Riots Rock France's New Caledonia Over Voting Reform

Noumea, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 15th May, 2024) France's prime minister on Tuesday urged calm in New Caledonia after the French Pacific archipelago was rocked by a night of rioting against a controversial voting reform that has angered pro-independence forces.

Shots were fired at security forces, vehicles torched and shops looted in the rioting -- the worst such violence in New Caledonia since deadly unrest in the 1980s. More than 80 people were arrested.

New Caledonia, which lies between Australia and Fiji, is one of several French territories spanning the globe from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to the Pacific that remain part of France in the post-colonial era.

It already has special status within France unlike other overseas territories. And while it has on three occasions rejected independence in referendums, independence retains support particularly among the indigenous Kanak people.

Authorities announced a night-time curfew Tuesday and a ban on public gatherings, while the main airport was closed and the government dispatched security reinforcements from mainland France.

"Violence is never a solution," Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told reporters during a trip to eastern France.

He said the government's "priority... is to re-establish order, calm and serenity" in New Caledonia.

He later told parliament: "What matters is defusing tensions. What matters is dialogue. What matters is the construction of a common, political, global solution."

But even with a curfew in place there were acts of vandalism overnight, with the store of a major sports brand ransacked.

A prison rebellion involving some 50 detainees in the Camop-Est facility subsided after security forces regained control, local officials said.

Videos posted on social media earlier showed inmates wearing hoods and wielding metal bars moving through prison corridors.

- 'Determination of our young' -

New Zealand said Tuesday that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had cancelled his visit to New Caledonia due to the unrest.

Schools and colleges are closed until further notice

One business group said around 30 shops, factories and other sites in and around capital Noumea had been set ablaze, while an AFP journalist saw burned-out cars and smoking remains of tyres and wooden pallets littering the streets.

From late Monday night, groups of young masked or hooded demonstrators took over several roundabouts and confronted police, who responded with non-lethal rounds.

A total of 82 people were arrested, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said, while Noumea authorities reported 51 police officers injured.

Firefighters said they had received around 1,500 calls overnight and responded to 200 blazes.

Pro-independence party leader Daniel Goa asked the youths to "go home", and condemned looting and abuses.

But he added: "The unrest of the last 24 hours reveals the determination of our young people to no longer let France take control of them."

But the main figure of the non-independence camp, the former minister Sonia Backes, denounced what she described as anti-white racism of demonstrators who burned down the house of her father, a man in his 70s who was exfiltrated by the security forces.

"If he was not attacked because he was my father, he was at least attacked because he was white," she told BFMTV.

- Frozen voter lists -

The unrest erupted Monday as protesters demonstrated against a constitutional reform being debated in the National Assembly in Paris that aims to expand the electorate in the territory's provincial elections.

France vowed in the Noumea Accord of 1998 to gradually give more political power to the Pacific island territory of nearly 300,000 people.

Under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, all rejecting independence.

The Noumea Accord has also meant that New Caledonia's voter lists have not been updated since 1998 -- meaning that island residents who have arrived from mainland France or elsewhere anytime in the past 25 years do not have the right to take part in provincial polls.

The French government has branded the exclusion of one out of five people from voting as "absurd", while separatists fear that expanding voter lists would benefit pro-France politicians and reduce the weight of the Kanaks.

But the lower house's debate on the reform -- the last hurdle before a constitutional convention to set it in stone -- went ahead Tuesday with the government refusing to heed pressure from the left to pull the bill.

A vote was also expected on the legislation.

President Emmanuel Macron has been seeking to reassert his country's importance in the Pacific region, where China and the United States are vying for influence but France has a strategic footprint through its territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

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