An eye on the Pacific series: Independence for Kanaks

Tu Tangata, Issue 24, 1 June 1985, Page 2

An eye on the Pacific series: Independence for Kanaks

Eloi Machoro

last thoughts of Kanak martyr.

Eloi Machoro

Vernon Wright

As Tu Tanga went to press, President Mitteruhd oi France announced that a>refcrenelu oh New Caledonian independence would be held in 1007. It was also announced that France intended to develop New Caledonia (Kanaky to the tangata wheniia) as a strategic nuclear capable defence Base. - ** „"' Pacific # neighbours have, voiced their concern at these

Eloi Machoro, the charismatic Kanak freedom fighter, shot dead by police in January, was propelled by urgency. For 30 years or more he had watched as talks on Kanak self-determination see-sawed between Paris and Noumea. The gains that had at first seemed possible under Mitterand’s socialist administration in Paris, stayed tantalisingly out of reach. Machoro was convinced that the socialist would not be re-elected in 1986 a view shared by nearly everyone in New Caledonia and he said “As soon as Chirac comes back into power in ’B6 we are done for.”

Machoro became the gladiator for the FLNKS (the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front) which has declared itself the Provisional Government of Kanaky. If the French settlers in New Caledonia wanted a scapegoat for the increasing violence in New Caledonia, they turned to Machoro: if the conservative French press wanted a media bogey, they turned to Machoro. And if the politicians in neighbouring Australia and New Zealand made their usual noises about the need for moderation and talking instead of confrontation, their fingers were pointed accusingly for them in the direction of Machoro.

It is the enforced alienation of the Kanaks from their land which is at the centre of their struggle with France, and it was to this problem rather than to the war of words, that Machoro addressed himself. His weapons ranged from persuasion to intimidation to harassment. He would approach a nonKanak farmer and attempt to persuade him to turn in his farm to the land reform office which, under recent land reform legislation, would compensate the farmer and turn the land over to the Kanaks. (Even so, the ownership would still not revert to the Kanaks; they merely held it for the French state, no doubt pending further land reform legislation.) If the farmer agreed, and also wanted to stay in the area, then he and the Kanak revolutionaries could continue to work the land amicably, either together or separately. And in fact this shared system is in progress between the Kanaks and a number of settler-farmers. However, most of the farmers, given their accustomed attitude of racial patronisation and fierce protectionist attitude to the land they had either bought or inherited, tended to answer with their rifles. When they did, Machoro and his men would then begin a campaign of harassment and intimidation against them. Farm buildings might be damaged or burned down, vehicles confiscated or wrecked, stock run off or killed. Human casualties were remarkably few.

The success of Machoro’s guerrillatype technique was such that he quickly became, for the settlers, the most hated man in New Caledonia, almost a symbol of some profound, black evil. Ironically, his only serious opponent in the contest for most-hated-man was President Mitterand, a man who had even dared to mention the possibility of independence for the Kanaks.

The act which more than any other turned Machoro into a gladiator, was the assassination of Pierre Declercq in 1981. Declercq is now generally regarded as the first white martyr of the independence cause. Machoro, who was to follow Declercq into martyrdom, inherited Declercq’s position as secretary-general of the moderate Union Caledon ienne. Following Declercq’s murder, Machoro declared in a speech in his hometown of Canala: “The reconquest of New Caledonia will begin here. When we have cleaned up this area we will move on to Thio, La Foa and Boulapari. Each tribe must draw up a list of those (caldoche and colon) they want to leave. This is going to be a trial of strength. Everyone should know that we are prepared to use guns if necessary.”

He was remarkably successful. The Canala area was “liberated” and Machoro and his men moved on Thio, immensely important because of its role as centre of the nickel-mining industry, the only substantial foreign exchangeearning industry that New Caledonia has. Machoro and his Kanak insurgents, striking a delicate balance in their harassments so as not to justify a massive French response that could wipe them out, quietly, in a series of almost pinprick harassments, all but cleared the countryside around Thio of reactionary settlers.

Demands for action against the ragged army were growing, however, and it was at La Foa, the next goal in Machoro’s liberation plan, that Machoro was shot dead by a French gendarme.*

At the time Machoro died, settlers in Noumea were rioting in protest at apparent French inaction following the shooting of a 17-year-old European youth on the same farm at La Foa where Machoro was also to be shot. When Machoro’s death was announced the rioters started cheering and clapping.

It would be hard to find a better example of the vicious irrationality of race conflict. What was Machoro, after all? Part of the answer is that he was a primary school teacher, a slightly-built, somewhat nervous actor in a drama over which neither he nor anyone else appears to have much control. He had consulted Canberra and Wellington many times to seek money and help, and had had to return home with sympathy and very little else. His exasperation drove him to Libya and that produced an outcry from the same people who he had approached first and who had turned down his requests for assistance. A few days before he died he said: “It’s up to New Zealand, Australia and the other countries around New Caledonia to ensure that communists or Libyans don’t come into New Caledonia. It’s up to them. If they help us, if they give us the assistance we ask

for, we’ve no reason to go looking for aid elsewhere. We’re certainly trying to make them understand. But they don’t want to understand.”

In turning to the sword, Machoro knew he would die by it, and he remarked on that too. He presented his knowledge with bravado, possibly to obscure the nervousness he felt. His main concession to nervousness was a lop-sided grin, the result, so local legend has it, of a memorable brawl with his wife which resulted in an incisor tooth being knocked out. But the story is probably apocryphal since no one can now say with certainty whether it was he or his wife who lost the tooth. All that remains is his assault conviction and his nickname of “Captain Incisor”.

