From the perspective of soothing the conscience, this is a mighty thing – for those in Paris, London and Ottawa. It does not save a single life on the ground in Gaza or the West Bank, provide a single meal for a starving family, or rebuild a single destroyed school. But President Emmanuel Macron, and Prime Ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney can all commune as a triumvirate of principled statesmen.

Macron, the first of the three, had been making signals on the issue earlier in the year. The French leader had hoped that a UN conference sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia would be the venue for joint recognition, but it came to naught with the resumption of hostilities in Gaza and Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In turning to the G7 nations, he hoped to amplify the urgency of recognition.

In doing so, the onus was also on the Palestinian Authority to make certain concessions to add momentum. A letter from PA President Mahmoud Abbas sent to Macron duly came, condemning the attacks of October 7, 2023 by Hamas, demanding the immediate release of all hostages and pledged the holding of elections and reforms to governance. Hamas – not that Abbas had any claims on this point – would also “no longer rule Gaza” and would have to surrender “weapons and military capabilities to the Palestinian Security Forces, which will oversee their removal outside the occupied Palestinian territory, with Arab and international support”.

On July 24, Macron confirmed in a letter to Abbas conveyed via France’s Consul General in Jerusalem that recognition of a Palestinian state would follow in September “in light of the historic commitments that were made” and the threatened two-state solution. On July 28, in his opening speech to a plenary session of the High-Level International Conference on the Peaceful Settlement on the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Jean-Nöel Barrot stated the “prospect of two States, whose rights are recognised and respected, is in mortal danger.” But assurances and momentum had been achieved, with Barrot acknowledging the condemnation by the Arab League of the Hamas attack and the insistence by its members on the release of the remaining hostages, the disarming of the group and conclusion of its rule in the Strip.

Of the G7, Starmer was the next to be swayed, but with a notable proviso: “the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two-State Solution.” To this could be added the need for Hamas to release the hostages, accept a ceasefire, disarm and “play no part in the government of Gaza.” In shabby fashion, room is left to withdraw the offer for recognising Palestinian statehood. “We will make an assessment in September on how far the parties have met these steps.”

Carney, the latest addition, claimed on July 30 that the two-state solution growing from a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority had been eroded as a prospect by four factors: the threat of Hamas to Israel; accelerated building across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including numerous instances of Israeli settler violence; the E1 Settlement Plan and the July vote by the Knesset calling for the annexation of the West Bank; and the ongoing failure by the Israeli government to arrest “the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza, with impeded access to food and other essential humanitarian supplies.”

The Canadian PM, in reasons almost identical to Macron, had also been swayed by “the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to much-needed reforms” in governance, including the promise to hold elections in 2026 that will exclude Hamas, undertaking anti-corruption measures and the creation of a demilitarised Palestinian state.

A resounding theme comes through in the latest flurry of statements: Palestinians continue to be lectured and harangued under the guise of humanitarian understanding, told who can represent them or not (a reformed Palestinian Authority promisingly good, Hamas decidedly bad), and whether they can have any semblance of a military force. “Recognising a State of Palestine today,” states Barrot, “means standing with the Palestinians who have chosen non-violence, who have renounced terrorism, and are prepared to recognise Israel.” Standing, it would seem, with a certain type of idealised Palestinian.

The Palestinians have become diplomatic merchandise or bits of currency, to be gambled with in the casino of power politics. Starmer is the worst exponent of this, hoping for such returns as Israel’s halt to the slaughter and famine in Gaza and the release of the hostages by Hamas and its disarmament. But the idea of Palestinian recognition remains, at this stage, a moot point.

At the end of any diplomatic tunnel on this lies certain requirements that would have to be met, not least the criteria of the Montevideo Convention from 1933. Despite gathering some dust over time, it outlines the relevant requirements for statehood: any recognised state in international law must have a permanent population, a defined territory, a discernible government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. In the UK, some 43 cross-party peers have sent a letter of warning to Starmer arguing against recognising a Palestinian state, citing such familiar, legal grumbles. There was, for instance, “no certainty over the borders of Palestine” nor “a functioning single government, Fatah and Hamas being enemies”. Neither could enter into relations with foreign states, with one entity having not held elections for decades, and the other being a “terrorist organisation”. Despite the UK not signing the Montevideo Convention, recognising Palestine “would be contrary to the principles of governing recognition of states in international law,” the convention having become part of international customary law.

On the bloodied ground, where legal abstractions dissolve into fleshy realities, Israel is doing its level best to make sure that there will be nothing left of a Palestinian state to recognise. For Israel, the case is not one of if or when, but never. The machinery of slaughter, deprivation and dislocation is now so advanced it risks smothering the very idea of a viable Palestinian entity. Israeli policy till October 2023 was engineered to stifle and restrain any credible progress towards a Palestinian state, crowned by feeding the acrimonious divisions between Hamas and Fatah. After October 7 that year, the sharpened focus became one of expulsion, subjugation, or plain elimination of the general populace. Palestinian sovereignty remains, to date, incipient, a bare semblance of a political self. This egregious state of affairs continues to be supported, even by those wishing to recognise Palestine. In some ways, those sorts are arguably the worst.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

New Caledonia’s pro-and-anti-independence parties have committed to an “historic” deal over the future political status of the French Pacific territory, which is set to become — for the first time — a “state” within the French realm.

The 13-page agreement yesterday, officially entitled “Agreement Project of the Future of New Caledonia”, is the result of a solid 10 days of difficult negotiations between both pro and anti-independence parties.

They have stayed under closed doors at a hotel in the small city of Bougival, in the outskirts of Paris.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The talks were convened by French President Emmanuel Macron after an earlier series of talks held between February and May 2025 failed to yield an agreement.

After opening the talks on July 2, Macron handed over them to his Minister for Overseas, Manuel Valls, to oversee. Valls managed to bring together all parties around the same table earlier this year.

In his opening speech earlier this month, Macron insisted on the need to restore New Caledonia’s economy, which was brought to its knees following destructive and deadly riots that erupted in May 2024.

He said France was ready to study any solution, including an “associated state” for New Caledonia.

During the following days, all political players exchanged views under the seal of strict confidentiality.

While the pro-independence movement, and its Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), remained adamant they would settle for no less than “full sovereignty”, the pro-France parties were mostly arguing that three referendums — held between 2018 and 2021 — had already concluded that most New Caledonians wanted New Caledonia to remain part of France.

Those results, they said, dictated that the democratic result of the three consultations be respected.

With this confrontational context, which resulted in an increasingly radicalised background in New Caledonia, that eventually led to the 2024 riots, the Bougival summit was dubbed the “last chance summit”.

In the early hours of Saturday, just before 7 am (Paris time, 5 pm NZ time), after a sleepless night, the secrecy surrounding the Bougival talks finally ended with an announcement from Valls.

He wrote in a release that all partners taking part in the talks had signed and “committed to present and defend the agreement’s text on New Caledonia’s future.”

Valls said this was a “major commitment resulting from a long work of negotiations during which New Caledonia’s partners made the choice of courage and responsibility”.

The released document, signed by almost 20 politicians, details what the deal would imply for New Caledonia’s future.

In its preamble, the fresh deal underlines that New Caledonia was “once again betting on trust, dialogue and peace”, through “a new political organisation, a more widely shared sovereignty and an economic and social refoundation” for a “reinvented common destiny.”

New Caledonia’s population will be called to approve the agreement in February 2026.

If approved, the text would be the centrepiece of a “special organic law” voted by the local Congress.

It would later have to be endorsed by the French Parliament and enshrined in an article of the French Constitution.

What does the agreement contain?
One of the most notable developments in terms of future status for New Caledonia is the notion of a “State of New Caledonia”, under a regime that would maintain it as part of France, but with a dual citizenship — France/New Caledonia.

Another formulation used for the change of status is the often-used “sui generis”, which in legal Latin, describes a unique evolution, comparable to no other.

This would be formalised through a fundamental law to be endorsed by New Caledonia’s Congress by a required majority of three-fifths.

The number of MPs in the Congress would be 56.

The text also envisages a gradual transfer of key powers currently held by France (such as international relations), but would not include portfolios such as defence, currency or justice.

In diplomacy, New Caledonia would be empowered to conduct its own affairs, but “in respect of France’s international commitments and vital interests”.

On defence matters, even though this would remain under France’s powers, it is envisaged that New Caledonia would be “strongly” associated, consulted and kept informed, regarding strategy, goals and actions led by France in the Pacific region.

On police and public order matters, New Caledonia would be entitled to create its own provincial and traditional security forces, in addition to national French law enforcement agencies.

New Caledonia’s sensitive electoral roll
The sensitive issue of New Caledonia’s electoral roll and conditions of eligibility to vote at local elections (including for the three Provincial Assemblies) is also mentioned in the agreement.

It was this very issue that was perceived as the main trigger for the May 2024 riots, the pro-independence movement feared at the time that changing the conditions to vote would gradually place the indigenous Kanak community in a position of minority.

It is now agreed that the electoral roll would be partly opened to those people of New Caledonia who were born after 1998.

The roll was frozen in 2007 and restricted to people born before 1998, which is the date the previous major autonomy agreement of Nouméa was signed.

Under the new proposed conditions to access New Caledonia’s “citizenship”, those entitled would include people who already can vote at local elections, but also their children or any person who has resided in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted ten years or who has been married or lived in a civil de facto partnership with a qualified citizen for at least five years.

Provincial elections once again postponed
One of the first deadlines on the electoral calendar, the provincial elections, was to take place no later than 30 November 2025.

It will be moved once again — for the third time — to May-June 2026.

A significant part of the political deal is also dedicated to New Caledonia’s economic “refoundation”, with a high priority for the young generations, who have felt left out of the system and disenfranchised for too long.

One of the main goals was to bring New Caledonia’s public debts to a level of sustainability.

In 2024, following the riots, France granted, in the form of loans, over 1 billion euros (NZ $1.9 billion) for New Caledonia’s key institutions to remain afloat.

But some components of the political chessboard criticised the measure, saying this was placing the French territory in a state of excessive and long-term debt.

Strategic nickel
A major topic, on the macro-economic side, concerns New Caledonia’s nickel mining industry, after years of decline that has left it (even before 2024) in a state of near-collapse.

Nickel is regarded as the backbone of New Caledonia’s economy.

A nickel “strategic plan” would aim at re-starting New Caledonia nickel’s processing plants, especially in the Northern province, but at the same time facilitating the export of raw nickel.

There was also a will to ensure that all mining sites (many of which have been blocked and its installations damaged since the May 2024 riots) became accessible again.

Meanwhile, France would push the European Union to include New Caledonia’s nickel in its list of strategic resources.

New Caledonia’s nickel industry’s woes are also caused by its lack of competitiveness on the world market — especially compared to Indonesia’s recent rise in prominence in nickel production — because of the high cost of energy.

Swift reactions, mostly positive

The announcement yesterday was followed by quick reactions from all sides of New Caledonia’s political spectrum and also from mainland France’s political leaders.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou expressed “pride” to see an agreement “on par with history”, emerge.

“Bravo also to the work and patience of Manuel Valls” and “the decisive implication of Emmanuel Macron,” he wrote on X-Twitter.

From the ranks of New Caledonia’s political players, pro-France Nicolas Metzdorf said he perceived as one of the deal’s main benefits the fact that “we will at last be able to project ourselves in the future, in economic, social and societal reconstruction without any deadline.”

Metzdorf admitted that reaching an agreement required concessions and compromise from both sides.

“But the fact that we are no longer faced with referendums and to reinforce the powers of our provinces, this was our mandate”, he told public broadcaster NC La 1ère.

“We’ve had to accept this change from New Caledonia citizenship to New Caledonian nationality, which remains to be defined by New Caledonia’s Congress. We have also created a completely new status as part of the French Republic, a sui generis State”, he noted.

He said the innovative status kept New Caledonia within France, without going as far as an “associated state” mooted earlier.

“At least, what we have arrived at is that New Caledonians remain French”, pro-France Le Rassemblement-LR prominent leader Virginie Ruffenach commented.

“And those who want to contribute to New Caledonia’s development will be able to do so through a minimum stay of residence, the right to vote and to become citizens and later New Caledonia nationals”

“I’m aware that some could be wary of the concessions we made, but let’s face it: New Caledonia nationality does not make New Caledonia an independent State . . . It does not take away anything from us, neither of us belonging to the French Republic nor our French nationality,” Southern Province pro-France President Sonia Backès wrote on social media.

In a joint release, the two main pro-France parties, Les Loyalistes and Rassemblement-LR, said the deal was no less than “historic” and “perennial” for New Caledonia as a whole, to “offer New Caledonia a future of peace, stability and prosperity” while at the same time considering France’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

From the pro-independence side, one of the negotiators, Victor Tutugoro of UNI-UPM (Progressist Union in Melanesia) said what mattered was that “all of us have placed our bets on intelligence, beyond our respective beliefs, our positions, our postures”.

“We put all of these aside for the good of the country.”

“Of course, by definition, a compromise cannot satisfy anyone 100 percent. But it’s a balanced compromise for everyone,” he said.

“And it allows us to look ahead, to build New Caledonia together, a citizenship and this common destiny everyone’s been talking about for many years.”

Before politicians fly back to New Caledonia to present the deal to their respective bases, President Macron received all delegation members last evening to congratulate them on their achievements.

During the Presidential meeting at the Elysée Palace, FLNKS chief negotiator Emmanuel Tjibaou (whose father Jean-Marie Tjibaou also struck a historic agreement and shook hands with pro-France leader Jacques Lafleur, in 1988), stressed the agreement was one step along the path and it allows to envisage new perspectives for the Kanak people.

A sign of the changing times, but in a striking parallel — 37 years after his father’s historic handshake with Lafleur, Emmanuel Tjibaou (whose father was shot dead in 1989 by a radical pro-independence partisan who felt the independence cause had been betrayed — did not shake hands, but instead fist pumped with pro-France’s Metzdorf.

In a brief message on social networks, the French Head of State hailed the conclusive talks, which he labelled “A State of New Caledonia within the (French) Republic,” a win for a “bet on trust.”

“Now is the time for respect, for stability and for the sum of good wills to build a shared future.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron has sent a formal invitation to “all New Caledonia stakeholders” for talks in Paris on the French Pacific territory’s political and economic future to be held on July 2.

The confirmation came on Thursday in the form of a letter sent individually to an undisclosed list of recipients and June 24.

The talks follow a series of roundtables fostered earlier this year by French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

But the latest talks, held in New Caledonia under a so-called “conclave” format, stalled on  May 8.

This was mainly because several main components of the pro-France (anti-independence) parties said the draft agreement proposed by Valls was tantamount to a form of independence, which they reject.

The project implied that New Caledonia’s future political status vis-à-vis France could be an associated independence “within France” with a transfer of key powers (justice, defence, law and order, foreign affairs, currency ), a dual New Caledonia-France citizenship and an international standing.

Instead, the pro-France Rassemblement-LR and Loyalistes suggested another project of “internal federalism” which would give more powers (including on tax matters) to each of the three provinces, a notion often criticised as a de facto partition of New Caledonia.

Local elections issue
In May 2024, on the sensitive issue of eligibility at local elections, deadly riots broke out in New Caledonia, resulting in 14 deaths and more than 2 billion euros (NZ$3.8 billion) in damage.

In his letter, Macron writes that although Valls “managed to restore dialogue…this did not allow reaching an agreement on (New Caledonia’s) institutional future”.

“This is why I decided to host, under my presidency, a summit dedicated to New Caledonia and associating the whole of the territory’s stakeholders”.

Macron also wrote that “beyond institutional topics, I wish that our exchanges can also touch on (New Caledonia’s) economic and societal issues”.

Macron made earlier announcements, including on 10 June 2025, on the margins of the recent UNOC Oceans Summit in Nice (France), when he dedicated a significant part of his speech to Pacific leaders attending a “Pacific-France” summit to the situation in New Caledonia.

“Our exchanges will last as long as it takes so that the heavy topics . . . can be dealt with with all the seriousness they deserve”.

Macron also points out that after New Caledonia’s “crisis” broke out on 13 May 2024, “the tension was too high to allow for a dialogue between all the components of New Caledonia’s society”.

A new deal?
The main political objective of the talks remains to find a comprehensive agreement between all local political stakeholders, in order to arrive at a new agreement that would define the French Pacific territory’s political future and status.

This would then allow to replace the 27-year-old Nouméa Accord, signed in 1998.

That pact put a heavy focus on the notions of “living together” and “common destiny” for New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanaks and all of the other components of its ethnically and culturally diverse society.

It also envisaged an economic “rebalancing” between the Northern and Islands provinces and the more affluent Southern province, where the capital Nouméa is located.

The Nouméa Accord also contained provisions to hold three referendums on self-determination.

The three polls took place in 2018, 2020 and 2021, all of those resulting in a majority of people rejecting independence.

But the last referendum, in December 2021, was largely boycotted by the pro-independence movement.

‘Examine the situation’
According to the Nouméa Accord, after the referendums, political stakeholders were to “examine the situation thus created”, Macron recalled.

But despite several attempts, including under previous governments, to promote political talks, the situation has remained deadlocked and increasingly polarised between the pro-independence and the pro-France camps.

A few days after the May 2024 riots, Macron made a trip to New Caledonia, calling for the situation to be appeased so that talks could resume.

In his June 10 speech to Pacific leaders, Macron also mentioned a “new project” and in relation to the past referendums process, pledged “not to make the same mistakes again”.

He said he believed the referendum, as an instrument, was not necessarily adapted to Melanesian and Kanak cultures.

In practice, the Paris “summit” would also involve French minister for Overseas Manuel Valls.

