pro-independence alliance who cited high infection rates and a traditional mourning period for those who had died from the virus.
With the pro-independence parties boycotting in protest, just 44 percent of the electorate cast a vote (compared with over 80 percent in the 2018 and 2020 referendums), casting a shadow over the legitimacy of the win for ‘no’.
Reverend Billy Wetewea, a pastor at the Protestant Church of Kanaky New Caledonia, has come to the summit after supporting local youth in the wake of the territory’s unrest.
Wetewea told Newsroom tensions were still running high, after French police killed an alleged gunman during clashes between officers and protesters earlier this month.
“We have lost so much already in terms of life, but also belongings, and a lot of our businesses have been destroyed…
“The feeling of the youth on the ground and the community, especially in town, is that there is no moving back … the way is to move forward.”
With more than 800 businesses suffering damage during the violence, and up to 25,000 people losing their jobs, the territory was undergoing economic and social turmoil. But Wetewea said the situation was also “an opportunity to rethink what has not worked for our people” since the signing of the Nouméa Accord in 1998, through which France promised New Caledonia greater political freedoms.
“Through that crisis, we are seeing a kind of transformation phenomenon, an opportunity to rethink, what is education for us? To rethink, what is economic development for us … To rethink all of those systems and to try to be more fair to our people.”
Forum leaders were due to send a fact-finding mission to the territory ahead of this week’s meeting, but the trip was delayed at the last minute by New Caledonia president Louis Mapou due to concerns about the level of control being exercised by Paris.
Despite the setback, Pacific leaders expressed cautious optimism the forum could prove helpful for the situation in New Caledonia.
Forum chair and Tonga Prime Minister Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni said he was “very optimistic about having some kind of agreed path forward with New Caledonia”, while Palau president Surangel Whipps said the meeting was an opportunity for forum members to understand both sides and help them work together on a resolution.
“Hurting each other doesn’t help anybody. That’s why we always ask that, if you’re going to have protests they should be peaceful protests – because that’s how you come to good solutions.”
Luxon was giving little away about his approach to New Caledonia, saying only that the Government wanted to see “peace and prosperity across the region”.
“That requires us to have a very constructive dialogue with both parties and … they will ultimately be decisions for the New Caledonian people around their constitutional arrangements.”
The hope behind the scenes appears to be that New Zealand can join other Pacific nations in bringing together moderates on both sides of the debate, helping them to land on a mutually acceptable model for New Caledonia’s future that could then be put to a vote.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters had an hour-long meeting with Mapou earlier in the week, and has expressed a desire to travel to the territory later this year.
Complicating matters has been the French approach to the issue: the country’s Pacific ambassador Véronique Roger-Lacan has ruffled feathers with her declaration that “New Caledonia is France” and suggestion that forum members had not been united in their support for a fact-finding mission.
Earlier this year, Roger-Lacan took aim at comments from Peters questioning the legitimacy of the 2021 referendum and stating New Caledonia’s residents had suffered “a democratic injury”,  telling him she would have “appreciated to be informed of the way you portrayed New Caledonia”.
Peters returned fire during his time in Nuku’alofa, dismissing the ambassador’s claims about the forum mission as “not helpful” (an assessment shared by Wetewea) and brushing off any suggestion he would meet Roger-Lacan while at the summit: “The answer is most definitely to go to the boss.”
France also remains without a government nearly two months on from national elections, as French president Emmanuel Macron holds talks with different political blocs – hardly ideal circumstances for the country to be taking a sufficiently rigorous look at its policy on New Caledonia.
New Zealand’s own history with its indigenous population brings both opportunity and risk when it comes to New Caledonia and broader self-determination discussions.
Wetewea recently visited the country, and was “amazed” at what Māori had managed to achieve in terms of promoting indigenous education, culture and language.
He had also observed government efforts to “dilute the Māori world”, seeing similarities with New Caledonia’s own struggle; unsurprisingly, that was a comparison forcefully disputed by Luxon.
“Just first and foremost, I’d reject the characterisation of that statement and your question … we are, as a new government, determined to improve outcomes for Māori – they went backwards over the previous six years.”
But with iwi Ngāti Hine and Ngāti Manu asking Luxon to publicly acknowledge Māori did not cede sovereignty to the Crown (in contrast to previous statements), the issue of self-determination is clearly a live issue within New Zealand – along with the wider Pacific.
“We are seeing that for a lot of indigenous people in the region, we are facing the same struggle in terms of self-determination and decolonisation. And it’s a continuous problem that we have faced, that our fathers [and] ancestors have faced, and now we are still in that fight,” Wetewea said of the Pacific.
Indeed, while most of the attention has gone on New Caledonia, members of the West Papua independence movement have called on the forum to back a United Nations visit to investigate alleged human rights abuses in the Indonesian province; “West Papua is dying,” independence leader Benny Wenda declared on social media.
Bougainville, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea, is still waiting for the PNG parliament to ratify the results of a 2019 referendum in which 97 percent of voters backed independence.
Whipps has previously drawn parallels between New Caledonia’s struggle for self-determination and his own country’s history of colonisation at the hands of Spain, Germany, Japan and the United States, and said there were a range of different solutions that could work for the territory’s people.
“Just in our Micronesian region, we have Guam, which is a US territory, and then we have the CNMI [Northern Mariana Islands], which is a Commonwealth, and then we’re freely associated with the United States.
“That’s all different, but all ultimately ensuring human dignity and that we all respect each other and live in harmony. I think that’s what we want for our friends in New Caledonia – how to help them ensure that they live peacefully and in harmony with their brothers.”
For his part, Wetewea said it was decolonisation that mattered most for New Caledonia, with independence a move that would come in time.
“We want everyone to assume their responsibility in that process to make sure that our children will be safe in their time, and will not have to fight for what we are fighting now.”