France has approved a pacific mission to investigate the unrest in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia.
Veronique Roger-Lacan, the French Ambassador to the Pacific, told radio station RNZ Pacific that a high-level mission will lead work to find facts about the crisis that began in May.
Earlier this month Roger-Lacan wrote on X that she was on her way to Fiji’s capital Suva for the Pacific Islands Forum Foreign Ministers meeting, “with some news” from French President Emmanuel Macron to the “Troika,” The Troika is a regional political consultative mechanism that includes the Prime Minister of Fiji Sitiveni Rabuka, Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown, and Prime Minister of Tonga Siaosi Sovaleni. Roger-Lacan told RNZ that France “welcomes” a Troika mission in New Caledonia, following a request made in a letter to Macron last month by the Pacific leaders.
Riots in New Caledonia have killed 10 people since May, with the territory under a curfew until August 19 as the authorities battled for control.
The unrest was sparked by a bill in mid-May which proposed that electoral rules are reviewed to give voting rights to French nationals. The indigenous Kanak people say they would become an electoral minority in their own homeland if the bill was adopted, giving French nationals resident on the island for 10 years eligiblity to vote in local elections. Many Kanaks worry their political power would be diluted if the reform were to take place, fearing any future independence referendum would be harder to achieve given about 40,000 French nationals will be newly eligible to vote, in a total population of 300,000.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced the suspension of the electoral reform plan in New Caledonia on June 12th this year, days after announcing snap polls in France.
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