The list of invited participants would include all parties, pro-independence and pro-France, represented at New Caledonia’s Congress (the local parliament).

But it would also include a number of economic stakeholders, as well as a delegation of Mayors of New Caledonia, as well as representatives of the civil society and NGOs.

Talks could also come in several formats, with the political side being treated separately.

The pro-independence platform FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) has to decide at the weekend whether it will take part in the Paris talks.

Will Christian Téin take part?
During a whirlwind visit to New Caledonia in June 2024, Macron met Christian Téin, the leader of a pro-independence CCAT (Field Action Coordination Cell), created by Union Calédonienne (UC).

Téin was arrested and jailed in mainland France.

In August 2024, while in custody in the Mulhouse prison (northeastern France), he was elected in absentia as president of a UC-dominated FLNKS.

Even though he still faces charges for allegedly being one of the masterminds of the May 2024 riots, Téin was released from jail on June 12 on condition that he does not travel to New Caledonia and reports regularly to French judges.

On the pro-France side, Téin’s release triggered mixed angry reactions.

Other pro-France hard-line components said the Kanak leader’s participation in the Paris talks was simply “unthinkable”.

Pro-independence Tjibaou said Téin’s release was “a sign of appeasement”, but that his participation was probably subject to “conditions”.

“But I’m not the one who makes the invitations,” he told public broadcaster NC la 1ère on 15 June 2025.

FLNKS spokesman Dominique Fochi said in a release Téin’s participation in the talks was earlier declared a prerequisite.

“Now our FLNKS president has been released. He’s the FLNKS boss and we are awaiting his instructions,” Fochi said.

At former roundtables earlier this year, the FLNKS delegation was headed by Union Calédonienne (UC, the main and dominating component of the FLNKS) president Emmanuel Tjibaou.

‘Concluding the decolonisation process’, says Valls
In a press conference on Tuesday in Paris, Valls elaborated some more on the upcoming Paris talks.

“Obviously there will be a sequence of political negotiations which I will lead with all of New Caledonia’s players, that is all groups represented at the Congress. But there will also be an economic and social sequence with economic, social and societal players who will be invited”, Valls said.

During question time at the French National Assembly in Paris on 3 June 2025, Valls said he remained confident that it was “still possible” to reach an agreement and to “reconcile” the “contradictory aspirations” of the pro-independence and pro-France camps.

During the same sitting, pro-France New Caledonia MP Nicolas Metzdorf decried what he termed “France’s lack of ambition” and his camp’s feeling of being “let down”.

The other MP for New Caledonia’s, pro-independence Emmanuel Tjibaou, also took the floor to call on France to “close the colonial chapter” and that France has to “take its part in the conclusion of the emancipation process” of New Caledonia.

“With the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, and the political forces, we will make offers, while concluding the decolonisation process, the self-determination process, while respecting New Caledonians’ words and at the same time not forgetting history, and the past that have led to the disaster of the 1980s and the catastrophe of May 2024,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

You might be bullied in the workplace for being fastidious and conscientious, showing up your daft colleagues, or reputationally attacked by a member of the establishment keen to conceal his corrupt practices. When contemplating retaliation, the self-appointed middle ground types will call upon you to “de-escalate” the situation, insisting that you appeal to the better side of your bruised nature. After all, you know it was your fault.

The joining of the United States in the war against Iran made Washington a co-conspirator to soiling international law and profaning its salient provisions. The US was in no immediate danger, nor was there any imminent threat, existential or otherwise, to its interests vis-à-vis Tehran. Yet President Donald Trump, having had the poison of persuasion poured into his ear by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had succumbed. His will annexed to that of the Israeli premier, Trump ordered the US Air Force on June 22 to conduct bombing raids on three Iranian nuclear facilities: Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow. They were recipients of that hefty example of phallocratic lethality known as the bunker buster, the GBU-57A Massive Ordnance Penetrator. With his usual unwavering confidence, Trump declared in an address to the nation that all the country’s “nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

In violating international law and desecrating that important canon injuncting states from committing crimes against peace, Israel and the United States are not the ones being told to restrain their violence and acknowledge breaching the United Nations Charter, risking yet another conflagration in the Middle East. It is their targeted state, the Republic of Iran, whose officials must “de-escalate” and play nice before the diplomatic table, abandoning a nuclear program, civil or military. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East,” Trump directs, “must now make peace.”

With suddenness, the advocates and publicists for international law vanished across the broadly described West. In Europe, Canada, the US and Australia, the mores and customs observed by states could be conveniently forgotten and retired. In its place reigned the logic of brute force and unquestioned violence. Provided such violence is exercised by that rogue combine of Amerisrael, deference and dispensation will be afforded. The same could never be said for such countries as China and Russia, abominated for not accepting the “rules-based order” imposed by Western weaponry and force.

The lamentable, plaintiff responses from Brussels to Canberra tell a sorry tale: pre-emptive war waged against a country’s nuclear and oil facilities is just the sort of thing that one is allowed to do, since the rotter in question is a theocratic state of haughty disposition and regional ambition. You can get away with murdering scientists in their sleep, along with their families, liquidating the upper echelons of their military leadership and killing journalists along the way.

The approved formula behind these responses is as follows. From the outset, mention that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon. If possible, underline any relevant qualities that render it ineligible to any other state that has nuclear weapons. Instruct Tehran that diplomacy is imperative, and retaliation terrible. Behave and exercise restraint.

Here is Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of the UK, speaking from his Chequers country retreat: it was “clear Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”, which was “why our focus has been on de-escalating, getting people back around to negotiate what is a very real threat in relation to the nuclear program.” If one was left in any doubt who the guilty party was, UK Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds helped dispel it, calling Iran “a threat to this country, not in an abstract way, not in a speculative way”.

The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, after convening his security cabinet on the morning of June 22, conveyed his views through German government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius: “Friedrich Merz reiterated his call for Iran to immediately begin negotiations with the US and Israel and to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict.”

French President Emmanuel Macron similarly got on the de-escalation bandwagon with gusto, giving a teacherly warning to Iran to “exercise the greatest restraint” and dedicate itself to renouncing nuclear weapons. It was the only credible path to peace and security for all. The president conveniently skipped past the huge elephant in the room: Israel’s illicit possession of nuclear weapons, undeclared, unmonitored and extra-legal, as a factor that severely compromises the issue of stability in the Middle East.

From the European Union, the attackers and the attacked were given equal billing. “I urge all sides to step back, return to the negotiating table and prevent further escalation,” urged Kaja Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission. The obligatory “Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, as it would be a threat to international security” followed. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also thought it perfectly sensible to matronly instruct the Iranians on the next step: “Now is the moment for Iran to engage in a credible diplomatic solution. The negotiating table is the only way to end this crisis.”

All these comments are deliciously rich given that Israel has never entertained negotiations on any level with Iran, dismissive of its nuclear energy needs, while the first Trump administration sabotaged the diplomatically brokered Joint Plan of Comprehensive Action that successfully diverted Tehran away from a military nuclear program in favour of a lifting of sanctions. Talk from Amerisrael and their allies would seem to be heavily discounted, if not counterfeit. The glaring, coruscating message to Iran: retaliation bad; de-escalation good.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

With its pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and much civilian infrastructure besides, Israel is being treated as a delicate matter. Condemnation of its attacks as a violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against independent, sovereign states, should have been a formality. Likewise, the violation of the various protocols dealing with the protection of civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities.

Rather than chastise Israel for committing a crime against peace, Iran was chided for exercising a retaliatory right that arose the moment Israeli weaponry started striking targets across the country on June 12. A villain had been identified, but it was not Israel.

With this skewed and absurd assessment of self-defence, notably by the Europeans and the US, French President Emmanuel Macron could only weakly declare that it was “essential to urgently bring these military operations to an end, as they pose serious threats to regional security.” On June 18, he gave his foreign minister Jean-Nöel Barrott the task of launching an “initiative, with close European partners, to propose a […] negotiated settlement, designed to end the conflict.” The initiative, to commence as talks on June 20 in Geneva, would involve the foreign ministers of France and Germany, along with Iran’s own Abbas Araghchi and relevant officials from the European Union.

Not much in terms of detail has emerged from that gathering, though Macron was confident, after holding phone talks with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, of a “path” that would “end war and avoid even greater dangers”. To attain that goal, “we will accelerate the negotiations led by France and its European partners with Iran.”

It has been reported that the E3 countries (France, Germany and the UK) felt that Israel would refuse to accept a ceasefire as things stood, while the resumption of negotiations between Tehran and Washington seemed unlikely. With these factors in mind, the proposal entailed conducting a parallel process of negotiations that would – again, a force of parochial habit – focus on Iranian conduct rather than Israeli aggression. Iran would have to submit to more intrusive inspections, not merely regarding its nuclear program but its ballistic missile arsenal, albeit permitting Tehran a certain uranium enrichment capacity.

It was clear, in short, who was to wear the dunce’s hat. As Macron reiterated, Tehran could never acquire nuclear weapons. “It is up to Iran to provide full guarantees that its intentions are peaceful.”

A senior Iranian official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, saw little to impress him. “The discussions and proposals made by the Europeans in Geneva were unrealistic. Insisting on these positions will not bring Iran and Europe closer to an agreement.” Having given the proposals a cold shower, the official nonetheless conceded that “Iran will review the European proposals in Tehran and present its responses in the next meeting.”

The European proposals were more than unrealistic. They did nothing to compel Israel to stop its campaign, effectively making the Iranians concede surrender and return to negotiations even as their state is being destabilised. While their command structure and nuclear scientific establishment face liquidation, their civilian infrastructure malicious destruction, they are to be the stoic ones of the show, turning the other cheek. With this, Israel can operate outside the regulatory frameworks of nuclear non-proliferation, being an undeclared nuclear weapons state that also refuses to submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The European proposition would also do nothing to stop what are effectively war crimes happening, and being planned, in real time. The EU states have made little of the dangers associated with Israel’s striking of nuclear facilities, something they were most willing to do when Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia plant from Ukraine in March 2022. During capture, the plant was shelled, while the ongoing conflict continues to risk the safety of the facility.

The International Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has also drawn attention to the critical risks associated with attacking nuclear facilities. “The use of force against nuclear facilities,” it stated in a media release, “violates international law and risks radioactive contamination with long-term consequences for human health and environment.” That same point has been made by the director general of the IAEA, Rafael Marino Grossi. “Military escalation,” stated Grossi on June 16, “threatens lives, increases the chance of radiological release with serious consequences for people and the environment and delays indispensable work towards a diplomatic solution for the long-term assurance that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon.”

US President Donald Trump’s own assessment of the EU’s feeble intervention was self-serving but apposite. “Nah, they didn’t help.” The Iranians did not care much for the Europeans. “They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help on this one.” In fact, the European effort, led unconvincingly by Macron, is looking most unhelpful.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The recent series of high-level agreements between Papua New Guinea and France marks a significant development in PNG’s geopolitical relationships, driven by what appears to be a convergence of national interests.

The “deepening relationship” is less about a single personality and more about a calculated alignment of economic, security, and diplomatic priorities with PNG, taking full advantage of its position as the biggest, most strategically placed island player in the Pacific.

An examination of the key outcomes reveals a partnership of mutual benefit, reflecting both PNG’s strategic diversification and France’s own long-term ambitions as a Pacific power.

• READ MORE: Other France in the Pacific reports

A primary driver is the shared economic rationale. From Port Moresby’s perspective, the partnership offers a clear path to economic diversification and resilience.

But many in PNG have been watching with keen interest and asking: how badly does PNG want this?

While Prime Minister James Marape offered France a Special Economic Zone in Port Moresby (SEZ) for French businesses, he also named the lookout at Port Moresby’s Variarata National Park after President Emmanuel Macron drawing the ire of many in the country.

The proposal to establish a SEZ specifically for French industries is a notable attempt to attract capital from beyond PNG’s traditional partners.

Strategically coupled
This is strategically coupled with securing the future of the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project.

Macron’s personal undertaking to work with TotalEnergies to keep the project on schedule provides crucial stability for one of PNG’s most significant economic ventures.

For France, these arrangements secure a major energy investment for its national corporate champion and establish a stronger economic foothold in a strategically vital region between Asia and the Pacific.

In the area of security, the relationship addresses tangible needs for both nations.

PNG is faced with the immense challenge of monitoring a 2.4 million sq km Exclusive Economic Zone, making it vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The finalisation of a Shiprider Agreement with France provides a practical force-multiplier, leveraging French naval assets to enhance PNG’s maritime surveillance capabilities. This move, along with planned defence talks on air and maritime cooperation, allows PNG to diversify its security architecture.

For France, a resident power with Pacific territories like New Caledonia and French Polynesia, participating in regional security operations reinforces its role and commitment to stability in the Indo-Pacific.

Elevating diplomatic influence
The partnership is also a vehicle for elevating diplomatic influence.

Port Moresby has noted the significance of engaging with a partner that holds permanent membership on the UN Security Council and seats at the G7 and G20.

This alignment provides PNG with a powerful channel to global decision-making forums. The reciprocal move to establish a PNG embassy in Paris further cements the relationship on a mature footing.

The diplomatic synergy is perhaps best illustrated by France’s full endorsement of PNG’s bid to host a future UN Ocean Conference. This support provides PNG with a major opportunity to lead on the world stage, while allowing France to demonstrate its credentials as a key partner to the Pacific Islands.

This deepening PNG-France partnership does not exist in a vacuum.

It is unfolding within a broader context of heightened geopolitical competition across the Pacific.

The West’s view of China’s rapid emergence as a dominant economic and military force in the region has reshaped the strategic landscape, prompting traditional powers to re-engage with renewed urgency.

increased diplomatic footprint
The United States has responded by significantly increasing its diplomatic and security footprint, a move marked by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Port Moresby to sign the Defence Cooperation Agreement.

Similarly, Australia, PNG’s traditional security partner, is working to reinforce its long-standing influence through initiatives like the multi-million-dollar deal to establish a PNG team in its National Rugby League (NRL), a soft-power exercise reportedly linked to security outcomes.

This competitive environment has, in turn, created greater agency for Pacific nations, allowing them to diversify their partnerships beyond old allies and providing a fertile ground for European powers like France to assert their own strategic interests.

A strong foundation for the relationship is a shared public stance on environmental stewardship. The agreement on the need for rigorous scientific studies before any deep-sea mining occurs aligns PNG’s national policy with a position of environmental caution.

This common ground extends to broader climate action, where France’s commitment to conservation in the Pacific resonates with PNG’s status as a frontline nation vulnerable to climate change.

This alignment on values provides a durable and politically important basis for cooperation, allowing both nations to jointly advocate for climate justice and ocean protection.

For the Papua New Guinea economy, this deepening partnership with France is critically important as it provides high-level stability for the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project and creates a direct pathway for new investment through a proposed SEZ for French businesses.

Vital economic resource
Furthermore, by moving to finalise a Shiprider Agreement to combat illegal fishing, the government is actively protecting a vital economic resource.

For Marape’s credibility in local politics, these outcomes are tangible successes he can present to the nation as he battles a massive credibility dip in recent years.

Securing a personal undertaking from the leader of a G7 nation, gaining support for PNG to host a future UN Ocean Conference, and enhancing national security demonstrates effective leadership on the world stage.

This allows him to build a narrative of a competent statesman who, through “warm, personal relationships”, can deliver on promises of economic opportunity and national security while strengthening his political standing at home.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The recent series of high-level agreements between Papua New Guinea and France marks a significant development in PNG’s geopolitical relationships, driven by what appears to be a convergence of national interests.

The “deepening relationship” is less about a single personality and more about a calculated alignment of economic, security, and diplomatic priorities with PNG, taking full advantage of its position as the biggest, most strategically placed island player in the Pacific.

An examination of the key outcomes reveals a partnership of mutual benefit, reflecting both PNG’s strategic diversification and France’s own long-term ambitions as a Pacific power.

• READ MORE: Other France in the Pacific reports

A primary driver is the shared economic rationale. From Port Moresby’s perspective, the partnership offers a clear path to economic diversification and resilience.

But many in PNG have been watching with keen interest and asking: how badly does PNG want this?

While Prime Minister James Marape offered France a Special Economic Zone in Port Moresby (SEZ) for French businesses, he also named the lookout at Port Moresby’s Variarata National Park after President Emmanuel Macron drawing the ire of many in the country.

The proposal to establish a SEZ specifically for French industries is a notable attempt to attract capital from beyond PNG’s traditional partners.

Strategically coupled
This is strategically coupled with securing the future of the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project.

Macron’s personal undertaking to work with TotalEnergies to keep the project on schedule provides crucial stability for one of PNG’s most significant economic ventures.

For France, these arrangements secure a major energy investment for its national corporate champion and establish a stronger economic foothold in a strategically vital region between Asia and the Pacific.

In the area of security, the relationship addresses tangible needs for both nations.

PNG is faced with the immense challenge of monitoring a 2.4 million sq km Exclusive Economic Zone, making it vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The finalisation of a Shiprider Agreement with France provides a practical force-multiplier, leveraging French naval assets to enhance PNG’s maritime surveillance capabilities. This move, along with planned defence talks on air and maritime cooperation, allows PNG to diversify its security architecture.

For France, a resident power with Pacific territories like New Caledonia and French Polynesia, participating in regional security operations reinforces its role and commitment to stability in the Indo-Pacific.

Elevating diplomatic influence
The partnership is also a vehicle for elevating diplomatic influence.

Port Moresby has noted the significance of engaging with a partner that holds permanent membership on the UN Security Council and seats at the G7 and G20.

This alignment provides PNG with a powerful channel to global decision-making forums. The reciprocal move to establish a PNG embassy in Paris further cements the relationship on a mature footing.

