As protests erupt across New Caledonia, a leading Loyalist politician claims indigenous Kanak and the West are like ‘oil and water’
Sonia Backès, the leading conservative anti-independence politician of her generation in New Caledonia, believes that — like “oil and water” — Kanak cannot mix with non-Kanak. The two groups have “insurmountable antagonisms,” the Southern Province president argued during a major speech on 14 July.
Backès heads a coalition of conservative parties opposed to independence in New Caledonia. The timing of her comments — on Bastille Day, France’s national holiday — was no accident. Her defiant rhetoric is a striking example of the colonial attitudes that underlie what are officially known as “French Republican values.”
“Two civilisations co-exist in New Caledonia,” Backès told her online audience. “Through their meeting, one day they will perhaps create a third, a long-awaited intermarriage of French and Melanesian cultures. But today, that is not the case.”
For Backès, the island nation’s 170 years of colonial history hasn’t yet bridged the gap. “Whether it is their way of living in society, the place given to women for example. Whether it is still their political systems, feudal for some and democratic for others. Or whether it is their relationship to the economy, communitarian for some and capitalist for others.”
“For a New Caledonian people to emerge one day,” she continued, “time, space and respect are needed. The Nouméa Accord sought to impose a merger or assimilation. But it has generated an implosion.”
Her intransigent words highlight the difficulty of restarting dialogue between supporters and opponents of independence after more than two months of clashes and rioting in the French Pacific dependency. Since 13 May, New Caledonia has been wracked by conflict, as young Kanak protestors clash with thousands of French police, riot squads and anti-terrorism officers, who are backed by armoured cars and logistic support from French military forces.
However, Backès’ binary view, reflecting her many years of anti-independence activity, misses something important: New Caledonia’s strengths and resilience, which transcend the community tensions caused by French colonial policy.
Born in the capital Nouméa in May 1976, Backès came from a family with Portuguese heritage. As an eighteen-year-old she joined the main anti-independence party, Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la République, or RPCR. Four years later, the May 1998 signing of the Nouméa Accord transformed the islands, opening a new political framework that has governed New Caledonia for more than twenty-five years. As Kanak independence leaders joined the government, pressing for change, Jacques Lafleur’s hegemonic anti-independence party began to fracture and split.
Breakaway conservative parties were forged out of the RPCR ruins over the next decade, and Backès joined other dissidents to jump from one new formation to another. In support of the Gaullist politician Gaël Yanno, Backès joined the Mouvement Populaire Calédonien, or MPC, before moving to Les Républicains de Nouvelle-Calédonie from 2015–17. Then, in late 2017, she founded yet another breakaway, Les Républicains Calédoniens, or LRC. Today, she leads the conservative coalition Les Loyalistes, which includes LRC, MPC and Nicolas Metzdorf’s Générations NC.
These political musical chairs highlight a fundamental problem for supporters of the French Republic in the South Pacific. The Loyalists know what they don’t want — an independent Kanaky New Caledonia — but remain divided about how to respond to the ongoing call for political sovereignty from the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, FLNKS, and other independence forces.
In 2019, Backès won the presidency of New Caledonia’s Southern Province, the largest of three provincial administrations, which includes the capital Nouméa and a majority non-Kanak population. The post served as a springboard for further promotions: in 2022, French president Emmanuel Macron chose her to serve as a junior minister in the French government in Paris. Her appointment as secretary of state for citizenship in Paris angered even her supporters back in Nouméa, who said she should concentrate on her day job as president of the Southern Province.
Backès continued to over-reach, running for the French Senate in September 2023 on top of her two existing jobs. Soundly beaten by Kanak politician Robert Xowie in an unprecedented FLNKS victory, she resigned her ministerial post and returned to Nouméa.
Since riots and clashes broke out in the capital on 13 May this year, Backès has echoed the wartime rhetoric of Charles de Gaulle, issuing defiant tirades against anyone who criticises French democracy. “What happens today in Nouméa will happen tomorrow in mainland France,” she wrote in the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro. She also “humbly calls on all French citizens to join in the resistance alongside the New Caledonians who are fighting to save their island, but also to uphold — twenty thousand kilometres from Paris — a certain idea of France and its values.”
Her Le Figaro article argued that anti-independence French citizens in New Caledonia “are the worthy descendants of the resistance fighters of this southern France which was the first, across the seas, to oppose Nazi obscurantism. Eighty years later, barbarism takes another form in New Caledonia, but resistance remains… We will not forcibly leave our homes. We will not abandon our ideals of justice, peace and democracy. In a word, we will not give in!”
