French Polynesia’s historic resolution at the United Nations was
clinched by years of campaigning and back-room diplomacy by this French
dependency, reports Nic Maclellan
IN A SENSE, Oscar Manutahi
Temaru lost the battle but won the war. Not long before he ended his
term as president of French Polynesia this month, he achieved his
long-held goal of increasing international support for the Maohi
people’s right to self-determination. Temaru has been campaigning for
independence from France since the 1970s.
In a historic decision,
the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on 17 May to
reinscribe French Polynesia on the UN list of non-self-governing
territories. The resolution, sponsored by Solomon Islands, Nauru and
Tuvalu with support from Vanuatu, Samoa and Timor-Leste, was adopted by
the 193-member UN General Assembly without a vote. It ends a
sixty-five-year period during which French Polynesia has been absent
from the list of countries recognised as colonial possessions.
The
resolution asks the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation to debate
the issue of French Polynesia at its next session and report back to the
General Assembly. It also calls on the French government “as the
Administering Power concerned, to intensify its dialogue with French
Polynesia in order to facilitate rapid progress towards a fair and
effective self-determination process, under which the terms and
timelines for an act of self-determination will be agreed.”
The
right to self-determination does not necessarily equate to political
independence. Under UN decolonisation principles, a referendum of the
“concerned population” can consider a range of options, including
integration with the colonial power, greater autonomy, free association,
or full independence and sovereignty.
There’s a long way to go
before the people of French Polynesia decide on a new political status.
Temaru’s opposite number, the incoming president Gaston Flosse,
denounced the “tyranny” of the UN decision. A long-time opponent of
independence, Flosse claims a popular mandate for his loyalty to France.
But
even as a symbolic measure, the UN resolution sparked fireworks and
fury in Paris. After writing to all member states in an unsuccessful bid
to delay or scuttle the resolution, France’s UN ambassador boycotted
the General Assembly session. “This resolution is a flagrant
interference,” said the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “with a
complete absence of respect for the democratic choice of French
Polynesians and a hijacking of the decolonisation principles established
by the United Nations.” The French nationalist party, the National
Front, denounced the United Nations, “recalling with great force that
the future of the French territories can only be seen within the bosom
of the French Republic.”
Since the end of nuclear testing in 1996,
France has sought to improve relations with members of the Pacific
Islands Forum. But the fierce reaction to the UN resolution suggests
that Paris is not planning to relinquish its role as a colonial power in
the region any time soon. And the fact that the UN resolution was
sponsored by French Polynesia’s island neighbours shows that the debate
about colonialism in the region isn’t going to go away.
FRANCE
first colonised part of Polynesia as the Etablissements Français de
l’Océanie in the mid nineteenth century. By the end of that century, the
five eastern-Pacific archipelagos we now call French Polynesia had
fallen under French control. Since then, their status has evolved from
protectorate to colony, then from “overseas territory” to “overseas
country” to today’s “overseas collectivity” of France, each shift in
terminology reflecting changes in colonial policy in Paris.
For
fifty years after the founding of the United Nations, Paris refused to
accept international monitoring of decolonisation in the Pacific,
arguing that the Pacific territories enjoyed self-government within the
French Republic. The newly created United Nations established a list of
non-self-governing territories in 1946, calling on administering powers
to promote economic, social and ultimately political development in
their colonies. But from 1947, France refused to transmit information on
its overseas territories to the General Assembly, as required under
Article 73 of the UN Charter. A revised UN list of territories in 1963
ignored France’s Pacific dependencies, apart from the joint Anglo-French
condominium of the New Hebrides.
After the end of nuclear testing
at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in 1996, France began to change its
policy in the Pacific region. The signing of the 1998 Noumea Accord – an
agreement between the French state and supporters and opponents of
independence in New Caledonia – acknowledged the need for decolonisation
and improved regional relations. President Jacques Chirac began the
devolution of more powers to France’s overseas territories in 2003. New
Caledonia and French Polynesia both gained observer status at the
Pacific Islands Forum (which links Australia, New Zealand and fourteen
independent island nations), and upgraded to associate membership in
2006.
These changes were too little, too late, for the FLNKS
independence coalition in New Caledonia and the pro-independence party
Tavini Huiraatira in French Polynesia. These nationalist movements have
long sought international support in their quest for a new political
status, and the United Nations is seen as a crucial forum.
The
latest UN resolution means that French Polynesia joins sixteen other
territories on the UN list of non-self-governing territories, including
five in the Pacific region: New Caledonia (under French administration);
Tokelau (New Zealand); Pitcairn (United Kingdom); Guam and American
Samoa (both United States).
New Caledonia was only reinscribed on
the UN list through a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1986,
after campaigning by members of the Pacific Islands Forum. The
resolution came at the height of armed conflict during 1984–88 between
the French armed forces and supporters and opponents of independence.
Australia and New Zealand joined their island neighbours to support New
Caledonia’s reinscription, fearful of the radicalisation of the Kanak
independence movement and perceived Soviet advances in the region.