The diplomatic synergy is perhaps best illustrated by France’s full endorsement of PNG’s bid to host a future UN Ocean Conference. This support provides PNG with a major opportunity to lead on the world stage, while allowing France to demonstrate its credentials as a key partner to the Pacific Islands.

This deepening PNG-France partnership does not exist in a vacuum.

It is unfolding within a broader context of heightened geopolitical competition across the Pacific.

The West’s view of China’s rapid emergence as a dominant economic and military force in the region has reshaped the strategic landscape, prompting traditional powers to re-engage with renewed urgency.

increased diplomatic footprint
The United States has responded by significantly increasing its diplomatic and security footprint, a move marked by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Port Moresby to sign the Defence Cooperation Agreement.

Similarly, Australia, PNG’s traditional security partner, is working to reinforce its long-standing influence through initiatives like the multi-million-dollar deal to establish a PNG team in its National Rugby League (NRL), a soft-power exercise reportedly linked to security outcomes.

This competitive environment has, in turn, created greater agency for Pacific nations, allowing them to diversify their partnerships beyond old allies and providing a fertile ground for European powers like France to assert their own strategic interests.

A strong foundation for the relationship is a shared public stance on environmental stewardship. The agreement on the need for rigorous scientific studies before any deep-sea mining occurs aligns PNG’s national policy with a position of environmental caution.

This common ground extends to broader climate action, where France’s commitment to conservation in the Pacific resonates with PNG’s status as a frontline nation vulnerable to climate change.

This alignment on values provides a durable and politically important basis for cooperation, allowing both nations to jointly advocate for climate justice and ocean protection.

For the Papua New Guinea economy, this deepening partnership with France is critically important as it provides high-level stability for the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project and creates a direct pathway for new investment through a proposed SEZ for French businesses.

Vital economic resource
Furthermore, by moving to finalise a Shiprider Agreement to combat illegal fishing, the government is actively protecting a vital economic resource.

For Marape’s credibility in local politics, these outcomes are tangible successes he can present to the nation as he battles a massive credibility dip in recent years.

Securing a personal undertaking from the leader of a G7 nation, gaining support for PNG to host a future UN Ocean Conference, and enhancing national security demonstrates effective leadership on the world stage.

This allows him to build a narrative of a competent statesman who, through “warm, personal relationships”, can deliver on promises of economic opportunity and national security while strengthening his political standing at home.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The recent series of high-level agreements between Papua New Guinea and France marks a significant development in PNG’s geopolitical relationships, driven by what appears to be a convergence of national interests.

The “deepening relationship” is less about a single personality and more about a calculated alignment of economic, security, and diplomatic priorities with PNG, taking full advantage of its position as the biggest, most strategically placed island player in the Pacific.

An examination of the key outcomes reveals a partnership of mutual benefit, reflecting both PNG’s strategic diversification and France’s own long-term ambitions as a Pacific power.

• READ MORE: Other France in the Pacific reports

A primary driver is the shared economic rationale. From Port Moresby’s perspective, the partnership offers a clear path to economic diversification and resilience.

But many in PNG have been watching with keen interest and asking: how badly does PNG want this?

While Prime Minister James Marape offered France a Special Economic Zone in Port Moresby (SEZ) for French businesses, he also named the lookout at Port Moresby’s Variarata National Park after President Emmanuel Macron drawing the ire of many in the country.

The proposal to establish a SEZ specifically for French industries is a notable attempt to attract capital from beyond PNG’s traditional partners.

Strategically coupled
This is strategically coupled with securing the future of the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project.

Macron’s personal undertaking to work with TotalEnergies to keep the project on schedule provides crucial stability for one of PNG’s most significant economic ventures.

For France, these arrangements secure a major energy investment for its national corporate champion and establish a stronger economic foothold in a strategically vital region between Asia and the Pacific.

In the area of security, the relationship addresses tangible needs for both nations.

PNG is faced with the immense challenge of monitoring a 2.4 million sq km Exclusive Economic Zone, making it vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The finalisation of a Shiprider Agreement with France provides a practical force-multiplier, leveraging French naval assets to enhance PNG’s maritime surveillance capabilities. This move, along with planned defence talks on air and maritime cooperation, allows PNG to diversify its security architecture.

For France, a resident power with Pacific territories like New Caledonia and French Polynesia, participating in regional security operations reinforces its role and commitment to stability in the Indo-Pacific.

Elevating diplomatic influence
The partnership is also a vehicle for elevating diplomatic influence.

Port Moresby has noted the significance of engaging with a partner that holds permanent membership on the UN Security Council and seats at the G7 and G20.

This alignment provides PNG with a powerful channel to global decision-making forums. The reciprocal move to establish a PNG embassy in Paris further cements the relationship on a mature footing.

The diplomatic synergy is perhaps best illustrated by France’s full endorsement of PNG’s bid to host a future UN Ocean Conference. This support provides PNG with a major opportunity to lead on the world stage, while allowing France to demonstrate its credentials as a key partner to the Pacific Islands.

This deepening PNG-France partnership does not exist in a vacuum.

It is unfolding within a broader context of heightened geopolitical competition across the Pacific.

The West’s view of China’s rapid emergence as a dominant economic and military force in the region has reshaped the strategic landscape, prompting traditional powers to re-engage with renewed urgency.

increased diplomatic footprint
The United States has responded by significantly increasing its diplomatic and security footprint, a move marked by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Port Moresby to sign the Defence Cooperation Agreement.

Similarly, Australia, PNG’s traditional security partner, is working to reinforce its long-standing influence through initiatives like the multi-million-dollar deal to establish a PNG team in its National Rugby League (NRL), a soft-power exercise reportedly linked to security outcomes.

This competitive environment has, in turn, created greater agency for Pacific nations, allowing them to diversify their partnerships beyond old allies and providing a fertile ground for European powers like France to assert their own strategic interests.

A strong foundation for the relationship is a shared public stance on environmental stewardship. The agreement on the need for rigorous scientific studies before any deep-sea mining occurs aligns PNG’s national policy with a position of environmental caution.

This common ground extends to broader climate action, where France’s commitment to conservation in the Pacific resonates with PNG’s status as a frontline nation vulnerable to climate change.

This alignment on values provides a durable and politically important basis for cooperation, allowing both nations to jointly advocate for climate justice and ocean protection.

For the Papua New Guinea economy, this deepening partnership with France is critically important as it provides high-level stability for the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project and creates a direct pathway for new investment through a proposed SEZ for French businesses.

Vital economic resource
Furthermore, by moving to finalise a Shiprider Agreement to combat illegal fishing, the government is actively protecting a vital economic resource.

For Marape’s credibility in local politics, these outcomes are tangible successes he can present to the nation as he battles a massive credibility dip in recent years.

Securing a personal undertaking from the leader of a G7 nation, gaining support for PNG to host a future UN Ocean Conference, and enhancing national security demonstrates effective leadership on the world stage.

This allows him to build a narrative of a competent statesman who, through “warm, personal relationships”, can deliver on promises of economic opportunity and national security while strengthening his political standing at home.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The recent series of high-level agreements between Papua New Guinea and France marks a significant development in PNG’s geopolitical relationships, driven by what appears to be a convergence of national interests.

The “deepening relationship” is less about a single personality and more about a calculated alignment of economic, security, and diplomatic priorities with PNG, taking full advantage of its position as the biggest, most strategically placed island player in the Pacific.

An examination of the key outcomes reveals a partnership of mutual benefit, reflecting both PNG’s strategic diversification and France’s own long-term ambitions as a Pacific power.

• READ MORE: Other France in the Pacific reports

A primary driver is the shared economic rationale. From Port Moresby’s perspective, the partnership offers a clear path to economic diversification and resilience.

But many in PNG have been watching with keen interest and asking: how badly does PNG want this?

While Prime Minister James Marape offered France a Special Economic Zone in Port Moresby (SEZ) for French businesses, he also named the lookout at Port Moresby’s Variarata National Park after President Emmanuel Macron drawing the ire of many in the country.

The proposal to establish a SEZ specifically for French industries is a notable attempt to attract capital from beyond PNG’s traditional partners.

Strategically coupled
This is strategically coupled with securing the future of the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project.

Macron’s personal undertaking to work with TotalEnergies to keep the project on schedule provides crucial stability for one of PNG’s most significant economic ventures.

For France, these arrangements secure a major energy investment for its national corporate champion and establish a stronger economic foothold in a strategically vital region between Asia and the Pacific.

In the area of security, the relationship addresses tangible needs for both nations.

PNG is faced with the immense challenge of monitoring a 2.4 million sq km Exclusive Economic Zone, making it vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The finalisation of a Shiprider Agreement with France provides a practical force-multiplier, leveraging French naval assets to enhance PNG’s maritime surveillance capabilities. This move, along with planned defence talks on air and maritime cooperation, allows PNG to diversify its security architecture.

For France, a resident power with Pacific territories like New Caledonia and French Polynesia, participating in regional security operations reinforces its role and commitment to stability in the Indo-Pacific.

Elevating diplomatic influence
The partnership is also a vehicle for elevating diplomatic influence.

Port Moresby has noted the significance of engaging with a partner that holds permanent membership on the UN Security Council and seats at the G7 and G20.

This alignment provides PNG with a powerful channel to global decision-making forums. The reciprocal move to establish a PNG embassy in Paris further cements the relationship on a mature footing.

The diplomatic synergy is perhaps best illustrated by France’s full endorsement of PNG’s bid to host a future UN Ocean Conference. This support provides PNG with a major opportunity to lead on the world stage, while allowing France to demonstrate its credentials as a key partner to the Pacific Islands.

This deepening PNG-France partnership does not exist in a vacuum.

It is unfolding within a broader context of heightened geopolitical competition across the Pacific.

The West’s view of China’s rapid emergence as a dominant economic and military force in the region has reshaped the strategic landscape, prompting traditional powers to re-engage with renewed urgency.

increased diplomatic footprint
The United States has responded by significantly increasing its diplomatic and security footprint, a move marked by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Port Moresby to sign the Defence Cooperation Agreement.

Similarly, Australia, PNG’s traditional security partner, is working to reinforce its long-standing influence through initiatives like the multi-million-dollar deal to establish a PNG team in its National Rugby League (NRL), a soft-power exercise reportedly linked to security outcomes.

This competitive environment has, in turn, created greater agency for Pacific nations, allowing them to diversify their partnerships beyond old allies and providing a fertile ground for European powers like France to assert their own strategic interests.

A strong foundation for the relationship is a shared public stance on environmental stewardship. The agreement on the need for rigorous scientific studies before any deep-sea mining occurs aligns PNG’s national policy with a position of environmental caution.

This common ground extends to broader climate action, where France’s commitment to conservation in the Pacific resonates with PNG’s status as a frontline nation vulnerable to climate change.

This alignment on values provides a durable and politically important basis for cooperation, allowing both nations to jointly advocate for climate justice and ocean protection.

For the Papua New Guinea economy, this deepening partnership with France is critically important as it provides high-level stability for the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project and creates a direct pathway for new investment through a proposed SEZ for French businesses.

Vital economic resource
Furthermore, by moving to finalise a Shiprider Agreement to combat illegal fishing, the government is actively protecting a vital economic resource.

For Marape’s credibility in local politics, these outcomes are tangible successes he can present to the nation as he battles a massive credibility dip in recent years.

Securing a personal undertaking from the leader of a G7 nation, gaining support for PNG to host a future UN Ocean Conference, and enhancing national security demonstrates effective leadership on the world stage.

This allows him to build a narrative of a competent statesman who, through “warm, personal relationships”, can deliver on promises of economic opportunity and national security while strengthening his political standing at home.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The recent series of high-level agreements between Papua New Guinea and France marks a significant development in PNG’s geopolitical relationships, driven by what appears to be a convergence of national interests.

The “deepening relationship” is less about a single personality and more about a calculated alignment of economic, security, and diplomatic priorities with PNG, taking full advantage of its position as the biggest, most strategically placed island player in the Pacific.

An examination of the key outcomes reveals a partnership of mutual benefit, reflecting both PNG’s strategic diversification and France’s own long-term ambitions as a Pacific power.

• READ MORE: Other France in the Pacific reports

A primary driver is the shared economic rationale. From Port Moresby’s perspective, the partnership offers a clear path to economic diversification and resilience.

But many in PNG have been watching with keen interest and asking: how badly does PNG want this?

While Prime Minister James Marape offered France a Special Economic Zone in Port Moresby (SEZ) for French businesses, he also named the lookout at Port Moresby’s Variarata National Park after President Emmanuel Macron drawing the ire of many in the country.

The proposal to establish a SEZ specifically for French industries is a notable attempt to attract capital from beyond PNG’s traditional partners.

Strategically coupled
This is strategically coupled with securing the future of the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project.

Macron’s personal undertaking to work with TotalEnergies to keep the project on schedule provides crucial stability for one of PNG’s most significant economic ventures.

For France, these arrangements secure a major energy investment for its national corporate champion and establish a stronger economic foothold in a strategically vital region between Asia and the Pacific.

In the area of security, the relationship addresses tangible needs for both nations.

PNG is faced with the immense challenge of monitoring a 2.4 million sq km Exclusive Economic Zone, making it vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The finalisation of a Shiprider Agreement with France provides a practical force-multiplier, leveraging French naval assets to enhance PNG’s maritime surveillance capabilities. This move, along with planned defence talks on air and maritime cooperation, allows PNG to diversify its security architecture.

For France, a resident power with Pacific territories like New Caledonia and French Polynesia, participating in regional security operations reinforces its role and commitment to stability in the Indo-Pacific.

Elevating diplomatic influence
The partnership is also a vehicle for elevating diplomatic influence.

Port Moresby has noted the significance of engaging with a partner that holds permanent membership on the UN Security Council and seats at the G7 and G20.

This alignment provides PNG with a powerful channel to global decision-making forums. The reciprocal move to establish a PNG embassy in Paris further cements the relationship on a mature footing.

The diplomatic synergy is perhaps best illustrated by France’s full endorsement of PNG’s bid to host a future UN Ocean Conference. This support provides PNG with a major opportunity to lead on the world stage, while allowing France to demonstrate its credentials as a key partner to the Pacific Islands.

This deepening PNG-France partnership does not exist in a vacuum.

It is unfolding within a broader context of heightened geopolitical competition across the Pacific.

The West’s view of China’s rapid emergence as a dominant economic and military force in the region has reshaped the strategic landscape, prompting traditional powers to re-engage with renewed urgency.

increased diplomatic footprint
The United States has responded by significantly increasing its diplomatic and security footprint, a move marked by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Port Moresby to sign the Defence Cooperation Agreement.

Similarly, Australia, PNG’s traditional security partner, is working to reinforce its long-standing influence through initiatives like the multi-million-dollar deal to establish a PNG team in its National Rugby League (NRL), a soft-power exercise reportedly linked to security outcomes.

This competitive environment has, in turn, created greater agency for Pacific nations, allowing them to diversify their partnerships beyond old allies and providing a fertile ground for European powers like France to assert their own strategic interests.

A strong foundation for the relationship is a shared public stance on environmental stewardship. The agreement on the need for rigorous scientific studies before any deep-sea mining occurs aligns PNG’s national policy with a position of environmental caution.

This common ground extends to broader climate action, where France’s commitment to conservation in the Pacific resonates with PNG’s status as a frontline nation vulnerable to climate change.

This alignment on values provides a durable and politically important basis for cooperation, allowing both nations to jointly advocate for climate justice and ocean protection.

For the Papua New Guinea economy, this deepening partnership with France is critically important as it provides high-level stability for the multi-billion-dollar Papua LNG project and creates a direct pathway for new investment through a proposed SEZ for French businesses.

Vital economic resource
Furthermore, by moving to finalise a Shiprider Agreement to combat illegal fishing, the government is actively protecting a vital economic resource.

For Marape’s credibility in local politics, these outcomes are tangible successes he can present to the nation as he battles a massive credibility dip in recent years.

Securing a personal undertaking from the leader of a G7 nation, gaining support for PNG to host a future UN Ocean Conference, and enhancing national security demonstrates effective leadership on the world stage.

This allows him to build a narrative of a competent statesman who, through “warm, personal relationships”, can deliver on promises of economic opportunity and national security while strengthening his political standing at home.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

To the Israeli attacks conducted as part of Operation Rising Lion, there was studied silence.  It was not a silence observed when it came to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  Then, the law books were swiftly procured, and obligations of the United Nations Charter cited under Article 2(4): “All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state.”  Russia was condemned for adopting a preventive stance on Ukraine as a threat to its security: that, in Kyiv joining NATO, a formidable threat would manifest at the border.

In his statement on the unfolding conflict between Israel and Iran, France’s President Emmanuel Macron made sure to condemn “Iran’s ongoing nuclear program”, having taken “all appropriate diplomatic measures in response.”  Israel also had the “right to defend itself and ensure its security”, leaving open the suggestion that it might have been justified resorting to Article 51 of the UN Charter.  All he could offer was a call on “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate.”

In a most piquant response, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories stated that, “On the day Israel, unprovoked, has attacked Iran, killing 80 people, the president of a major European power, finally admits that in the Middle East, Israel, and only Israel, has the right to defend itself.”

The German Foreign Office was even bolder in accusing Iran of having engaged in its own selfish measures of self-defence (such unwarranted bravado!), something it has always been happy to afford Israel.  “We strongly condemn the indiscriminate Iranian attack on Israeli territory.”  In contrast, the foreign office also felt it appropriate to reference the illegal attack on Iran as involving “targeted strikes” against its nuclear facilities. Despite Israel having an undeclared nuclear weapons stockpile that permanently endangers security in the region, the office went on to chastise Iran for having a nuclear program that violated “the Non-Proliferation Treaty”, threatening in its nature “to the entire region – especially Israel.”  Those at fault had been found out.