Many supporters of independence bridle at lectures about French justice, democracy and “more than 170 years of life together.” After France annexed the islands of New Caledonia in 1853, indigenous Kanak, their land stolen, were pushed into tribal reserves and required to do forced labour under the native affairs policy known as the Indigénat. For nearly a century, they didn’t have the right to vote— a right also refused for women and indentured labourers from Asia (It was only after the second world war that fear of communism in the tribes opened the way for Kanak to gain voting rights.)
Lectures about democracy from a colonising power only go so far. President Macron’s call to end violence and restore “Republican order” in New Caledonia is blind to the reality that most independence supporters don’t want to live in the French Republic.
Beyond this, Backès’ notion that “feudal” and “communitarian” Kanak won’t engage with Western capitalism is belied by decades of work around New Caledonia’s nickel doctrine, and the integration of industry into global networks of trade and capital accumulation. Since the Noumea Accord, the independence movement has promoted construction of new nickel smelters and expansion of nickel ore exports into Asia – welcomed by Japan, Korea, and the capital roaders of the People’s Republic of China. In contrast, President Macron argues that New Caledonia’s mineral wealth should benefit French capitalism, “a major strategic resource for France and Europe, at a time when we have embarked on a massive reindustrialisation effort.”
Nor does Sonia Backès’s binary division of “oil and water” reflect the lived reality of most New Caledonians. Her arguments are undercut by a range of evidence — demographic, social and political — revealing the resilience of community life across racial and ethnic lines.
Take, for example, the significant amount of intermarriage across ethnic groups in New Caledonia. Using data from the last census, the Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies in New Caledonia reveals the population of 271,407 in 2019 included 41.2 per cent people of Kanak heritage and 24 per cent European — but also another 11.3 per cent who identified as members of “several communities,” and yet another 7.5 per cent who refused to list any race or ethnicity. The fact that nearly one-in-five people self-identified as neither Kanak nor European challenges the notion that people are bound forever by one or other ethnic identity.
Since the Nouméa Accord was signed in May 1998, New Caledonian citizenship — rather than French nationality — has been promoted as a means of forging a “common destiny.” For younger New Caledonians, united by education, sport and social media, the binary division promoted by the Loyalists doesn’t reflect their own bonds across communal lines.
This unity has certainly been challenged by the economic devastation since 13 May and ongoing clashes between police and protestors. The trauma and isolation of some communities is stark — the people of Mont Dore, for example, have been cut off from the capital for weeks. At the same time, numerous examples have emerged of intercommunal solidarity drawing on Christian and customary values.
Early in the crisis, a Wallisian leader in the northern provincial capital of Koohnê described to me how elders — Kanak, Caldoche and islander — were organising night patrols together to calm young people and avoid the clashes seen in Nouméa. In Bourail, Poindimié and other rural towns, Kanak protestors, customary elders and local business owners met, feasted and discussed ways to maintain community harmony.
This social resilience is echoed in significant political shifts, especially amongst the younger generation. It’s no accident that when Kanak cultural leader Emmanuel Tjibaou successfully campaigned for a seat in the French National Assembly this month, his running mate was Amandine Darras, a young environmentalist of Caldoche (European) heritage. Many non-Kanak living in rural areas have lived under FLNKS administration since the late 1980s. Over time — whether joyfully or pragmatically — people have learned to work together to address common concerns, despite cultural differences and memories of the armed conflict the divided New Caledonia in the 1980s.
In contrast, Sonia Backès and other Loyalist leaders rely on an electoral base in the southern suburbs of the capital as well as nearby Southern Province towns like Mont Dore, Paita and Dumbea. Many wealthy New Caledonians and short-term French public servants live a life of privilege, often without much interaction with Kanak culture. This bubble has been popped over the past two months, and many French expats may decide to head back to Europe.
Seeking to maintain New Caledonia within the French Republic, Backès has sought to roll back many of the achievements of the Nouméa Accord: the creation of a collegial, multi-party government; systems to allocate extra funding for rural areas and outlying islands; and better representation from the two Kanak-majority provinces in the national Congress. In her Bastille Day speech, she declared that “an institutional reform aimed at the empowerment of the provinces must now be seriously considered. It must be seen as a necessary evolution towards peaceful and respectful coexistence between communities of values which, although different, share the same territory.”
