Kanaky (New Caledonia): Anti-capitalism and independence

By Bernard Alleton, translated by Sam Wainwright for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Rouge, issue 2280 -- December 25, 2008 -- One year after its founding by the Kanak and Exploited Workers Union (Union syndicale des travailleurs kanaks et des exploités:USTKE[1]), the Kanaky Labour Party (Parti travailliste: PT) held its first congress in November 2008 in Noumea. The Revolutionary Communist League (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire: LCR[2]) sent a representative who conveyed a message of fraternal solidarity.The balance sheet of first year of the Kanaky PT is largely positive. In the municipal elections in March, four months after it was formed, the PT ran candidates in fourteen of the territory’s thirty-three communes resulting in thirty elected representatives. This demonstrates its genuine implantation. More generally, the PT knew how to take on the lethargy of the other parties that claim to struggle for independence. They have been integrated into the institutions of colonial administration, set in place in Paris through the Matignon-Oudinot Accords of 1988 and the Noumea Accords of 1998. This has led them to favour the defence of these institutions and the place of individuals within them as the creation of structures for a future independent country. For several months now independence has been put back into the political debate in a way that does not treat it like some distant dream.
This
also explains the radicalisation of the local pro-colonial right-wing forces,
which according to Pierre Frogier (UMP)[3]
want “to purge this question of independence, which people don’t talk about
anymore, so we can move onto other things”. They propose to finish with the
“Kanak problem” with the 2014 referendum on independence. This is also the line
of the Socialist Party (PS), for whom “the concept of independence no longer
has meaning in a multipolar world and a globalised economy”. They all
effectively deny the fact that since 1986

The
PT congress was an opportunity to make an assessment of the twenty years of the
“transfer of competencies” which required Kanaks to be drawn into the centre of
governmental machinery. For the most part the promises made by the colonial
state have not been kept. The training which was supposed to allow Kanaks to
reach every level of society has failed, to the
extent that not one is a lawyer, judge or state prosecutor; and only one has
become a doctor! Dozens of young Kanaks have studied in
Ecological issues
In
both secondary and tertiary education the transfer of competencies is promised
to be “on the way”. In the meantime, young people continue to learn in earnest
about the geography of the
Economic
policy, notably the development of downstream processing of nickel by multinational
corporations, has been implemented largely excluding the local population.[6]
Les Métropolitains (French
expatriates) have come to make the most of the boom and been hired in big
numbers. In the south the construction of the Goro processing plant has brought
with it years of struggle against the destruction of the environment caused by
the new industrial processes.[7]
Several million euros have gone to carefully chosen politicians because of
these environmental battles. Right in the thick of these struggles, the PT has
not taken a backwards step. It puts its demand for the respect of the
territory’s ecological future at the centre of its resolutions.
For
the multinationals, their approach to the exploitation of this ore centres on
the fluctuations of the price of nickel on the world market, dropping from US$50,000
a tonne in July 2007 to less than $10,000 today. What might happen
“post-nickel” is not really their concern. The local deposits are estimated to
last for about another one hundred years. What will become of the territory
when its mineral resources have been exhausted for the benefit of the multinationals
and not invested in the country’s long term development? The PT asks these
questions and demands, for the future of Kanaky, an overall mining plan of
action and a new distribution of the wealth produced.
If
ecology has an important place in the program of the PT it is because it is a necessary
condition for the continuation of Kanak culture, in which humans draw their
life force from the earth and the natural world. It is also a pressing
necessity in the French colonies in which, by deliberate agreement, the Kyoto
Protocol is not applicable. Some twenty pesticides, banned in
Colonial justice
The
provincial elections in May will be the last before the referendum on
self-determination foreshadowed by the Noumea Accord. Ratified by a vote in
1999, the accord set a referendum for 2014. Consequently, the next elections
will be very important for shaping the future of the country. The view of the
PT is clear: Kanaks are ready for independence. If they wait until the colonial
power is ready to give it to them (as it keeps telling them, in a paternalistic
way) then they must wait several more decades to be trained up and reap the
benefits of colonisation. The French minister for education Xavier Darcos
declared again in October 2008 that he was still “personally in favour” of
“school curricula recognising the positive role of the French presence in the
overseas territories”. He did not specify how long he thought colonial rule
should continue.
The
PT is firmly in favour of a move to complete independence in 2014. The French
colonies that won independence after the Second World War were no more ready
and often had fewer natural resources.
The
PT’s claim to independence has got the pro-colonial right wing especially
worried. This explains in part the increased repression of the USTKE unionists.
Police and judicial harassment of union leaders, early morning searches and
interrogations, attacks on picket lines, and sentences by the colonial justice
system of several months in prison and tens of thousands of euros in fines are
all signs that the colonial state is taking a tougher line.
Self-determination
Unfortunately
in this context the parties of the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front (Front
de la libération nationale kanak et socialiste: FLNKS[8])
have not shown any solidarity at all, preferring to continue to soak up the
spoils of their deal with the state. The basic principles of the independence
struggle, reaffirmed by the PT, have long since been packed away by the FLNKS;
despite its status at the UN as the legitimate representative of the Kanak
peoples’ right to independence. The appearance of the PT on the electoral scene
has pushed the Union calédonienne (Caledonian
Union, UC) and the Parti de liberation
kanak (Palika-Kanak Liberation Party), the main components of the FLNKS, to
add a dash of pro-independence talk to their rhetoric, but without questioning
the essentials of a society founded on such an inequitable sharing of wealth.
For
the PT challenging the social and economic system that continues to make the
very rich even richer while driving the poor into further poverty, especially
the indigenous Kanak people, is the basis for a viable independent country. The
challenge is not one of cutting themselves off from the world or throwing non-Kanaks
into the sea, it is about really allowing the people to decide how they want to
live, on what economic basis and in what framework of international relations.
The PT congress decided to keep Kanaky as the name of an independent country
and that the flag should still be the one popularised by the FLNKS since 1984.
The
PT congress also adopted several motions detailing the program that it will
campaign on for the upcoming elections, including: the protection of local jobs
and control over immigration (the number of settlers has increased by 20% in
the last ten years); to reopen a discussion on housing policy (significant
shanty towns have grown up around Noumea); the development of regions where
there is no nickel; the future of the fishing industry and fish farming.
In
[Rouge is the newspaper of the
Revolutionary Communist League (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire: LCR) in
[1] Kanak and Exploited
Workers Union (Union syndicale des travailleurs kanaks et des exploités: U
[2] Revolutionary Communist
League (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire: LCR),
[3]
[4] In 1878 Chief Attaï led
armed resistance in a revolt that ended with the colonial forces massacring 5%
of the Kanak population.
[5] The administrative system
applying to the indigenous populations of French colonies before 1945.
[6] Nickel is the country’s
largest natural resource (the second largest reserves in the world), which is
used in the production of stainless steel.
[7] In the first project
effluent from the refinery, which inevitable contains heavy metals, recorded
levels of manganese 100 times greater than usual.
[8] Kanak Socialist National
Liberation Front (Front de la libération nationale kanak et socialiste: FLNKS), founded in 1984
and formerly uniting all the pro-independence parties.