The President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, could hardly improve on that apologia.  She revealed that she had been conversing with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about the “escalating situation in the Middle East.”  She also knew her priorities: reiterating Israel’s right to self- defence and refusing to mention Iran’s, while tagging on the statement a broader concern for preserving regional stability.  The rest involved a reference to diplomacy and de-escalation, toward which Israel has shown a resolute contempt with regards Iran and its nuclear program.

The assessment offered by Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was forensically impressive, as well as being icily dismissive.  Not only did he reproach the German response for ignoring the importance of Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibiting the use of force subject to the right to self-defence, he brought up a reminder: targeted strikes against the nuclear facilities of any party “are prohibited under Article 56 of the additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions to which Germany is a party”.

ElBaradei also referred anyone exercised by such matters to the United Nations Security Council 487 (1981), which did not have a single demur in its adoption.  It unreservedly condemned the attack by Israel on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research reactor in June that year as a violation of the UN Charter, recognised that Iraq was a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and had permitted the IAEA inspections of the facility, stated that Iraq had a right to establish and develop civilian nuclear programs and called on Israel to place its own nuclear facilities under the jurisdictional safeguards of the IAEA.

The calculus regarding the use of force by Israel vis-à-vis its adversaries has long been a sneaky one.  It is jigged and rigged in favour of the Jewish state. As Trita Parsi put it with unblemished accuracy, Western pundits had, for a year and a half, stated that Hamas, having started the Gaza War on October 7, 2023 bore responsibility for civilian carnage. “Western pundits for the past 1.5 days: Israel started the war with Iran, and if Iran retaliates, they bear responsibility for civilian deaths.” The perceived barbarian, when attacked by a force seen as superior and civilised, will always be condemned for having reacted most naturally, and most violently of all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

After twenty months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5?

On May 30, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.

“We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”

He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for,” so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”

Fletcher called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”

Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?

This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?

If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.

Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.

The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17-20, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.

A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.

The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.

Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.

Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17 at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.

Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.

These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.

So all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,

“These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”

Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.

But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.

Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.

Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.

Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.

The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans–between 6% and 16% in each country–find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.

For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

As summer approaches, the French government and its media echo chambers are once again launching an Islamophobic offensive. By seizing on a newly released report about the so-called ‘influence’ of the Muslim Brotherhood, they are using a crude pretext to target and suppress any visible expression of Islam in society. This comes in the wake of the brutal murder of 22-year-old Aboubakar Cissé, a Malian-born carpenter who was stabbed 57 times while praying in a mosque — a horrific hate crime. We are republishing this article from last summer as a stark testament to the deep-rooted, cartoonish racism and bigotry that pervade the so-called “Cradle of Human Rights.” Although originally written for the French CGT Education teachers’ union, the article’s author has since been expelled for criticizing the Confederation’s stance on Gaza (see this petition).

The summer period is notoriously prone to forest fires, a formidable threat to our natural resources and the surrounding biodiversity. However, there is an even more insidious danger spreading through our societies, undermining our values and cohesion: irresponsible hate speech. A reminder of some recent occurrences is in order.

Occitan Hearth

At the end of April, in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools in the Academies of Toulouse and Montpellier [French southern cities of the Occitania region], a survey on “absenteeism” during the month of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr holiday, particularly affecting priority education zones [underprivileged areas with a significant Muslim community], targeted exclusively Muslim pupils. Commissioned by the Interior Ministry, this survey was required from schools by the police and the Ministry of Education. This situation provoked a legitimate outcry.

Following the denunciation of these stigmatizing practices — which turn a basic practice of Islam into a security issue — fraught with illegality, since religious statistics (even non-nominative ones) are strictly regulated in France, the authorities, as usual, talked a lot of hot air: “clumsiness”, “badly formulated message”, “autonomous research by an intelligence officer”, “study of the impact of certain religious holidays on the operation of public services”… As if cops were known for carrying out sociological investigations in schools; as if a religion other than Islam had ever been in the line of fire; as if occasional absences, provided for in the Education Code and legally unassailable (for the time being), could harm the functioning of Europe’s most overcrowded classrooms — after Romania.

A wet-finger estimate in [the right-wing newspaper] Le Figaro, announcing a “record absenteeism rate” on the day of Eid al-Fitr 2023 due to an alleged “TikTok trend,” is said to have prompted this investigation, which is perhaps intended to provide more quantified data for future witch-hunts. The data, moreover, is hardly usable, for while some school heads and inspectors have encouraged staff to respond to these tendentious surveys, which we can only deplore and denounce, others have fortunately dissuaded them from doing so — not to mention the fact that it is difficult to presume the reason for an absence on a Friday just before the national school holidays.

The question immediately arose as to the motives behind such a survey. Was it “only” a question of stirring up yet another unfounded controversy at the expense of the Muslim community? Or is the government planning to call into question an acquired right that is in no way contentious, in the name of an ever more narrow and misguided interpretation of secularism (which could tomorrow attack pork-free or meat-free menus in school canteens, ban any refunding of half-boarding fees for Muslim pupils during the month of Ramadan, etc.)? Will staff be the next targets of these investigations? Already, some non-teaching staff have been refused a “religious holiday” leave, which is illegal and unacceptable. Any attempt to generalize these measures on the pretext of “combating separatism” and “ensuring the smooth running of the public education service” must be fiercely opposed.

PACA Hearth and Ministerial Fuel to the Fire

On June 15, the Mayor of Nice and President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur (PACA) Regional Council, Christian Estrosi, issued an alarmist press release denouncing “several extremely serious incidents” which had occurred the previous day in three Nice elementary schools, and which were reported to the School Inspection Office, then to the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes Department, and the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne. The following day, the French Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, went even further, speaking of “intolerable facts,” the “mobilization of the Values of the Republic teams in all the schools concerned to ensure full respect for the principle of secularism on a permanent basis,” and the implementation of “the necessary government measures” to ensure respect for secularism — or “laïcité” — in schools.

The alleged “facts”? Some children in 4th and 5th grades were said to have “performed the Muslim prayer in their school playground” or organized “a minute’s silence in memory of the Prophet Mahomet[1].” These were nothing more than rumors, as the expressions of doubt (“it is reported to me,” “or”) and the conditional tense (“These unacceptable situations would also have taken place in secondary schools”) clearly underlines. Worse still, before even the slightest verification of these absolutely insignificant alleged facts (it’s just a handful of 9–10 year olds having fun in the playground), Christian Estrosi likened these “attempts at religious intrusion into the sanctuaries of the Republic that are our schools” to “religious obscurantism attempting to destabilize us” and to “families who left to wage jihad in Syria,” who are reportedly beginning to return to France and sending their children “to our schools.”

Pap Ndiaye and Christian Estrosi

And without even waiting for the results of “the General Inspectorate’s investigation to establish the facts precisely and draw the appropriate conclusions” (no kidding), the full force of the law was brought to bear against this allegedly dangerous “slide” (which at this stage has not even gone beyond the stage of gossip): “meeting with all the departments concerned to set up an action plan,” “reinforcement of State action to ensure that these attacks on secularism are firmly combated,” “campaign to prevent and combat radicalization,” “firm, collective, and resolute response,” setting up “secularism and values of the Republic training courses” which “will be the subject of a common module bringing together all personnel…” The joint press release from Christian Estrosi and Pap Ndiaye concluded with a fanfare worthy of this outpouring of catastrophist press releases, disproportionate means, and withering epithets: “the principle of secularism is non-negotiable in our Republic.” Such a display of paranoia and hysteria is not surprising from the reactionary clown Estrosi, whose secular fervor is otherwise well known, but considering what Pap Ndiaye was before he plunged body and soul into the political cesspool (Pap Ndiaye was a Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, focusing his research on the compared history of racially discriminatory practices in France and in America, and the Director of the French national museum of immigration], one can only feel a bitter mixture of disgust and pity)[2].

An Eternal Flame

The deep-seated motivations behind such Islamophobic outbursts are well known and have unfortunately become a constant in the discourse of Emmanuel Macron and his minions. Having faced massive popular opposition with the pension reform, they now resort to a despicable strategy of scapegoating, reminiscent of the darkest hours of France’s history. In a notorious debate with Marine Le Pen, President of the Far-Right Party “Rassemblement National” (National Rally), Macron’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin accused her of being “too soft” on Islam and refusing to “name the enemy”: “You say that Islam isn’t even a problem… You need to take vitamins, you’re not harsh enough!”

During a special evening dedicated to Samuel Paty [French teacher who was beheaded by a radicalized Islamist for showing his pupils derogatory Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam], Darmanin also denounced “communitarianism” and the “baser instincts” of “separatism” related to clothing or food (again, no kidding). He criticized clothing stores offering “community outfits” and the “halal sections” of supermarkets, portraying these as shocking practices. His aim was to link these cultural practices, which are perfectly harmless and consensual, to terrorism — a despicable process of amalgamation, stigmatization, and the appropriation of far-right discourse that is increasingly overt in the discourse and practices of Macron and his ministers.

Far from deterring the Rassemblement National’s electorate, this trivialization has only served to consolidate and grow it, providing a vigorous “vitamin” treatment regularly administered to hate speech by those in power and their media echo chambers.

In any case, it wouldn’t be the first time that alleged TikTok “cyber-attacks on secularism” or other unverified gossip causes an uproar in the services of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of National Education. Let us mention the controversies surrounding the wearing of the abaya and the deployment of the Orwellian concept of “improvised religious clothing,” promoted during the dubious “laïcité” training courses imposed on all teaching staff throughout France. These courses provide instructions and even rhetorical and legal tools to track down alleged intentions behind the “suspicious” dresses of presumably Muslim girls. A dress bought at H&M could thus fall under the “law banning ostentatious religious signs” (which really only targeted the Islamic veil) and earn the targeted schoolgirls summons, reprimands, or even threats and exclusion if they refuse to dress in a “republican” manner: a “morality police” doubled with a “thought police” in short. And it seems that the French authorities have just introduced a “children’s games police [3].” Are we soon to see SWAT teams in primary school playgrounds? The degree of insanity is such that a sneeze from a swarthy pupil that sounds vaguely like “Allahu Akbar” would be enough to trigger such an intervention.

Extinguishing the fires or fanning them?

At a time when violence, including far-right terrorism targeting our fellow Muslim citizens, is reaching worrying proportions, the government persists in fanning the flames of hatred with its pyromaniac actions, exacerbating the real dangers threatening civil peace. The government’s approach involves all-out repression, police and security abuses with total impunity [the French police are lately becoming seditious and openly rebellious, literally demanding a license to beat up and even kill without being bothered by any kind of justice procedure], and over-instrumentalizing trivial facts to raise the specter of fantasized threats. These tactics only serve to pit citizens against each other and divide the French society.

The republican school urgently needs resources, not diversionary strategies, artificial tensions, or a perpetual call into question of the status and fundamental rights of users and staff. The “non-negotiable” secularism promoted and ardently defended by the CGT Educ’action aims to ensure the serenity and cohesion of the educational community, not to transform staff into zealous police auxiliaries or confine an entire population to the status of suspect or “enemy within,” to be constantly monitored and held at bay.

The Republic guarantees freedom of worship and equal treatment for all its citizens. Anyone committed to republican ideals must protest against this frenzied desire to ignite bonfires from the most microscopic twigs, and against stigmatizing and discriminatory practices that tarnish France’s image abroad and regularly elicit condemnations from human rights associations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. National Education staff, in particular, must oppose these practices and report them to local union sections, which must vigorously defend all members of the educational community (staff, pupils, parents…) who fall victim to them.

ENDNOTES:

[1] The minute’s silence isn’t precisely a well-known practice in Muslim liturgy. As for the spelling “Mahomet,” we can only deplore the fact that despite the presence of the first name Mohammed in the top 10 of most given names in the current French population, and its position in the top 50 of names on French war memorials from the First World War, this backward-looking and contemptuous name dating from an era of antagonism between Christianity and Islam, and felt as an insult by millions of Muslims, remains in use.

[2] Like a downsized version of Voltaire fighting fanaticism in the days of the Inquisition, Pap Ndiaye has also taken to TV to denounce these “manifestations of religious proselytism in schools,” gargling in big words, notably BFM WC (“These facts are not acceptable in the School of the Republic… It is only natural that the Nice Academy, the Nice Rector, and the Nice Mayor should react firmly to ensure respect for the principles of secularism, which is why I have signed this joint declaration with the Nice Mayor… The parents have been summoned… The pupils have been reminded of their obligations with regard to religious neutrality, and they have been given training, because we’re talking about children after all… In secondary schools, [for similar acts] there can be sanctions [or even] temporary or permanent exclusions…”). Pap Ndiaye did not hesitate to spread false Islamophobic information, namely that these children all belonged to the Muslim faith, which was denied by Eliane’s testimony to BFM Côte d’Azur, whose non-Muslim grandson took part in these children’s games: “He should check his sources because my grandson was part of the group playing and imitating prayer. There was no intention, no religion in the middle, it was really just a game… The stigmatization of children is really lamentable… That’s why we no longer have confidence in politicians, because everything is blown out of proportion to unbelievable proportions, and this harms solidarity and life together.”

[3] Let us remind that to be valid, Muslim prayer (especially in congregations) requires the age of puberty, a precise timetable, ablutions, specific clothing, orientation towards Mecca, etc.; so many conditions that it is simply impossible to meet in an elementary school playground during the lunch break.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Salah Lamrani.

The killing of Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum located in downtown Washington, D.C. was such a chance. According to Yechiel Leitner, the Israeli ambassador to the US, the couple were to be engaged.

The suspect gunman, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested at the scene and taken away shouting: “Free Palestine!” In court documents submitted by the FBI, the suspect, in handing himself to the officers, stated his rationale for the shootings: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.” He also professed admiration for US Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in February 2024 declaring that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Rodriguez has been charged by the US attorney’s office in Washington with two counts of first-degree murder.

A grave, reflective response might have been in order. But the Netanyahu government has always been on the hunt for the political justification, and the political expedient. Given Netanyahu’s own political travails, be they corruption charges and his own unpopularity, this quest has become habitual. So it came to pass that Milgrim and Lischinsky could become a convenient platform to attack countries allied to Israel yet taking issue with the levelling and starving of Gaza.

The mood was set during a press conference given by Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on May 21. The slaying of Milgrim and Lischinsky was “the direct result of toxic antisemitic incitement against Israel and Jews around the world that has been going on since the October 7 massacre.” Israel’s missions and representatives across the globe had become “targets of antisemitic terrorism that has crossed all red lines.”

In suggesting “a direct line connecting antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement to this murder”, Sa’ar accused “leaders and officials of many countries and international organizations, especially from Europe”, for being central instigators. They had resorted to “modern blood libels” in accusing Israel of “genocide, crimes against humanity and murdering babies”.

While not expressly mentioning them, the Foreign Minister was clearly referring to France, Britain and Canada and their joint statement of May 19 warning about the murderous implications of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The statement affirmed the trio’s opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was condemned as wholly inadequate, while denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip was “unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law.” The three countries further condemned “the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”

The statement went on to warn that, were Israel not to cease pursuing such “egregious actions”, cease the ongoing military operation, and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid, “we will take further concrete actions in response.”

On May 20, in his address to the House of Commons, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy noted the “abominable” situation of threatened “starvation hanging over hundreds of thousands of civilians.” He grimly noted the words of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had spoken of “cleansing Gaza” and “destroying what’s left”, with the intention of relocating Palestinians to third countries. Such measures, for Lammy, were “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counter-productive.”

In light of such developments, negotiations with Israel over a new free trade agreement were to be suspended. A further three individuals and four entities involved in Israel’s illegal settler program in the West Bank were also to be sanctioned.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry was dismissive of the British position, calling the sanctions “regrettable”. “If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy – that is its own prerogative.”

It was Netanyahu, however, who pulled out all the stops. In a video address, he noted the words uttered by Rodriquez as he was taken away: “Free Palestine.” Finding such a statement obscene, he recalled that it was “the same chant we heard on October 7 [2023]”, when “thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza”, proceeding to behead men, rape women and burn babies. To take “Free Palestine” as a serious proposition was “today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler.’” It was a “simple truth” that had evaded “the leaders of France, Britain, Canada and others.” In their proposals for establishing a Palestinian state, they were rewarding “these murderers with the ultimate price.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney were roundly condemned for being on “the wrong side of justice”, “humanity” and “history”. They had been praised by “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”. The PM’s objective was simple: avoiding the establishment of any Palestinian state, as it was bound to be vulnerable to seizure by “radicals”. It was axiomatic that such an entity would wish for the destruction of the Jewish state. The picture becomes complete: Israel’s operations, totally justified on national security grounds; critics, abominated as hateful antisemites; the Palestinians, radicals current or in embryo needing to be rubbed out.

No one doubts that the reserves of antisemitism run deep, clouded by miasmic, millennial hatreds. Few can also doubt that a dislike of policies driven by ethno-religious fanaticism contemptuous of human rights is a valid ground of protest. That this should end up in killings of individuals attending an event about humanitarian aid that would have otherwise appalled Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, et al., is another, disturbing irony. Fanaticism diminishes the horizon, leaving human beings bare, and hollow, and naked. And that baring is currently underway with remorseless intensity in Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their ‘criticisms’ of the genocide – just as they earlier coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different – but equally deceitful – narrative.

With the finishing line in sight for Israel’s programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West’s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada – key US allies – erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

They called Israel’s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing “disproportionate”, while Israel’s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was “intolerable”.

The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language against Israel from the western press corps.