In
French Polynesia, the independence movement has sought the same sort of
international recognition for decades. As leader of the Polynesian
Liberation Front, Temaru first lobbied at the United Nations in 1978. He
patiently sought support from Pacific governments throughout the 1980s
and 1990s, gaining solidarity from the Pacific Conference of Churches
and the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, but little action
came from neighbouring Polynesian nations.
In contrast, the
independence movement in New Caledonia gained extensive support from the
Melanesian Spearhead Group, which links the FLNKS and the governments
of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
Since
reinscription in 1986, New Caledonia has been scrutinised by the UN
Special Committee on Decolonisation every year. The governments of
France and New Caledonia even invited the UN committee to hold its
regional seminar in Noumea in 2010. Maohi nationalists are angry that
the rights extended to New Caledonia under the 1998 Noumea Accord do not
extend to other French dependencies in the region. Symbolically, Oscar
Temaru was refused entry to the UN’s 2010 decolonisation seminar in New
Caledonia’s capital.
GASTON FLOSSE first served as president of
French Polynesia in 1984–87 and was re-elected in 1991. The long rule of
this fierce opponent of independence came to an end in 2004 after
Temaru’s Tavini Huiraatira party united with other groups in the Union
for Democracy coalition, or UPLD, and defeated him in closely fought
elections for the French Polynesian Assembly. For the first time, French
Polynesia had a president who supported independence from France.
Since
then, local opinion has shifted slowly but significantly, even as
control of the government has swung back and forth between supporters
and opponents of independence. (Unstable political coalitions and
Paris’s unceasing opposition to Temaru’s agenda have combined to bring
about eleven changes of leadership since 2004.)
In 2011, the
French Polynesian Assembly in the capital, Papeete, narrowly voted for
the first time to support Temaru’s call for UN reinscription. A legal
challenge to the Assembly vote failed at the Administrative Tribunal of
Papeete in early 2012.
The UPLD also looked to Paris as France
moved towards presidential elections in May 2012. After years of
conservative rule under presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy,
the Tavini Huiraatira party had aligned itself with the French Socialist
Party. Before his 2012 election as president, François Hollande signed a
cooperation agreement with Tavini in his role as Secretary General of
the Socialist Party, formally recognising the right to
self-determination for the Maohi people.
The UPLD coalition
decided to soft-pedal their reinscription push at the United Nations
during 2012 in order to avoid embarrassing Hollande in the midst of the
presidential elections. Once elected, however, Hollande began to back
away from the principles set out in the inter-party accord.
With
Australia and France signing a Joint Statement of Strategic Partnership
in January 2012, Canberra too has been less than enthusiastic about
Temaru’s reinscription initiative. When I interviewed him last year,
Australia’s then parliamentary secretary for Pacific Island affairs,
Richard Marles, described France as a long-term stable democratic
partner in the Pacific and reaffirmed Australian opposition to
re-inscription. “We absolutely take our lead from France on this,” he
said.
Meeting in Rarotonga in August 2012, Pacific Islands Forum
leaders reiterated their support for the principle of self-determination
but didn’t endorse the call for re-inscription. Instead, the Forum
communique welcomed “the election of a new French government that opened
fresh opportunities for a positive dialogue between French Polynesia
and France on how best to realise French Polynesia’s right to
self-determination.”
A month after the Forum, without the
restraining influence of Canberra and Wellington, the leaders of Samoa,
Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu lined up at the UN General Assembly,
explicitly calling for action on decolonisation. Vanuatu’s then prime
minister, Sato Kilman, called on “the independent and free nations of
the world to complete the story of decolonisation and close this
chapter.” He urged the United Nations “not to reject the demands for
French Polynesia’s right to self-determination and progress.”
In
the year Samoa celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence from
New Zealand, prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi told the
General Assembly, “In the case of French Polynesia, we encourage the
metropolitan power and the territory’s leadership together with the
support of the United Nations to find an amicable way to exercise the
right of the people of the territory to determine their future.”
The
same month, with Fiji’s foreign minister Ratu Inoke Kubuabola in
attendance, the Sixteenth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, in Tehran,
issued a new policy on decolonisation. According to its communique,
“The Heads of State or Government affirmed the inalienable right of the
people of French Polynesia–Maohi Nui to self-determination in accordance
with Chapter XI of the Charter of the United Nations and the UN General
Assembly resolution 1514 (XV).”
Opinion was also shifting at
home. In August 2012, the Eglise Protestante Maohi, the Protestant
church that is the largest denomination in French Polynesia, voted for
the first time to support Temaru’s call for re-inscription. “The
reinscription of Maohi Nui on this list constitutes one way to protect
the people from decisions and initiatives of the French State that are
contrary to their interests,” said the church executive. “This
reinscription would serve, through the recognition of the rights of the
Maohi people, as an efficient means of protecting their heritage and
allowing them to remind France that she must clean our country of all
the nuclear waste that has been left here.”