Backès and other conservative anti-independence politicians have long toyed with the idea of partition under the guise of increasing the powers of New Caledonia’s three provincial administrations. In an echo of apartheid-era Bantustan policy in South Africa, they want to shift more power to the Southern Province and the capital Nouméa in the vain hope that this part of the main island of Grande Terre might somehow remain a French dependency after independence (The Northern and Loyalty Islands provinces both have a majority Kanak population and have been managed by FLNKS administrations since the late 1980s.)
Dividing the country in this way has precedents in the French colonial empire: the partition of the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean, for example, with Mayotte remaining with France as the rest of the country moved to independence. But a partition that would allow the Southern Province to retain ties with France in perpetuity is a clear breach of both the letter and the spirit of the Nouméa Accord, which expressly rejects this possibility after a referendum on self-determination: “The result of the poll will apply comprehensively to New Caledonia as a whole.”
Independence leaders are angered by this push for division. “Today she wants to push independence back to the Loyalty Islands province and the Northern province, there is no question of that,” says Aloisio Sako, president of the Rassemblement Démocratique Océanien, one of the four FLNKS members.
The results of the three referendums on self-determination in 2018–21 do highlight a level of polarisation in New Caledonia, with the vast majority of Kanak seeking independence and most non-Kanak wanting to remain within the French Republic. But Backès’s binary division doesn’t reflect ongoing shifts that undercut this polarisation, especially among islander communities who have migrated from Uvea mo Futuna (Wallis and Futuna), Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia) and Vanuatu (the former UK¬–French condominium of the New Hebrides).
After the nickel boom of the late 1960s, thousands of people were brought from Wallis and Futuna to work in mining and smelting. Reliant on local anti-independence mayors for housing, jobs and training, the Wallisian community historically voted against independence. Young Polynesian toughs served as anti-Kanak militias during the clashes of the mid-1980s.
Fast forward to today, and younger generations of Polynesians are grappling with their place in New Caledonia, which they see as their home. At the last census, the Wallisian and Futunan community made up 8.3 per cent of the population, and “other communities” (Tahitian, ni-Vanuatu, Vietnamese etc) another 7.5 per cent.
New Caledonian-born, the younger generation of Wallisians recognises that there’s little attraction in returning to Wallis. The creation of a new political party, Eveil Océanien (EO — Pacific Awakening), in March 2019 symbolised this transformation. EO now holds three seats in the fifty-four-member Congress, with the balance of power between Loyalist and independence parliamentary groups. Under its leader Milakulo Tukumuli, the party doesn’t support independence — yet — but has used its three votes in Congress to vote with independence parties. This “islander majority” has elected and sustained pro-independence politicians like President pf New Caledonia Louis Mapou and the Congress president, veteran UC politician Roch Wamytan.
EO’s collaboration with the FLNKS is driven by both cultural and economic agendas. In Oceanian culture, islander migrants recognise they are living on indigenous land, and pan-Pacific customary and cultural ties have a vitality that is undervalued by many parts of the European elite. On a more pragmatic level, working-class Wallisians and other islanders have more in common with Kanak than with wealthy French expats. In government, the EO and FLNKS parties have worked together on common concerns around housing, jobs for young people, social welfare, access to public services, and poverty alleviation.
EO president Milakulo Tukumuli has been the target of racist abuse from Loyalist politicians, and has joined Kanak leaders to challenge the condescension of the extreme right. In April, as the French government moved to change electoral rolls for local political institutions — the trigger for the latest conflict — Tukumuli joined FLNKS leaders to condemn anti-independence Loyalist politicians for stoking conflict. “While our country has become a powder keg,” he said, “the Loyalists and the Rassemblement enjoy spitting fire in order to set the country ablaze. To top it all off, they accuse us of being responsible!”
Given the minority status of the Kanak people in their own land, current debates over sovereignty in New Caledonia echo the situation of indigenous peoples across the region, including CHamoru in Guahan (Guam), Kanaka Mā’oli in Hawai’i or Māori in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The creative tension between Oceanic values and French republican perspectives lies at the heart of the current crisis.
Like their counterparts around the Pacific Rim, settler populations in New Caledonia are grappling with the call for indigenous sovereignty. Transforming New Caledonian citizenship into a new nationality remains the challenge, but the Kanak people have deep roots and a willingness to work with those dubbed “the victims of history” — the descendants of the prisoners, indentured labourers and free settlers brought to the islands under colonialism.
Backès’s analogy of oil and water misses the point. As one friend in Nouméa joked: “Sure, oil and vinegar taste very different, but they make great vinaigrette!” Celebrating the call for New Caledonian identity at the heart of the independence project, he presented the very different image of a freshwater river flowing into the sea: it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this publication.