The establishment media’s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza’s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – after more than a year and a half of indifference – did not appear too abrupt, or too strange.

They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.

The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.

But the deeper reality is that western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their “criticisms” of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – just as they earlier coordinated their support for it.

As much was conceded by a senior Israeli official to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Referring to the sudden change of tone, he said: “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The handwringing is just another bit of stagecraft, little different from the earlier mix of silence and talk about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. And it is to the same purpose: to buy Israel time to “finish the job” – that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The West is still promoting phoney “debates”, entirely confected by Israel, about whether Hamas is stealing aid, what constitutes sufficient aid, and how that aid should be delivered.

It is all meant as noise, to distract us from the only pertinent issue: that Israel is committing genocide by slaughtering and starving Gaza’s population, as the West has aided and abetted that genocide.

PR exercise

With stocks of food completely exhausted by Israel’s blockade, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday that some 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours without immediate aid reaching them.

The longer-term prognosis is bleaker still.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to let in a trickle of aid, releasing five trucks, some containing baby formula, from the thousands of vehicles Israel has held up at entry points for nearly three months. That was less than one percent of the number of trucks experts say must enter daily just to keep deadly starvation at bay.

On Tuesday, as the clamour grew, the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza reportedly climbed to nearly 100 – or less than a fifth of the bare minimum. None of the aid was reported to have reached the enclave’s population by the time of writing.

Netanyahu was clear to the Israeli public – most of whom appear enthusiastic for the engineered starvation to continue – that he was not doing this out of any humanitarian impulse.

This was purely a public relations exercise to hold western capitals in check, he said. The goal was to ease the demands on these leaders from their own publics to penalise Israel and stop the continuing slaughter of Gaza’s population.

Or as Netanyahu put it: “Our best friends worldwide, the most pro-Israel senators [in the US] … they tell us they’re providing all the aid, weapons, support and protection in the UN Security Council, but they can’t support images of mass hunger.”

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was even clearer: “On our way to destroying Hamas, we are destroying everything that’s left of the [Gaza] Strip.” He also spoke of “cleansing” the enclave.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

Western publics have been watching this destruction unfold for the past 19 months – or at least they’ve seen partial snapshots, when the West’s establishment media has bothered to report on the slaughter.

Israel has systematically eradicated everything necessary for the survival of Gaza’s people: their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries, water systems and community kitchens.

Israel has finally implemented what it had been threatening for 20 years to do to the Palestinian people if they refused to be ethnically cleansed from their homeland. It has sent them “back to the Stone Age”.

A survey of the world’s leading genocide scholars published last week by the Dutch newspaper NRC found that all conclusively agreed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Most think the genocide has reached its final stages.

This week, Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s main centrist party and a former deputy head of the Israeli military, expressed the same sentiments in more graphic form. He accused the government of “killing babies as a hobby”. Predictably, Netanyahu accused Golan of “antisemitism”.

The joint statement from Starmer, Macron and Carney was far tamer, of course – and was greeted by Netanyahu with a relatively muted response that the three leaders were giving Hamas a “huge prize”.

Their statement noted: “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.” Presumably, until now, they have viewed the hellscape endured by Gaza’s Palestinians for a year and a half as “tolerable”.

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary who in the midst of the genocide was happy to be photographed shaking hands with Netanyahu, opined in parliament this week that Gaza was facing a “dark new phase”.

That’s a convenient interpretation for him. In truth, it’s been midnight in Gaza for a very long time.

A senior European diplomatic source involved in the discussions between the three leaders told the BBC that their new tone reflected a “real sense of growing political anger at the humanitarian situation, of a line being crossed, and of this Israeli government appearing to act with impunity”.

This should serve as a reminder that until now, western capitals were fine with all the other lines crossed by Israel, including its destruction of most of Gaza’s homes; its eradication of Gaza’s hospitals and other essential humanitarian infrastructure; its herding of Palestinian civilians into “safe” zones, only to bomb them there; its slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of children; and its active starvation of a population of more than two million.

Played for fools

The three western leaders are now threatening to take “further concrete actions” against Israel, including what they term “targeted sanctions”.

If that sounds positive, think again. The European Union and Britain have dithered for decades about whether and how to label goods imported from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The existence of these ever-expanding settlements, built on stolen Palestinian territory and blocking the creation of a Palestinian state, is a war crime; no country should be aiding them.

In 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that it must be made clear to European consumers which products come from Israel and which from the settlements.

In all that time, European officials never considered a ban on products from the settlements, let alone “targeted sanctions” on Israel, even though the illegality of the settlements is unambiguous. In fact, officials have readily smeared those calling for boycotts and sanctions against Israel as “Jew haters” and “antisemites”.

The truth is that western leaders and establishment media are playing us for fools once again, just as they have been for the past 19 months.

“Further concrete actions” suggest that there are already concrete actions imposed on Israel. That’s the same Israel that recently finished second in the Eurovision Song Contest. Protesters who call for Israel to be excluded from the competition – as Russia has been for invading Ukraine – are smeared and denounced.

When western leaders can’t even impose a meaningful symbolic penalty on Israel, why should we believe they are capable of taking substantive action against it?

No will for action

On Tuesday, it became clearer what the UK meant by “concrete actions”. The Israeli ambassador was called in for what we were told was a dressing down. She must be quaking.

And Britain suspended – that is, delayed – negotiations on a new free trade agreement, a proposed expansion of Britain’s already extensive trading ties with Israel. Those talks can doubtless wait a few months.

Meanwhile, 17 European Union members out of 27 voted to review the legal basis of the EU–Israel Association Agreement – providing Israel with special trading status – though a very unlikely consensus would be needed to actually revoke it.

Such a review to see if Israel is showing “respect for human rights and democratic principles” is simple time-wasting. Investigations last year showed it was committing widespread atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Speaking to the British parliament, Lammy said: “The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”

There are plenty of far more serious “concrete actions” that Britain and other western capitals could take, and could have taken many months ago.

A flavour was provided by Britain and the EU on Tuesday when they announced sweeping additional sanctions on Russia – not for committing a genocide, but for hesitating over a ceasefire with Ukraine.

Ultimately, the West wants to punish Moscow for refusing to return the territories in Ukraine that it occupies – something western powers have never meaningfully required of Israel, even though Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories for decades.

The new sanctions on Russia target entities supporting its military efforts and energy exports – on top of existing severe economic sanctions and an oil embargo. Nothing even vaguely comparable is being proposed for Israel.

The UK and Europe could have stopped providing Israel with the weapons to butcher Palestinian children in Gaza. Back in September, Starmer promised to cut arms sales to Israel by around eight percent – but his government actually sent more weapons to arm Israel’s genocide in the three months that followed than the Tories did in the entire period between 2020 and 2023.

Britain could also stop transporting other countries’ weapons and carrying out surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. Flight tracking information showed that on one night this week, the UK sent a military transport plane, which can carry weapons and soldiers, from a Royal Air Force base on Cyprus to Tel Aviv, and then dispatched a spy plane over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in its slaughter.

Britain could, of course, take the “concrete action” of recognising the state of Palestine, as Ireland and Spain have already done – and it could do so at a moment’s notice.

The UK could impose sanctions on Israeli government ministers. It could declare its readiness to enforce Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, in line with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, if he visits Britain. And it could deny Israel access to sporting events, turning it into a pariah state, as was done to Russia.

It could announce that any Britons returning from military service in Gaza risk arrest and prosecution for war crimes.

And of course, the UK could impose sweeping economic sanctions on Israel, again as was done to Russia.

All of these “concrete actions”, and more, could be easily implemented. The truth is there is no political will to do it. There is simply a desire for better public relations, for putting a better gloss on Britain’s complicity in a genocide that can no longer be hidden.

Wolf exposed

The problem for the West is that Israel now stands stripped of the lamb’s clothing in which it has been adorned by western capitals for decades.

Israel is all too evidently a predatory wolf. Its brutal, colonial behaviours towards the Palestinian people are fully on show. There is no hiding place.

This is why Netanyahu and western leaders are now engaged in an increasingly difficult tango. The colonial, apartheid, genocidal project of Israel – the West’s militarised client-bully in the oil-rich Middle East – needs to be protected.

Until now, that had involved western leaders like Starmer deflecting criticism of Israel’s crimes, as well as British complicity. It involved endlessly and mindlessly reciting Israel’s “right to defend itself”, and the need to “eliminate Hamas”.

But the endgame of Israel’s genocide involves starving two million people to death – or forcing them out of Gaza, whichever comes first. Neither is compatible with the goals western politicians have been selling us.

So the new narrative must accentuate Netanyahu’s personal responsibility for the carnage – as though the genocide is not the logical endpoint of everything Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for many decades.

Most Israelis are on board, too, with the genocide. The only meaningful voices of dissent are from the families of the Israeli hostages – and then chiefly because of the danger posed to their loved ones by Israel’s assault.

The aim of Starmer, Macron and Carney is to craft a new narrative, in which they claim to have only belatedly realised that Netanyahu has “gone too far” and that he needs to be reined in. They can then gradually up the noise against the Israeli prime minister, lobby Israel to change tack, and, when it resists or demurs, be seen to press Washington for “concrete action”.

The new narrative, unlike the worn-thin old one, can be spun out for yet more weeks or months – which may be just long enough to get the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza either over the finish line, or near enough as to make no difference.

That is the hope – yes, hope – in western capitals.

Blood on their hands

Starmer, Macron and Carney’s new make-believe narrative has several advantages. It washes Gaza’s blood from their hands. They were deceived. They were too charitable. Vital domestic struggles against antisemitism distracted them.

It lays the blame squarely at the feet of one man: Netanyahu.

Without him, a violent, highly militarised, apartheid state of Israel can continue as before, as though the genocide was an unfortunate misstep in Israel’s otherwise unblemished record.

New supposed “terror” threats – from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran – can be hyped to draw us back into cheerleading narratives about a plucky western outpost of civilisation defending us from barbarians in the East.

The new narrative does not even require that Netanyahu face justice.

As news emerges of the true extent of the atrocities and death toll, a faux-remorseful Netanyahu can placate the West with revived talk of a two-state solution – a solution whose realisation has been avoided for decades and can continue to be avoided for decades more.

We will be subjected to yet more years of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” finally being about to turn a corner.

Even were a chastened Netanyahu forced to step down, he would pass the baton to one of the other Jewish supremacist, genocidal monsters waiting in the wings.

After Gaza’s destruction, the crushing of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem will simply have to return to an earlier, slower pace – one that has allowed it to be kept off the western public’s radar for 58 years.

Will it really work out like this? Only in the imaginations of western elites. In truth, burying nearly two years of a genocide all too visible to large swaths of western publics will be a far trickier task.

Too many people in Europe and the US have had their eyes opened over the past 19 months. They cannot unsee what has been live-streamed to them, or ignore what it says about their own political and media classes.

Starmer and co will continue vigorously distancing themselves from the genocide in Gaza, but there will be no escape. Whatever they say or do, the trail of blood leads straight back to their door.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

On Monday President Donald Trump telephoned President Vladimir Putin and they talked for two hours before Trump put lunch in his mouth and Putin his dinner.

On the White House schedule, there was no advance notice of the call and no record afterwards. The White House log is blank for Trump’s entire morning while the press were told he was at lunch between 11:30 and 12:30.

Putin went public first, making a statement to the press which the Kremlin posted at 19:55 Moscow time; it was then 12:55 in Washington. Click to read.

Trump and his staff read the transcript and then composed Trump’s statement in a tweet posted at 13:33 Washington time, 20:33 Moscow time. Click to read.

If Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, the president’s negotiator with the Ukraine and FUGUP (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Poland), were consulted during Trump’s prepping, sat in on the call with the President,  or were informed immediately after the call, they have remained silent.

The day before, May 18, Rubio announced that the Istanbul-II meeting had produced agreement “to exchange paper on ideas to get to a ceasefire. If those papers have ideas on them that are realistic and rational, then I think we know we’ve made progress. If those papers, on the other hand, have requirements in them that we know are unrealistic, then we’ll have a different assessment.” Rubio was hinting that the Russian formula in Istanbul, negotiations-then-ceasefire, has been accepted by the US. What the US would do after its “assessment”, Rubio didn’t say – neither walk-away nor threat of new sanctions.

Vice President JD Vance wasn’t present at the call because he was flying home from Rome where he attended Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass. “We’re more than open to walking away,” Vance told reporters in his aeroplane. “The United States is not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes.” Vance prompted Trump to mention the Pope as a mediator for a new round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, first to Putin and then in public.

Kellogg is refusing to go along. He tweeted on Sunday: “In Istanbul @SecRubio  made it clear that we have presented ‘a strong peace plan’. Coming out of the London meetings we (US) came up with a comprehensive 22 point plan that is a framework for peace. The first point is a comprehensive cease fire that stops the killing now.”

FUGUP issued their own statement after Trump’s call. “The US President and the European partners have agreed on the next steps. They agreed to closely coordinate the negotiation process and to seek another technical meeting. All sides reaffirmed their willingness to closely accompany Ukraine on the path to a ceasefire. The European participants announced that they would increase pressure on the Russian side through sanctions.”

This signalled acceptance with Trump of the Russian formula, negotiations-then-ceasefire, and time to continue negotiating at the “technical” level. The sanction threat was added. But this statement was no longer FUGUP. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was omitted; so too Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The Italian, the Finn and the European Commission President were substituted. They make FUGIFEC.

Late in the Paris evening of Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to keep Starmer in Trump’s good books and preserve the ceasefire-first formula. “I spoke tonight,” Macron tweeted, “with @POTUS @Keir_Starmer @Bundeskanzler  and @GiorgiaMeloni  after our talks in Kyiv and Tirana. Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe.” By the time on Monday that Macron realized he had been trumped, the Elysée had nothing to say.

By contrast, Italian Prime Minister Meloni signalled she was happy to line up with Trump and accept Putin’s negotiations-then-ceasefire. “Efforts are being made,” Meloni’s office announced, “for an immediate start to negotiations between the parties that can lead as soon as possible to a ceasefire and create the conditions for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”  Meloni claimed she would assure that Pope Leo XIV would fall into line. “In this regard, the willingness of the Holy Father to host the talks in the Vatican was welcomed. Italy is ready to do its part to facilitate contacts and work for peace.”

For the time being, Putin’s and Trump’s statements have put Rubio, Kellogg and the Europeans offside. Decoding the two president’s statements shows how and why.

President Putin’s Statement

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76953 

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good evening.

Our colleagues asked me to briefly comment on the outcome of my telephone conversation with the President of the United States.This conversation has effectively taken place and lasted more than two hours. I would like to emphasise that it was both substantive and quite candid. Overall, [1] I believe it was a very productive exchange.

First and foremost [2], I expressed my gratitude to the President of the United States for the support provided by the United States in facilitating the resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine aimed at potentially reaching a peace agreement and resuming the talks which, as we know, were thwarted by the Ukrainian side in 2022 [3].

The President of the United States shared his position [4] on the cessation of hostilities and the prospects for a ceasefire. For my part, I noted that Russia also supports a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis as well. What we need now is to identify the most effective [5] ways towards achieving peace.

We agreed with the President of the United States that Russia would propose and is ready to engage with the Ukrainian side on drafting a memorandum [6] regarding a potential future peace agreement. This would include outlining a range of provisions, such as the principles for settlement, the timeframe for a possible peace deal, and other matters, including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements [7] be reached.

Contacts among participants of the Istanbul meeting and talks have resumed, which gives reason to believe that we are on the right track overall [8].

I would like to reiterate that the conversation was highly constructive, and I assess it positively. The key issue, of course, is now for the Russian side and the Ukrainian side to show their firm commitment to peace and to forge a compromise that would be acceptable to all parties.

Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes [9] of this crisis is what matters most to us.

Should any clarifications be necessary, Press Secretary [Dmitry] Peskov and my aide, Mr Ushakov [10], will provide further details on today’s telephone talks with President Trump.

Keys to Decode

1. This is a qualifier, meaning there are serious differences on the details — Putin asked Trump to pause, halt or cease all arms deliveries to the Ukraine, including US arms shipped through Israel, Germany, and Poland. This is a bullet Trump hasn’t bitten, yet.

2. Putin has made a firm decision to give Trump the “peace deal” he has asked for and wishes to announce at a summit meeting. In their call Putin was mollifying Trump’s disappointment at the failure of their plan to meet when Trump was in the Middle East. A Russian source comments: “Whatever concessions have to be made will be made only by Putin and only to Trump. The Europeans are trying to hog the headlines and turn their defeat into some sort of victory – Trump won’t let them have it and Putin won’t either.”

3. Putin does not publicly admit the mistakes he made with Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Medinsky in March 2022 at Istanbul-I. They have now been corrected at the  consensus decision-making session with the military and intelligence chiefs (May 14 Kremlin session) and then on May 16 in Istanbul with Admiral Igor Kostyukov of the GRU seated on Medinsky’s right with General Alexander Fomin, Deputy Minister of Defence. For more details, click to listen.

Source: https://ria.ru/20250516/peregovory-2017151081.html
At top left, 2nd from left, Fomin, then Kostyukov (obscured) and then Medinsky.

4. Soft qualifier. This means Putin did not agree with several of Trump’s points relating to intelligence sharing, arms deliveries, Ukrainian elections.

5. Future tense. Putin suggested to  Trump that he stop Kellogg and FUGUP encouraging Zelensky. Putin made an especially negative remark about the role played by Prime Minister Starmer.