Machoro might have surprised his enemies, if they had listened to him. He carried no radical banners, except the claim for freedom. His personal philosophy, as he explained it, differed little from that of all the major Kanak leaders who proclaim fully aware of the apparent contradiction a specifically Kanak independence as a necessary first step towards a genuinely free, multi-racial society.

Inevitably, the charges of communism were made. The mileau of the international socialist was not that of Machoro, however. “There are amongst us some who've gone to school in the M etropole, and they are able to differentiate between communism and international socialism. All that. But most of us haven't gone further than the New Caledonia primary schools, and

when we talk of socialism it’s because the Kanak community lifestyle is close to socialism. We know what capitalism is, and we are reacting against that, seeking the socialism of Kanak community life. People want the world to believe that we’re Marxist and that we’ve got behind us the USSR or some other country that wants to destabilise the capitalist system. That’s not us.”

In a lengthy interview shortly before his death Machoro made plain his concerns: “Earlier we spoke only about the question of land. But the whole situation here is colonial. We’re talking about schooling, the economy, work, running the country and even the demographics, even they are colonial. At present we make up only two-fifths of the population. It’s not us who wanted that: the government imposed on us intentional immigration to make us a minority. Now they say to us that there is a majority of people who don’t want the country to be independent, and we have to listen to them. We refuse to accept that.

“In the economy the Kankas are only consumers, they’re not producers. And they’re not producers not because they don’t want to be, but because they haven’t got the land to produce on. It’s been taken from them. But even if they could produce they haven’t got a market, because the market is controlled by Paris, by the unions, by organisations that are controlled by Europeans and non-Kanaks. Right?

“Then, to launch out into the economy you must have the means. But (Kanaks) can’t launch themselves into the economy by mortgaging their land

to get loans, because their land has been taken from them. The subsidy system here helps the non-Kanak group, especially the colons, and also the people who own the businesses and trade in the territory....

“In education, the Kanaks are disadvantaged relative to non-Kanaks, and above all relative to Europeans, because schooling is in French and the Kanaks have another language in which they live, into which they are born and in which they will then die.

“And there’s no adaptation of teaching to the current situation, so that few Kanaks have a diploma, and to get a job here in the European situation you must show a diploma. Now the people who come from the MetropoJe to here, they arrive with their pockets full of diplomas. They come here and two or three days' later they’ve got a job in Noumea or elsehere whilst we’re unemployed from beginning to end.”

There’s a hoary story that does the rounds among settler groups in Noumea, a story which is trotted out for disbelieving visitors when they express scepticism about the barbaric nature of Kanak resistance to a well-meaning and benign French colonial presence. It has to do with the senseless murder of

two gendarmes who were sent to protect a forester who was doing much for the people and the country by way of individual, entrepreneurial development. Machoro’s version of the story puts it in a different perspective, a perspective which explains as well as anything Machoro’s frustration and anger:

“The two gendarmes went into the tribe of Kwindou-wi-kwan to enforce the law, the law which protects the colonial situation against the interests of the Kanak people. Right? It’s simple. The forester was working in the mountains and in so doing he was polluting the river. There were two tribes living beside that river. Now the river was used for food and for cleaning. It had shrimps in it too, and the shrimps bought in good money. Those people had no other source of income because their land was very steep and they couldn’t work it. So they fish and sell the shrimps. Right? The forester came, he took out the wood, he polluted the land, he polluted the river. That lasted for perhaps five years. The people protested, asked the administration to intervene. Nothing.

“After five years the forester bought in more people from elsewhere, mostly Europeans, to work the forest, to cut the wood on land that once belonged to

the Kanaks but was taken from them. At Lumbua he was bringing out that wood under the noses of people who knew the value of it. The strangers took the wood out then returned through the tribe in the evening. Now they were fed up with that. They protested again. Nothing. They laid complaints with the sanitary services and with the administration regarding pollution of the river. Nothing.

“So they decided to block the machinery of the forester. So they blocked it and then had talks with the administration who said ‘yes, we're listening'. Nothing. Then early one morning they sent in the gardes mobile to clear the barricades and free the machinery for the forester. When the tribe woke up and went out the gardes mobile threw teargas grenades amongst the tribe. So there was confusion, uncertainty, and one of the people took up a rifle and fired it. Two dead.

“The problem was that the forces of order intervened to protect the possessions and the free movement of this forestry exploiter who was polluting the river. The children, due to swimming in the river, began to get covered in spots. The tea was red in the morning the water was red. That lasted for

five or six years. After the two men died the police gathered up and did over about 10 young tribespeople. But the forester got out with his machinery, with the help of the forces of order and at the present time that forester is taking out wood in the south, always under the same conditions.”

Elio Machoro had become fatalistic. He regarded his reputation in the local and foreign press as an ogre with a kind of grim amusement. What they said didn't surprise him he had only to look, he said, at the ownership of the media and the interests they represented. It was frustrating for him, however, that the messages weren't reaching South Pacific neighbours: “What is certain and everyone needs to be clear about it we want Kanak independence and we're going to have it. If it's with the understanding and support of New Zealand, Australia and the other countries of the Pacific, so much the better for everyone. If they don't want to help us well, we'll have it anyway.”

* Note: The official version of the shooting of Eloi Machoro differs considerably from the events as pieced together by officials of the Provisional Government of Kanaky. The two versions can be found in the March edition of “Overview", the journal of Corso.