The vast French colonial empire of past days has gone. The anti-colonial struggles after World War II saw a series of losses.
In May 2024, Vietnam celebrated the 70th Anniversary of victory of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, that not only sounded the death knell of French colonial rule in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but also inspired national liberation movements throughout the world.
In time, France’s colonies in Africa fell Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea (now Guinea), Côte d’Ivoire, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Dahomey (now Benin), and Niger.
Today France clutches its remnant territories to project its power far beyond Europe. Reunion in the Indian Ocean, Guadeloupe. Martinique and French Guiana provide a foothold in the Caribbean alongside British and Dutch possessions. Off the Atlantic coast of Canada there are small islands of St Pierre and Miqueleon.
In the Pacific, Tahiti and Kanaky/ New Caledonia are jewels. The former was the site of 180 French nuclear tests up until 1995. Both possessions give France a military presence in the Pacific. The nickel mines in Kanaky are the third largest in the world.
French imperialist interests have long struggle to keep hold of this jewel by flooding Kanaky with French citizens to swamp the native population who live in a marginalised poverty, surrounded by foreign owned resorts, mines and farms.
Armed struggle organised by the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste, or FLNKS) broke out in 1980. The FLNKS is an alliance of parties in Kanaky.
November 1984, roadblocks were set up, police station were occupied in the commune of Thio, and five GIGN (elite police corps of rapid intervention) helicopters were disarmed. In December, European homes were looted and set on fire. The French government sent in the army and gendarmerie, banned all demonstrations and placed the tribes under close surveillance.
After a brief period of calm, tensions flared again between the colonists and the independence fighters.
In January 1985, the GIGN executed Kanak independence leader, Eloi Machoro, and a state of emergency and curfew were introduced.
To calm things down, the French government granted New Caledonia greater autonomy and introduced a number of democratic reforms.
And now in 2024, unrest and rioting broke out after the Macron government pushed electoral reforms that would swamp the up-coming referendum with thousands of new settler voters in order to forestall independence from France.
Kanaky is integral to French president Emmanuel Macron’s Indo-Pacific Strategy and is another manifestation of vestigal imperialism struggling to hold on. French troops and police will not quench the Kanak peoples desire for independence and freedom