6. This is a Russian lesson in escalation control. By putting the memorandum of understanding in Russian hands to initiate, Putin returns to the key parts of the December 17, 2021, draft treaty which President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken summarily dismissed. Placing agreement on these terms first, before a temporary ceasefire, and making that ceasefire conditional on ceaseforce (halt to battlefield intelligence sharing and arms re-supply), Putin has invited Trump to choose between the US and FUGUP; between Zelensky and an elected successor;  and between his personal negotiator advisors, Steven Witkoff and General Kellogg.

7. Reiteration of the formula, negotiations first, then ceasefire.

8. Qualifier repeated – see Key 1.

9. This phrase refers to the European security architecture and mutual security pact of December 2021, as well as to the two declared objectives of the Special Military Operation — demilitarization and denazification.

10. Following Putin’s statement, Ushakov added: “other details of the telephone conversation. Among other things, Putin and Trump touched upon the exchange of prisoners of citizens of the two countries: the format of ‘nine nine’ is being worked out. The leaders also discussed their possible meeting and agreed that it should be productive, so the teams of the presidents will work out the content of the summit between Russia and the United States.”

President Trump’s Statement

Tweet source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114535693441367601

Trump followed in a stumbling speech in the Rose Garden in which, referring to the morning telephone call, he said “they [Putin] like Melania better.”

Just completed my two hour call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. I believe it went very well. Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire [1] and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. [2] The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree [3]. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country.

Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately. I have so informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of Italy, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany, and President Alexander Stubb, of Finland, during a call with me,[4]  immediately after the call with President Putin. The Vatican, as represented by the Pope [5] has stated that it would be very interested in hosting the negotiations. Let the process begin! [6]

Keys to Decode

1. Trump accepts that negotiations should come before ceasefire.

2. This amounts to rejection of Kellogg’s 22-point term paper first decided with Zelensky and FUGUP in London on April 23 and repeated by Macron the night before Trump’s telephone call; as well as rejection of Witkoff’s term paper discussed at the Kremlin on April 25.

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76797
From left to right: Witkoff’s interpreter, Witkoff, Putin, Ushakov, Russian interpreter, Kirill Dmitriev. For analysis of the term sheets, read this.

3. Agreement with the business deal-making which Witkoff has been discussing with Kirill Dmitriev. For the deal beneficiaries on both sides, read this.

4. This list includes two Germans, both Russia haters — Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, former German defense minister and supporter of the German rearmament plan to continue the war with Russia into the future. The British Prime Minister has been dropped by Trump, and also Polish Prime Minister Tusk. Included for the first time in this context are the Italian and Finnish representatives with whom Trump has demonstrated personal rapport. Research by Manos Tzafalias indicates that there is a substantial money interest in Finland for Trump’s associate, Elon Musk.

5. Prompt from the Catholic convert, Vice President Vance.

Vance and Rubio meeting with Pope Leo XIV on May 18. They invited the Pope to make an official visit to Washington. The last papal visit to the White House was in September 2015 on the invitation of President Obama and Vice President Biden.

6. Trump has covered his disappointment at failing to hold a summit meeting with Putin in Istanbul on the afternoon of May 16 by dismissing the negotiations which occurred without him. For details of Trump’s abortive summit plan, read this.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

A few years ago, no one would have imagined that one of the biggest democracies in the world would cancel research programs under the pretext that the word ‘diversity’ was in this program.

— French President Emmanuel Macron, Choose Europe for Science Event/Paris, May 5, 2025

America’s shores are experiencing a huge sucking sound as one of the biggest brain drains of modern history hits the country’s best, smartest, heading for Europe on grants, as smiles abound across the pond. European leaders are pinching themselves, unable to believe such good fortune falling into their laps, thanks to the Trump administration “freezing” government funding linked to “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.”

The EU has officially launched a drive to attract scientists and researchers that America is discarding by the bucketful, see:  “Europe Launches a Drive to Attract Scientists and Researchers After Trump Freezes US Funding,” AP News, May 5, 2025.

This is an extraordinary shrinking of America’s IQ in so many ways that a full understanding is nearly impossible, but it is only too obvious that deliberate destruction of science is the product of a bruised/intimidated mentality that’s seeking payback. There is no other logical explanation.

The EU is licking its chops over this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. According to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, while on stage at Sorbonne University, the EU Executive Branch has already decided to set up a “super grant” program, aimed at “longer-term perspective to the very best in the field.”

Essentially, the EU is cherry-picking some of America’s best brain power. To accomplish this phenomenal opportunity, the Commission is authorizing additional funding of $566 million in 2025-2027, making Europe “a magnet for researchers.” This funding is in addition to the European Research Council’s budget of $18 billion for 2021-2027. Moreover, the EU will “enshrine freedom of scientific research into law” via a new enactment. Europe will not compromise on its long-standing principles of academic freedom.

Above and beyond the EU, according to President Macron, France has also beefed-up commitments to science and research to capitalize on America’s ‘fired’ scientists. France has launched a platform for reception of international researchers: Choose France for Science. President Macron officially christened the platform: “Here in France, research is a priority, innovation a culture, science a limitless horizon. Men and women researchers from all over the world, choose France, choose Europe.”

So far, the US has cut 380 grant projects and thousands of university researchers have been notified that their National Science Foundation funding is canceled, but they know where to turn. Backlash has resulted as doctors, scientists, and researchers hit the streets in “Stand Up for Science” rallies across the country. Astronomy Professor Phil Platt, addressing a crowd, said: “We’re looking at the most aggressively anti-science government the United States has ever had.” UPenn climate scientists Michael Mann: “Science is under siege.” Bill Nye the Science Guy hit the bull’s eye, rhetorically challenging the forces of government: “What are you afraid of?” which may become the rallying cry of opposition throughout the land.

Professionals agree that science has been in the midst of enormous achievements to make lives better than ever, but according to senior staff members of the National Institutes of Health, funding cuts will seriously damage or eliminate major progress on key, very significant, programs for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer, as examples. Unfortunately, this will negatively impact tens of millions of Americans for years to come.

Since World War II, the US has been recognized as a world leader in science and technology. Now, that enviable position is swirling around the drain. According to several key federal workers who spoke at a recent MIT Technology Review, America’s world leadership is literally being dismantled before our eyes. These are research programs that backstop American life. “The US took nearly a century to craft its rich scientific ecosystem; if the unraveling that has taken place over the past month continues, Americans will feel the effects for decades to come.” (“The Foundations of America’s Prosperity Are Being Dismantled,” MIT Technology Review, Feb. 21, 2025)

According to a recent article in The Hill, March 2, 2025: “The administration has issued a multi-pronged, anti-science attack on the health sciences. Possibly the most destructive is the recent slashing of research funding for both NIH and the National Science Foundation.” Here’s what’s at stake: “In 2024, NIH provided more than $37 billion in funding across every state, creating more than 400,000 jobs and generating $92 billion in economic activity. This funding is used for laboratory research, research centers and, most importantly, the education of trainees, the next generation of scientists. Trainees greatly contribute to the research and discoveries even while they are in training.”

If $37 billion in funding produces $92 billion “in economic activity” and “supports 400.000 jobs,” what’s up with destroying a greater than 2-for-1 return on investment? What’s missing from this equation, or is it simply a matter of looney-tunes, not knowing which way is up? Study after study after study, and more studies, prove that governmental funding of science generates returns in-excess of what private enterprise achieves. For example, governmental science funding played the crucial leading role in creation of the internet. What’s that worth?

It should be widely recognized and brought to the public’s attention that so much is wrong, so much at stake with anti-science rhetoric, recklessly cutting science budgets, elimination of entire programs, and loud-mouthed threats, demoralizing the public about science. It’s difficult to know how to respond, and of course, this is the intention behind the rapidity of a well-orchestrated blind-siding all parties, unable to collect ones’ thoughts type of assault on major, hugely productive governmental programs that protect life. This type of assault is comparable to a Panzer Division Blitzkrieg. Nobody has enough time to react.

What’s the impact of Blitzkriegs demolishing science? According to an article in Science, May 2, 2025: “Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Mean ‘Disastrous’ Cuts to Science.” For those interested, this article delineates agencies subject to cuts. Meanwhile, the brain drain is in full throttle motion. Of interest, an article in the prestigious science journal Nature, March 25, 2025: A poll found that 75% of 1,600 respondents, including 1,200 US scientists said: “Yes, they are looking for jobs in Europe and Canada.” And there’s considerable anecdotal evidence that current post-graduates are looking overseas.

And there’s this: “Trump Proposed Unprecedented Budget Cuts to US Science,” Nature, May 2, 2025: “Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and scientific pipeline… The message that this sends to young scientists is that this country is not a place for you,’ says Michael Lubell, a physicist who tracks science policy at the City University of New York in New York City. ‘If I were starting my career, I would be out of here in a heartbeat.”

The word is out. Scientists will find opportunities galore. Science has never been more sought after in Europe and Canada and Australia, which ranks 5th in the world for trust in science. After all, the world is experiencing the most exciting era of scientific achievement of all time, and the EU intends to take over leadership, stripping the US of its 75-year crown. It’s been laid in their lap.

Moreover, according to the National Science Foundation, China has already overtaken America in several key scientific metrics. Going forward, the EU has America to thank for reinvigorating its science and technology effort more so than ever before, as they challenge China with much more enthusiasm for top billing. The U.S. lit their fuse, making EU science and technology great again!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Apparently, the use of that particular fragrance by the France’s head of state happens to be “industrial” in application, “at all hours of the day”, intended to impress “less-accustomed visitors” with “the floral and musky scent, as refined as it is powerful.” A former aide is quoted as claiming that the President’s use is far from subtle, a way of “marking his territory”. Former minister Stanislas Guerini is also found stating that “everyone holds their breath for a few moments before [his] arrival.” That’s if we believe the findings of Le Parisien journalist Olivier Beaumont in The Tragedy of the Élysée (La Tragédie de L’Élysée).

The field of scent and odours teems with what might be loosely called analysis of the self-evident and palpably obvious. Scent is worn for calculated reasons: for impression, the pursuit of sex, an expression of power. An article in Women’s Wear Daily from June 1990 is pungent with examples, much of it featuring garden gnome psychology. “Those who select a different fragrance for every occasion use scents as a means of shaping their social image,” Mark Snyder, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota is quoted as saying. “All odors trigger an emotional response,” one Susan Schiffman, medical psychologist at Duke University blandly states.

According to the book, Macron’s choice of fragrant dousing is driven by power – and ensuring that everyone else working with him knows about it. “Just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Emmanuel Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Élysée.”

These revelations about Macron’s excessive use have caused something of a ripple. “It is one thing at a school dance or nightclub when you are a horny teen,” writes Zoe Strimpel in The Spectator. “Outside of these contexts, it can be a nauseating, terrible thing.” The Daily Telegraph dives into the shallow currents of social media to use the term “blusher blindness”, meant to signify “an inability to objectively gauge how much blusher one is applying – often resulting in overly roughed cheeks.”

Tips are offered for Macron with unasked, hollow generosity, many amounting to a shoddy excuse to plump for preferred products. (The “Mr President Could Do Far Better” discipline.) Fragrance journalist (they do exist), Alice du Parcq is more than up to the task. “Scent can be truly very potent, so if you’re spending time in close proximity to a lot of other people you should be a little more gentle with your approach,” she chides. Avoid, she advocates, spraying on wrists. Why not the top of each forearm? “This makes the scent last longer as it’s less likely to come off every time you wash your hands.” The fragrance lingers, as “the skin is more textured and it also clings to an arm hair, which is porous.”

The advertising note emerges from the opinions of Thomas Dunckley, who markets himself as “fragrance expert, writer, trainer, event host and speaker”. He suggests that products less concentrated in fragrance oils might be appropriate when seeking a balance. “An eau de cologne is a good way for a man to wear a pleasant fragrance without making a statement or overpowering.” He throws in the recommended products: Eau de Guerlain and Acqua di Parma.

The disciplinarian view is most evident in the commentary that accuses the French leader of revealing a character fault. As with one of his predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy, size and stature are matters of comment regarding Macron, implying that a manufactured defect requires remedies of exaggeration. Small men demand large substitutes, broad covers, gargantuan distractions. The spare frame will not do.

If one has to use perfume, suggests Strimpel, why not do so differently? “A French leader might, one would think, go for something more openly, proudly elite, since he is not hamstrung by the modern British obsession with appearing to be one of the people,” she squawks. A fault is swiftly detected: immaturity. Perhaps Macron confused his abode of power with the school where he met his wife, Brigitte, “planting the seed (or perhaps it was the scent?) that would eventually lead her to return his passion.”

The fragrance analysts and perfumeries will be delighted to know that a head of state is so enamoured with a specific product. Those wishing to make a fuss about workplace attitudes and dispositions will also add, and have added, their worthless observations. Ultimately, the use, or otherwise, of French power would not come down to a fragrance but a decision marked by other considerations. The fragrance cabal and tabloid titterers may have you think otherwise.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany.  (Photo: Reuters)

When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.

Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

In Europe, the fear at the retreat of Washington’s nuclear umbrella, and the inflation of the Russian threat, has caused flutters of panic. On February 20, 2025, Friedrich Merz, chairman of the Christian Democratic Union and the incoming German chancellor, floated the idea that other states consider shouldering Europe’s security burden. “We need to have discussions with both the British and the French – the two European nuclear powers – about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, would apply to us.”

Merz has also explicitly urged European states to accept the proposition that “Donald Trump will no longer unconditionally honour NATO’s mutual defence commitment”, making it incumbent on them to “make every effort to at least be able to defend the European continent on its own.”

On March 1, French President Emmanuel Macron showed signs of interest. In an interview with Portuguese TV RTP, he expressed willingness to “to open this discussion … if it allows to build a European force.” There had “always been a European dimension to France’s vital interests within its nuclear doctrine.”

On March 5, in an address to the nation, Macron openly identified Russia as a “threat to France and Europe”. Accordingly, he had decided “to open the strategic debate on the protection of our allies on the European continent by our (nuclear) deterrent.” The future of Europe did not “have to be decided in Washington or Moscow.”

The matter of France’s European dimension has certainly been confirmed by remarks made by previous presidents, including Charles de Gaulle, who, in 1964, stated that an attack on a country such as Germany by the then Soviet Union would be seen as a threat to France.

Domestically, Macron’s offer did not go down well in certain quarters. It certainly did not impress Marie Le Pen of the far-right National Rally. “The French nuclear deterrent must remain a French nuclear deterrent,” she declared in comments made on a visit to the Farm Show in Paris. “It must not be shared, let alone delegated.” This was a misunderstanding, came the response from Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu. The deterrent “is French and will remain French – from its conception to its production to its operation, under a decision of the president.”

A number of countries meeting at the European Union emergency security summit in Brussels showed interest in Macron’s offer, with some caution. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk suggested that “we must seriously consider this proposal.” Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda thought the idea “very interesting” as “a nuclear umbrella would serve as really very serious deterrence towards Russia.” Latvian Prime Minister Evika Siliņa was not inclined to commit to a stationing of French nuclear weapons on Latvian territory: it was “too soon” to raise the issue.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, on the other hand, found the debate “premature”, as “our security is guaranteed by close cooperation with the United States”. He certainly has a point, given that the United States still, at present, maintains an extensive nuclear arsenal on European soil.

The trouble with deterrence chatter is that it remains hostage to delusion. Strategists talk in extravagant terms about the genuine prospect that nuclear weapons can make any one state safer, leading to some calculus of tolerable use. Thus we find the following comment from Benoît Grémare of the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3: “[T]he fact remains that without US support, the balance of power appears largely unfavourable to France, which has a total of 290 nuclear warheads compared to at least 1,600 deployed warheads and nearly 2,800 stockpiled warheads on the Russian side.”

While Grémare acknowledges that France’s thermonuclear arsenal, along with the M51 strategic sea-to-land ballistic missile, would be able to eliminate major Russian cities, Russia would only need a mere “200 seconds too atomise Paris” if its Satan II thermonuclear weapons were used. “This potential for reciprocity must be kept in mind amid the mutual bet of nuclear deterrence.”

Logic here gives way to the presumption that such weapons, rather than suggesting impotence, promise formidable utility. This theoretical, and absurd proposition, renders the unthinkable possible: that Russia just might use nuclear weapons against European countries. Any such contention must fail for the fundamental point that nuclear weapons should, quite simply, never be used. Instead, they should be disbanded and banned altogether, in line with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Unfortunately, the French offer of replacing the US nuclear umbrella in Europe perpetrates similar deadly sins about deterrence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

If there is one thing we can thank US President Donald Trump for, it is this: he has decisively stripped away the ridiculous notion, long cultivated by western media, that the United States is a benign global policeman enforcing a “rules-based order”.

Washington is better understood as the head of a gangster empire, embracing 800 military bases around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been aggressively seeking “global full-spectrum domination”, as the Pentagon doctrine politely terms it.

You either pay fealty to the Don or you get dumped in the river. Last Friday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was presented with a pair of designer concrete boots at the White House.

The innovation was that it all happened in front of the western press corps, in the Oval Office, rather than in a back room, out of sight. It made for great television, Trump crowed.

Pundits have been quick to reassure us that the shouting match was some kind of weird Trumpian thing. As though being inhospitable to state leaders, and disrespectful to the countries they head, is unique to this administration.

Take just the example of Iraq. The administration of Bill Clinton thought it “worth it” – as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously put it – to kill an estimated half a million Iraqi children by imposing draconian sanctions through the 1990s.

Under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, the US then waged an illegal war in 2003, on entirely phoney grounds, that killed around half a million Iraqis, according to post-war estimates, and made four million homeless.

Those worrying about the White House publicly humiliating Zelensky might be better advised to save their concern for the hundreds of thousands of mostly Ukrainian and Russian men killed or wounded fighting an entirely unnecessary war – one, as we shall see, Washington carefully engineered through Nato over the preceding two decades.