The following month,
the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches added its voice,
calling on “France, the United Nations, and the international community
to support the reinscription of French Polynesia on the UN list of
countries to be decolonised, in accordance with the example of New
Caledonia.”
WITH increasing regional support, the formal bid for
reinscription was relaunched in early 2013, with extensive lobbying in
New York by Oscar Temaru and France’s senator for French Polynesia,
Richard Ariihau Tuheiava.
In January, Temaru addressed a meeting
of the Co-ordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement in New York,
seeking their support. “This is yet another case of David against
Goliath, and the reason why we want our country back on the UN’s list of
non-self-governing territories,” he said. “Without the UN as a referee
between France and us, this is once again an unfair and uphill battle.
Don’t get mistaken – this is not a request from us to get independence
without our people’s vote. What we seek is a fair evolution of our
relations with France, with the oversight of the UN.”
In February,
the UN ambassadors for Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Nauru formally
lodged a draft resolution at the General Assembly. But in spite of
pre-election pledges by President Hollande, French diplomats launched a
sharp attack on the initiative. The assault was led by France’s UN
ambassador Gérard Araud, a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale
d’Administration who had represented France as a diplomat in Washington,
NATO and Tel Aviv. Araud lobbied hard to have the resolution delayed in
the hope that it would lapse after the May 2013 elections in Papeete.
In
the interests of compromise, the sponsoring states issued a revised
version of the resolution on 1 March, but France sought for weeks to
keep the resolution out of the General Assembly. Although colonial
powers including the United States and Britain agreed to back France,
other UN member states were astounded by the vigour with which France
pressed its case. Denouncing the “violence and condescension” of Araud’s
interventions, Temaru wrote to the French president on 27 March,
calling on him to bring the ambassador to heel.
“Without wanting
to embarrass you with the procedural details or the reasons invoked to
refuse us a date,” Temaru wrote, “I would draw to your attention the
growing frustration and incomprehension over France’s position, which we
have been informed of by several UN member states. For the majority of
these states, the right to self-determination is a sacred principle,
inscribed in the UN Charter… The French pressure towards the President
of the General Assembly is similarly perceived as the denial of the
democracy that is at the heart of the General Assembly… If some of your
confreres in the P5 [permanent members of the Security Council] seem to
be accepting the French action on our dossier, others have shared their
astonishment with us.”
French Polynesia’s local elections on 5 May
saw the defeat of President Temaru’s UPLD coalition, with voters angry
over the government’s management of French Polynesia’s post-GFC fiscal
crisis, declining tourism and growing unemployment. The return of Gaston
Flosse, an ageing politician currently appealing a series of
convictions for corruption and abuse of office, highlights the political
stasis in Papeete, and the lack of vision for new post-nuclear economic
options.
After his election, Flosse immediately wrote to the
president of the General Assembly, Vuk Jeremic of Serbia, in an
unsuccessful attempt to delay action on the resolution. France’s
ambassador boycotted the session on 17 May and Britain, the United
States, Germany and the Netherlands all disassociated themselves from
the consensus vote. Fearful of a growing regional debate about West
Papua, Indonesia’s representative stressed that the “adoption was solely
based on a specific historical context and should not be misinterpreted
as precedence by other territories whose cases were pending with the
Decolonisation Committee.”
IN THE aftermath of the UN resolution,
Gaston Flosse is now seeking to pre-empt a debate about options and
timetables for self-determination by calling for an immediate referendum
on independence. Buoyed by his success in the Assembly elections,
Flosse is hoping that a quick vote would overwhelm the UPLD, which must
rally a population fearful that France would abandon them, politically
and financially, after independence.
For Temaru and the UPLD, any
referendum must be based on UN practice and principles, and the thorny
question of voting rights must be resolved. Flosse has argued that all
French nationals resident in the territory have the right to vote in a
self-determination referendum. Temaru, echoing the process established
by the Noumea Accord in New Caledonia, has argued for a restricted
electorate limited to indigenous Maohi and long-term residents. Any vote
should be preceded, he says, by a lengthy transition, with information
in local languages about all options and a timetable for the transfer of
authority.
In spite of French anger over the UN resolution, the
decolonisation agenda has some way to go. New Caledonia has been on the
UN list since 1986 and increased UN scrutiny does little to change the
reality on the ground. (Under the Noumea Accord, after elections in 2014
New Caledonia will move towards a decision on its political status,
with a possible referendum before 2019.) With limited staff and
finances, the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation lacks the capacity
to fully support the remaining territories.
Even so,
self-determination will remain on the region’s agenda over the coming
decade. The Melanesian Spearhead Group meets in June in New Caledonia,
with FLNKS leader Victor Tutugoro taking over as chair of the
sub-regional body at a crucial time. The UN resolution has buoyed the
Kanak independence movement, with the FLNKS Political Bureau warmly
welcoming the decision. As Maohi nationalists celebrate their victory,
the future of France in the South Pacific is yet to be decided.
*Story courtesy of Inside Story -