Henchman Zelensky

All those casualties served the same goal as they did in Iraq: to remind the world who is boss.

Uniquely, western publics don’t understand this simple point because they live inside a disinformation bubble, created for them by the western establishment media.

Henry Kissinger, the long-time steward of US foreign policy, famously said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Zelensky just found that out the hard way. Gangster empires are just as fickle as the gangsters we know from Hollywood movies. Under the previous Joe Biden administration, Zelensky had been recruited as a henchman to do Washington’s bidding on Moscow’s doorstep.

The background – the one western media have kept largely out of view – is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US tore up treaties crucial to reassuring Russia of Nato’s good intent.

Viewed from Moscow, and given Washington’s track record, Nato’s European security umbrella must have looked more like preparation for an ambush.

Keen though Trump now is to rewrite history and cast himself as peacemaker, he was central to the escalating tensions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2019, he unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That opened the door to the US launching a potential first strike on Russia, using missiles stationed in nearby Nato members Romania and Poland.

He also sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, a move avoided by his predecessor, Barack Obama, for fear it would be seen as provocative.

Repeatedly, Nato vowed to bring Ukraine into its fold, despite Russia’s warnings that the step was viewed as an existential threat, that Moscow could not allow Washington to place missiles on its border, any more than the US accepted Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba back in the early 1960s.

Washington pressed ahead anyway, even assisting in a colour revolution-style coup in 2014 against the elected government in Kyiv, whose crime was being a little too sympathetic to Moscow.

With the country in crisis, Zelensky was himself elected by Ukrainians as a peace candidate, there to end a brutal civil war – sparked by that coup – between anti-Russian, “nationalistic” forces in the country’s west and ethnic Russian populations in the east. The Ukrainian president soon broke that promise.

Trump has accused Zelensky of being a “dictator”. But if he is, it is only because Washington wanted him that way, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians.

Reddest of red lines

Zelensky’s job was to play a game of chicken with Moscow. The assumption was that the US would win whatever the outcome.

Either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff would be called. Ukraine would be welcomed into Nato, becoming the most forward of the alliance’s forward bases against Russia, allowing nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to be stationed minutes from Moscow.

Or Putin would finally make good on his years of threats to invade his neighbour to stop Nato crossing the reddest of red lines he had set over Ukraine.

Washington could then cry “self-defence” on Ukraine’s behalf, and ludicrously fear-monger western publics about Putin eyeing Poland, Germany, France and Britain next.

Those were the pretexts for arming Kyiv to the hilt, rather than seeking a rapid peace deal. And so began a proxy war of attrition against Russia, using Ukrainian men as cannon fodder.

The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow.

Zelensky did precisely what was demanded of him. When he appeared to waver early on, and considered signing a peace deal with Moscow, Britain’s prime minister of the time, Boris Johnson, was dispatched with a message from Washington: keep fighting.

That is the same Boris Johnson who now breezily admits that the West is fighting a “proxy war” against Russia.

His comments have generated precisely no controversy. That is particularly strange, given that critics who pointed this very obvious fact out three years ago were instantly denounced for spreading “Putin disinformation” and Kremlin “talking points”.

For his obedience, Zelensky was feted a hero, the defender of Europe against Russian imperialism. His every “demand” – demands that originated in Washington – was met.

Ukraine has received at least $250bn worth of guns, tanks, fighter jets, training for his troops, western intelligence on Russia, and other forms of aid.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have paid with their lives – as have the families they leave behind.

Mafia etiquette

Now the old Don in Washington is gone. The new Don has decided Zelensky has been an expensive failure. Russia isn’t lethally wounded. It’s stronger than ever. Time for a new strategy.

Zelensky, still imagining he was Washington’s favourite henchman, arrived at the Oval Office only to be taught a harsh lesson in mafia etiquette.

Trump is spinning his stab in the back as a “peace agreement”. And in some sense, it is. Rightly, Trump has concluded that Russia has won – unless the West is ready to fight World War III and risk a potential nuclear war.

Trump has faced up to the reality of the situation, even if Zelensky and Europe are still struggling to.

But his plan for Ukraine is actually just a variation of his other peace plan – the one for Gaza. There he wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, on the bodies of the enclave’s many thousands of dead children, build the “Riviera of the Middle East” – or “Trump Gaza” as it is being called in a surreal video he shared on social media.

Similarly, Trump now sees Ukraine not as a military battlefield but as an economic one where, through clever deal-making, he can leverage riches for himself and his billionaire pals.

He has put a gun to Zelensky and Europe’s head. Make a deal with Russia to end the war, or you are on your own against a far superior military power. See if the Europeans can help you without a supply of Washington’s weapons.

Not surprisingly, Zelensky, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron huddled together at the weekend to find a deal that would appease Trump. All Starmer has revealed so far is that the plan will “stop the fighting”.

That is a good thing. But the fighting could have been stopped, and should have been stopped, three years ago.

Money, not peace

It is deeply unwise to be lulled into tribalism by all this – the very tribalism western elites seek to cultivate among their publics to keep us treating international affairs no differently from a high-stakes football match.

No one here has behaved, or is behaving, honourably.

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately.

An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

Zelensky now understands this. He knows that he, and the people of Ukraine, have been scammed. That is what tends to happen when you cosy up to the mafia.

If anyone doubts Washington’s insincerity over Ukraine, look to Palestine for clarity.

In his earlier presidency, Trump tried to bring about what he termed the peace “deal of the century” whose centrepiece was the annexation of much of the Occupied West Bank.

The hope was that the Gulf states would ultimately fund an incentivisation programme – the carrot to Israel’s stick – to encourage Palestinians to make a new life in a giant, purpose-built industrial zone in Sinai, next to Gaza.

That plan is still simmering away in the background. At the weekend, Israel received a green light from Washington to revive its genocidal starvation of Gaza’s population, after Israel refused to negotiate the second phase of the original ceasefire agreement.

The Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now spinning their own bad faith as Hamas “rejectionism”.

They and the echo chamber that is the western media are blaming the Palestinian group for refusing to be gulled into an “extension” of what was never more than a phoney ceasefire – Israel’s fire never ceased. Israel wants all the hostages back, without having to leave Gaza, so that Hamas has no leverage to stop Israel reviving the full genocide.

The people of Gaza are still being fed into the Washington mafia’s meatgrinder, just as the Ukrainian people have been.

Trump wants them out of the way so he can develop a Mediterranean playground for the rich, paid for with Gulf oil money and the so-far untapped natural gas reserves just off Gaza’s coast.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t pretend that Ukraine and Gaza are anything more than geostrategic real estate for Washington.

The big shakedown

Zelensky’s shakedown did not come out of the blue. Trump and his officials had been flagging it well in advance.

Two weeks ago, the industrial correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote an article headlined “Here’s why Trump wants to make Ukraine a US economic colony”.

Trump’s team believes that Ukraine may have rare-earth minerals under the ground worth some $15 trillion – a treasure trove that will be critical to the development of the next generation of technology.

In their view, controlling the exploration and extraction of those minerals will be as important as control over the Middle East’s oil reserves was more than a century ago.

And most important of all, the US wants China, its chief economic – if not military – rival excluded from the plunder. China currently has an effective monopoly on many of these critical minerals.

Or as the Telegraph puts it, Ukraine’s “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.

A draft of the plan seen by the Telegraph would, in its words, “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity”.

Washington wants first refusal on all deposits within the country.

At their Oval Office confrontation, Trump reiterated this goal: “So we’re going to be using that [Ukraine’s rare earth minerals], taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI, and including weapons, and the military. And it’s really going to very much satisfy our needs.”

All of this means that Trump has a keen incentive to get the war finished as quickly as possible, and Russia’s territorial advance halted. The more territory Moscow seizes, the less territory is left for the US to plunder.

Self-sabotage

The battle against China over rare-earth minerals isn’t a Trump innovation either – and adds an additional layer of context for why Washington and Nato have been so keen over the past two decades to prise Ukraine away from Russia.

Last summer, a Congressional select committee on competition with China announced the formation of a working group to counter Beijing’s “dominance of critical minerals”.

The chairman of the committee, John Moolenaar, noted that the current US dependence on China for these minerals “would quickly become an existential vulnerability in the event of a conflict”.

Another committee member, Rob Wittman, observed: “Dominance over global supply chains for critical mineral and rare earth elements is the next stage of great power competition.”

What Trump appears to appreciate is that Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has, by default, driven Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace. It has been self-sabotage on a grand scale.

Together, China and Russia are a formidable opponent, and one at the centre of the ever-growing Brics group – comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They have been seeking to expand their alliance by adding emerging powers to become a counterweight to Washington and Nato’s bullying global agenda.

But a deal with Putin over Ukraine would provide an opportunity for Washington to build a new security architecture in Europe – one more useful to the US – that places Russia inside the tent rather than outside it.

That would leave China isolated – a long-time Pentagon goal.

And it would also leave Europe less central to the projection of US power, which is why European leaders – led by Keir Starmer – have been looking and sounding so unnerved over the past few weeks.

The danger is that Trump’s “peacemaking” in Ukraine simply becomes a prelude to the fomenting of a war against China, using Taiwan as the pretext in the same way Ukraine was used against Russia.

As Moolenaar implied, US control over critical minerals – in Ukraine and elsewhere – would ensure the US was no longer vulnerable in the event of a war with China to losing access to the minerals it would need to continue the war. It would free Washington’s hand.

Trump may be behaving in a vulgar manner. But the gangster empire he now heads is conducting the same global shakedown as ever.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Behind the headlines and all the public huffing and puffing we find several caveats; other countries doing the “heavy lifting” are not named; a plan must be developed; a month long pause in the fighting must precede the deployment of troops; to succeed the effort must have “strong US backing.” This is not understated because Lord Dannet, former head of the Army told the BBC “the UK military was ‘so run down’ it could not lead any mission in Ukraine.” And we read that in Germany, soldiers are practicing with broomsticks painted black instead of with rifles. Finally, no mention is made of the fact that Russia has already ruled out Europe’s participation in any peace deal. Other than that the proposal is good to go.

What all this means is that war mongering European leaders (plus many Democrats, liberals and putative leftists here) are ‘willing’ to send soldiers to their deaths in the war in Ukraine that’s already lost. This is reminiscent of when George W. Bush introduced his national security strategy in 2002 with the phrase “coalition of the willing” — before the US invaded Iraq.

I’ve thought long and hard about why European leaders are incapable of working toward peace. Have these characters totally lost touch with reality? Is it because they can’t admit, even to themselves, that the UK/US used Europe for its own ends and otherwise doesn’t give a whit about the Continent? Is it because they can’t acknowledge this because, as part of the pro-war Atlanticist Establishment, they’ve been absolutely complicit in America’s predatory behavior — and have constantly lied about it? Is it because the European ruling class benefits from their own MIC? Shares in European defense giants soared to record highs today.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

The previous US President Joe Biden had been more than willing to keep the war machine fed by proxy, furnishing Zelensky handsomely.  The Washington war establishment purred, happy that Ukrainians were doing the dying and bleeding Russia’s soldiery white.  Cant and righteousness were in abundant supply: the Ukrainians were foot soldiers wrapped in civilisation’s flag, democracy worn on their sleeves.  Accusations from the Russian side that Ukrainian nationalism was also adulterated by a history of fascist inclination were dismissed out of hand.  A country famously seized by kleptocrats, with a spotty, ill-nourished civil society, had been redrawn as a westward looking European state, besieged by the Oriental Barbarism of the East.

If words of support could be counted as weapons, then Zelensky would have had a fresh arsenal in the aftermath of his tongue lashing by President Donald Trump and his deputy J.D. Vance.  Much of these were provided by leaders gathered at Lancaster House on March 1 hosted by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  Starmer, for his part, promised that Europe would continue sustaining Ukraine’s efforts and, were a peace deal to arise, aid the country in improving its defences to ensure that “Ukraine can draw on munitions, finance and equipment to defend itself”.

French President Emmanuel Macron tried to clarify any doubt that had arisen in the Oval Office savaging.  “There is an aggressor: Russia.  There is a victim: Ukraine.  We were right to help Ukraine and sanction Russia three years ago – and to keep doing so.”  The “we” in this case, Macron went on to add, involved “Americans, the Europeans, the Canadians, the Japanese, and many others.”

Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz also declared that “we must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war”, affirming that “we stand with Ukraine”.  The country’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, thought it prudent to point out that the Oval Office brawl “underlined that a new age of infamy has begun”, adding that Russia would be withstood “even if the US withdraws support, so that it [Ukraine] can achieve a just peace and not a capitulation”.

Other leaders expressed supportive words of standing.  Donald Tusk of Poland: “Dear [Zelensky], dear Ukrainian friends, you are not standing alone.”  Spain’s Pedro Sánchez: “Ukraine, Spain stands with you.”  Canada’s Justin Trudeau: “[we] will continue to stand with Ukraine and Ukrainians in achieving a just and lasting peace.”

When they were not standing, many of these effusively supportive leaders were scrambling, teasingly suggesting a bloc of military support that may, somehow, be formed in the absence of US involvement.  This would comprise the sillily worded “coalition of the willing” (that expression, when used in 2003, saw the United States, UK and Australia, along with a motley collective, violate international law in invading Iraq).  Such a coalition, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen dreamily envisaged, would transform Ukraine into a “steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders”.

This imaginatively foolish and recklessly irresponsible undertaking does little to patch up the irreplaceable role the US plays in a number of areas, not least the budgetary coverage of NATO, coupled with the promise for military intervention in the event a member state is attacked.  Macron has, at stages, taken pot shots at NATO as cerebrally obsolete, a brain dead creature best be done away with.  But these articulations, beyond such reports as NATO 2030, have not resulted in anything significant that would cope with an absentee US.

European states, furthermore, are divided ahead of the March 6 summit, where the EU will supposedly approve some 20 billion euros for the purchase of missiles and air defence equipment for Ukraine.  Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a letter to European Council President António Costa, offered the view that the EU, “following the example of the United States – should enter into direct discussions with Russia on a ceasefire and sustainable peace in Ukraine”.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister, Robert Fico, was even harder in his response, suggesting that financial and military assistance to Kyiv could be refused were ceasefire efforts not pursued, rejecting such notions as “peace through strength” being advocated by various EU members.  It was also incumbent, Fico went on to insist, that any settlement “explicitly include a requirement to reopen the transit of gas through Ukraine to Slovakia and Western Europe.”

With this in mind, and the pressing, crushing implications of power, not as fantasy, but as coarsening reality, other options must be entertained.  Given their lack of punch and prowess, one arising from years fed by the devitalising US teat, European states are simply playing with toy soldiers.  Eventually, they will have to play along if peace in Ukraine, however much detested in its form, is to be reached.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

France has been criticised for the “alarming” death toll in New Caledonia during recent protests and its “cold shower” approach to decolonisation by experts of the UN Human Rights Committee.

The UN committee met this week in Geneva for France’s five-yearly human rights review with a focus on its Pacific territory, after peaceful protests over electoral changes turned violent leaving 13 people dead since May.

French delegates at the hearing defended the country’s actions and rejected the jurisdiction of the UN decolonisation process, saying the country “no longer has any international obligations”.

• READ MORE: PM defends Fiji’s UN ‘ambush’ vote – challenged by human rights advocate
• Rabuka’s message to free Kanaky movement: ‘Don’t slap the hand that feeds you’
• ‘We’ll be talking about the future of negotiations’, says Rabuka on New Caledonia mission
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports
• Other CHOGM reports

A delayed fact-finding mission of Pacific Islands Forum leaders is due to arrive in New Caledonia this weekend to assess the situation on behalf of the region’s peak regional inter-governmental body.

Almost 7000 security personnel with armoured vehicles have been deployed from France to New Caledonia to quell further unrest.

“The means used and the intensity of their response and the gravity of the violence reported, as well as the amount of dead and wounded, are particularly alarming,” said committee member Jose Santo Pais, assistant Prosecutor-General of the Portuguese Constitutional Court.

“There have been numerous allegations regarding an excessive use of force and that would have led to numerous deaths among the Kanak people and law enforcement,” the committee’s vice-chair said on Wednesday.

Months of protests
Violence erupted after months of protests over a unilateral attempt by President Emmanuel Macron to “unfreeze” the territory’s electoral roll. Indigenous Kanaks feared the move would dilute their voting power and any chance of success at another independence referendum.

Eleven Kanaks and two French police have died. The committee heard 169 people were wounded and 2658 arrested in the past five months.

New Caledonia’s economy is in ruins with hundreds of businesses destroyed, tens-of-thousands left jobless and the local government seeking 4 billion euros (US$4.33 billion) in recovery funds from France.

France’s reputation has been left battered as an out-of-touch colonial power since the deadly violence erupted.

Santos Pais questioned France’s commitment to the UN Declaration on Indigenous People and the “sufficient dialogue” required under the Nouméa Accord, a peace agreement signed in 1998 to politically empower Kanak people, that enabled the decolonisation process.

“It would seem that current violence in the territory is linked to the lack of progress in decolonisation,” said Santos Pais.

Last week, the new French Prime Minister announced controversial electoral changes that sparked the protests had been abandoned. Local elections, due to be held this year, will now take place at the end of 2025.

Pacific mission
Tomorrow, Tonga’s prime minister Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni will lead a Pacific “observational” mission to New Caledonia of fellow leaders from Cook Islands, Fiji and Solomon Islands Minister for Foreign Affairs, together known as the “Troika-Plus”.

The PIF leaders’ three-day visit to the capital Nouméa will see them meet with local political parties, youth and community groups, private sector and public service providers.

“Our thoughts have always been with the people of New Caledonia since the unrest earlier this year, and we continue to offer our support,” Sovaleni said in a statement on Friday.

The UN committee is a treaty body composed of 18 experts that regularly reviews compliance by 173 member states with their human rights obligations and is separate from the Human Rights Council, a political body composed of states.

Serbian committee member Tijana Surlan asked France for an update on investigations into injuries and fatalities “related to alleged excessive use of force” in New Caledonia. She asked if police firearms use would be reviewed “to strike a better balance with the principles of absolute necessity and strict proportionality.”

France’s delegation responded saying it was “committed to renewing dialogue” in New Caledonia and to striking a balance between the right to demonstrate and protecting people and property with the “principle of proportionality.”

Alleged intimidation by French authorities of at least five journalists covering the unrest in New Caledonia was highlighted by committee member Kobauyah Tchamdja Kapatcha from Togo. France responded saying it guarantees freedom of the press.

France rejects ‘obligations’
The French delegation led by Ambassador for Human Rights Isabelle Rome added it “no longer administers a non-self-governing territory.”

France “no longer has any international obligations in this regard linked to its membership in the United Nations”, she told the committee on Thursday.

New Caledonia voted by modest majorities to remain part of France in referendums held in 2018 and 2020 under a UN-mandated decolonisation process. Three referendums were part of the Nouméa Accord to increase Kanaks’ political power following deadly violence in the 1980s.

A contentious final referendum in 2021 was overwhelmingly in favor of continuing with the status quo. Supporters of independence rejected its legitimacy due to a very low turnout — it was boycotted by Kanak political parties — and because it was held during a serious phase of the covid-19 pandemic, which restricted campaigning.

“France, through the referendum of September [2021], has therefore completed the process of decolonisation of its former colonies,” ambassador Rome said. She added that New Caledonia was one of the most advanced examples of the French government recognising indigenous rights, with a shared governance framework.

Another of its Pacific territories — French Polynesia — was re-inscribed on the UN decolonisation list in 2013 but France refuses to recognise its jurisdiction.

No change in policy
After a decade, France began attending General Assembly Decolonisation Committee meetings in 2023 to “promote dialogue” and that it was not a “change in [policy] direction”, Rome said.

“There is no process between the French state and the Polynesian territory that reserves a role for the United Nations,” she added.

Santos Pais responded saying, “what a cold shower”.

“The General Assembly will certainly have a completely different view from the one that was presented to us,” he said.

Earlier this month pro-independence French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson told the UN Decolonisation Committee’s annual meeting in New York that “after a decade of silence” France must be “guided” to participate in “dialogue.”

The Human Rights Committee is due to meet again next month to adopt its findings on France.

Copyright ©2015-2024, BenarNews. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka says he will take a back seat in the upcoming Pacific leaders’ fact-finding mission to New Caledonia, which was postponed from earlier in the year.

Leaders from the Cook Islands, Tonga, and Solomon Islands make up a group called the Pacific Islands Forum troika, comprising past, present and future hosts of the annual PIF leaders’ meeting.

The call for a PIF fact-finding mission was made while Fiji was still part of the troika.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports
• Other CHOGM reports

Rabuka spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron the week before the mission was originally scheduled to take place.

When asked by RNZ Pacific why the trip had been postponed, Rabuka replied: “I do not know. I’m just the troika-plus.”

Moments after touching down in Samoa, Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka was bestowed the chiefly title, Tagaloa in Samoa’s Leauva’a village. #CHOGM2024 pic.twitter.com/zzrNqgc1u0

— Susana Suisuiki (@SanaSuisuikiRNZ) October 23, 2024

Rabuka, who is currently in Apia for the 27th Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), was bestowed with a Samoan matai title of Tagaloa by the village of Leauva’a yesterday.

He confirmed to RNZ Pacific that he would be in Nouméa on Sunday.

“We will be talking about the future of negotiations and the relationship between New Caledonia and the people and France,” he said.

PIF Secretary-General Baron Waqa told RNZ Pacific that supporting peace and harmony in New Caledonia was top of the agenda for the leaders’ mission.

Waqa, who is also attending CHOGM, said an advance team was in Nouméa making preparations for the visit.

Violence and destruction has been ongoing in New Caledonia for much of the past five months in protest over French plans for the territory.

The death toll stands at 13.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Last week, New Caledonia was visited by France’s new Overseas Minister, François Buffet, offering a more conciliatory position by Paris.

This week, the territory, torn apart by violent riots, is to receive a Pacific Islands Forum fact-finding mission comprised of four prime ministers.

New Caledonia has been riven with violence and destruction for much of the past five months, resulting in 13 deaths and countless cases of arson.

• READ MORE: Buffet appeals for dialogue as he ends New Caledonia visit
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Islands Business journalist Nic Maclellan is back there for the first time since the rioting began on May 13 and RNZ Pacific asked for his first impressions.

Nic Maclellan: Day by day, things are very calm. It’s been a beautiful weekend, and there were people at the beach in the southern suburbs of Nouméa. People are going about their daily business. And on the surface, you don’t really notice that there’s been months of clashes between Kanak protesters and French security forces.

But every now and then, you stumble across a site that reminds you that this crisis is still, in many ways, unresolved. As you leave Tontouta Airport, the main gateway to the islands, for example, the airport buildings are surrounded by razor wire.

The French High Commission, which has a very high grill, is also topped with razor wire. It’s little things like that that remind you, that despite the removal of barricades which have dotted both Noumea and the main island for months, there are still underlying tensions that are unresolved.

And all of this comes at a time of enormous economic crisis, with key industries like tourism and nickel badly affected by months of dispute. Thousands of people either lost their jobs, or on part-time employment, and uncertainty about what capacity the French government brings from Paris to resolve long standing problems.

Don Wiseman: Well, New Caledonia is looking for a lot of money in grant form. Is it going to get it?

NMac: With, people I’ve spoken to in the last few days and with statements from major political parties, there’s enormous concern that political leaders in France don’t understand the depth of the crisis here; political, cultural, economic. President Macron, after losing the European Parliament elections, then seeing significant problems during the National Assembly elections that he called the snap votes, finds that there’s no governing majority in the French Parliament.

It took 51 days to appoint a new prime minister, another few weeks to appoint a government, and although France’s Overseas Minister Francois Noel Buffet visited last week, made a number of pledges, which were welcomed, there was sharp criticism, particularly from anti-independence leaders, from the so called loyalists, that France hadn’t recognised the enormity of what’s happened, and to translate that into financial commitments.

The Congress of New Caledonia passed a bipartisan, or all party proposal, for significant funding over the next five years, amounting to almost 4 billion euros, a vast sum, but money required to rebuild shattered economic institutions and restore public institutions that were damaged during months of riots and arson, is not there.

France faces, in Metropolitan France, a major fiscal crisis. The current Prime Minister Michel Barnier announced they cut $250 million out of funding for overseas territories. There’s a lot of work going on across the political spectrum, from politicians in New Caledonia, trying to make Paris understand that this is significant.

DW: Does Paris understand what happened in New Caledonia back in the 1980s?

NMac: Some do. I think there’s a real problem, though, that there’s a consistency of French policy that is reluctant to engage with France’s responsibilities as what the United Nations calls it, “administering power of a non-self-governing territory”.

You know, it’s a French colony. The Noumea Accord said that there should be a transition towards a new political status, and that situation is unresolved. Just this morning (Tuesday), I attended the session of the Congress of New Caledonia, which voted in majority that the provincial elections should be delayed until late next year, late 2025.

The aim would be to give time for the French State and both supporters and opponents of independence to meet to talk out a new political statute to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord. However, it’s clear from different perspectives that have been expressed in the Congress that there’s not a meeting of minds about the way forward. And key independence parties in the umbrella coalition, the FLNKS make it clear that they only see a comprehensive agreement possible if there’s a pathway forward towards sovereignty, even with a period of inter-dependence with France and over time to be negotiated.

The loyalists believe that that’s not a priority, that economic reconstruction is the priority, and a talk of sovereignty at this time is inappropriate. So, there’s a long way to go before the French can bring people together around the negotiating table, and that will play out in coming weeks.

DW: The new Overseas Minister seems to have taken a very conciliatory approach. That must be helpful.

NMac: For months and months, the FLNKS said that they were willing to discuss electoral reforms, opening up the voting rolls for the local political institutions to more French nationals, particularly New Caledonian-born citizens, but that it had to be part of a comprehensive, overarching agreement.

The very fact that President Macron tried to force key independence parties, particularly the largest, Union Caledoniénne, to the negotiating table by unilaterally trying to push through changes to these voting rules triggered the crisis that began on the 13th of May.

After five months of terrible destruction of schools, of hospitals, thousands of people, literally leaving New Caledonia, Macron has realised that you can’t push this through by force. As you say, Overseas Minister Buffet had a more conciliatory tone. He reconfirmed that the controversial reforms to the electoral laws have been abandoned. Doesn’t mean they won’t come back up in discussions in the future, but we’re back at square one in many ways, and yet there’s been five months of really terrible conflict between supporters and opponents of independence.

The fact that this is unresolved is shown by the reality that the French High Commissioner has announced that the overnight curfew is extended until early November, that the French police and security forces that have been deployed here, more than 6000 gendarmes, riot squads backed by armoured cars, helicopters and more, will be held until at least the end of the year.

This crisis is unresolved, and I think as Pacific leaders arrive this week, they’ll have to look beyond the surface calm to realise that there are many issues that still have to play out in the months to come.

DW: So with this Forum visit, how free will these people be to move around to make their own assessments?

NMac: I sense that there’s a tension between the government of New Caledonia and the French authorities about the purpose of this visit. In the past, French diplomats have suggested that the Forum is welcome to come, to condemn violence, to address the question of reconstruction and so on.

But I sense a reluctance to address issues around France’s responsibility for decolonisation, at the same time, key members of the delegation, such as Prime Minister Manele of Solomon Islands, Prime Minister Rabuka, have strong contacts through the Melanesian Spearhead Group, with members of the FLNKS and the broader political networks here. To that extent, there’ll be informal as well as formal dialogue. As the Forum members hit the ground after a long delay to their mission.

DW: There have been in the past, Forum groups that have gone to investigate various situations, and they’ve tended to take a very superficial view of everything that’s going on.

NMac: I think there are examples where the Forum missions have been very important. For example, in 2021 at the time of the third referendum on self-determination, the one rushed through by the French State in the middle of the covid pandemic, a delegation led by Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, a former Fiji Foreign Minister, with then Secretary-General of the Forum, Henry Puna, they wrote a very strong report criticising the legitimacy and credibility of that vote, because the vast majority of independence supporters, particularly indigenous Kanaks, didn’t turn out for the vote.

France claims it’s a strong no vote, but the Forum report, which most people haven’t read, actually questions the legitimacy of this politically. The very fact that four prime ministers are coming, not diplomats, not ministers, not just officials, but four prime ministers of Forum member countries, shows that this is an important moment for regional engagement.

Right from the beginning of the crisis, the then chair of the Forum, Mark Brown, who’ll be on the delegation, talked about the need for the Forum to create a neutral space for dialogue, for talanoa, to resolve long standing differences.

The very presence of them, although it hasn’t had much publicity here so far, will be a sign that this is not an internal matter for France, but in fact a matter of regional and international attention.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Well, it seems that George Bush and Tony Blair are only secondary influences on Macron whose true playbook seems to be derived from that of Italian philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli is famous for his quote “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception”, and Macron seems to have taken this to heart with his finger always in the proverbial “wind” of politics. But what would cause Macron to adopt this position in particular? Should we believe him when he says that he wants to “avoid the escalation of tensions, protect civilian populations, free the hostages and find political solutions”?

Up until this recent declaration, Emmanuel Macron has been anything but a friend to the people of occupied Palestine. From condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu, Macron has been staunchly pro-Israel his entire political career. Macron has not just actively voiced his opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict; he has also worked to crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. In one such Orwellian maneuver, France under macron’s leadership banned all pro-Palestinian protests.

Obviously, the French Left and, frankly, all supporters of free speech, were horrified by this despicable directive and the many other disastrous decisions carried out by the French government under Macron. Unsurprisingly, in the most recent French election, the people of France, both left-wing and right-wing, seemed to agree that Macronism should be tossed onto the trash heap of history. As a result, Macron’s party, Ensemble, suffered a historic defeat at the hands of the New Popular Front and the National Rally with the New Popular Front (NPF) faring the best out of the three. According to the Intercept, one of the factors contributing to this victory for the NPF was the coalition’s support for Palestine.

Macron’s strategy of pandering to the Right by fear mongering about the “radial Left” clearly did not contribute to positive electoral success. According to CNBC, “Without the left vote in favor of Macron against Le Pen in 2022 and 2017, he would not be president, and he never really tried to do something together in the end with the people who made him president”. Macron failed because he counted on the Left to bend to his every whim. He did not confront the real possibility of the Left being able to stand alone, but the Left realized that they simply did not need Macron to defeat the Right. Everyone has heard the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and this seems to be the case with Emmanuel Macron. It is obvious that he truly does not care about the Palestinian people, yet he is willing to say what he believes will help him electorally including declaring his support for an arms embargo on Israel.

Nevertheless, Macron likely has other strategic reasons for this shift as well. Under Macron, France has done its best to maintain good relations with Western and non-Western powers alike. A recent example of this was the 2024 China-France summit which saw Macron pursuing, as some described, as strategic autonomy from the United States. Likewise, Macron has supported a hypothetical Ukraine-Russia cease-fire deal because he realizes that, according to Responsible Statecraft, “The vast majority of the electorate is clearly opposed to sending troops to Ukraine… Macron will be unwilling to risk hundreds of French lives for such a distant war nobody wants”.

Macron’s foreign policy strategy of realpolitik is all about appeasement. Macron believes that he must appease both the United States and the international community alike which is clearly opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza per the recent UN vote of 124 to 14 in favor of demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Similarly, Macron believes that in order for his centrist party to remain in power he must placate both the French political Left and Right. Unfortunately for Macron, this strategy of fence-sitting has led to failure both electorally and geopolitically and will, naturally, continue to fail in the future.

Macron’s sudden shift in favor of an arms embargo is part of a greater political wager, which the French President believes will pay dividends in terms of international relevance and domestic support. His statement is inherently elitist and predicated on the idea that the French people are of low intelligence and will forget his history of support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For now, Macron’s dubious promises of peace and restraint are as insubstantial as the airy, delicate macarons his out-of-touch supporters so adore. And just like the dessert, they crumble easily under pressure, revealing the emptiness inside.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.D. Hester.

The high-level Pacific mission to New Caledonia will be a three person-led delegation and it is still expected to happen prior to the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders (PIF) Meeting in Tonga on August 26, says PIF chair Mark Brown.

Brown, who is also the Cook Islands Prime Minister, made the comment at the PIF Foreign Ministers Meeting on Friday following French President Emmanuel Macron approving the mission.

“It’s important that everyone can assess the situation together with [France],” the French Ambassador to the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, told RNZ Pacific on Friday.

• READ MORE: Macron gives Pacific mission to Kanaky New Caledonia green light, says diplomat
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Brown said Tonga’s Prime Minister, Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni, may not be on the trip “because of pending obligations in preparation for the leaders meeting”.

“In which case the incoming troika member, Prime Minister of Solomon Islands [Jeremiah Menele], would be the next person,” he said.

“It will be a three-person delegation that will be leading the delegation to New Caledonia and the expectation is it will be done before the leaders meeting at the end of this month.”

Brown and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka will both be on the mission.

‘Sensitive political dimensions’
“The Forum is very mindful of the nature of the relationship that New Caledonia as a member of the Forum has, but also France’s relationship with New Caledonia currently as a territory of France.

“There are some sensitive political dimensions that must be taken into account, but we feel that our sentiments as a Forum, firstly, is to try and reduce the incidents of violence that has taken place over the last few months and also to call for dialogue as the way forward.”

He said the decision around timing of the trip is up to the troika members — current chair, previous chair and incoming chair.

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters prior to the announcement from France, said it was still to be worked out what role New Zealand would play on the New Caledonia mission.

“We are seriously concerned to ensure that the long-term outcome is a peaceful solution but also where the economics of New Caledonia is sustained, that’s important,” he said.

Peters said he expected that over time there would be more than one delegation sent to New Caledonia.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Since May, a powerful struggle has rocked Kanaky (New Caledonia), an archipelago located in the Pacific, roughly 1,500 kilometres east of Australia. The island, one of five overseas territories in the Asia-Pacific ruled by France, has been under French colonial rule since 1853. The indigenous Kanak people initiated this cycle of protests after the French government of Emmanuel Macron extended voting rights in provincial elections to thousands of French settlers in the islands. The unrest led Macron to suspend the new rules while subjecting islanders to severe repression. In recent months, the French government has imposed a state of emergency and curfew on the islands and deployed thousands of French troops, which Macron says will remain in New Caledonia for ‘as long as necessary’. Over a thousand protesters have been arrested by French authorities, including Kanak independence activists such as Christian Tein, the leader of the Coordination Cell for Field Actions (Cellule de coordination des actions de terrain, or CCAT), some of them sent to France to face trial. The charges against Tein and others, such as for organised crime, would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

The reason France has cracked down so severely on the protests in New Caledonia is that the old imperial country uses its colonies not only to exploit its resources (New Caledonia holds the world’s fifth largest nickel reserves), but also to extend its political reach across the world – in this case, to have a military footprint in China’s vicinity. This story is far from new: between 1966 and 1996, for instance, France used islands in the southern Pacific for nuclear tests. One of these tests, Operation Centaure (July 1974), impacted all 110,000 residents on the Mururoa atoll of French Polynesia. The struggle of the indigenous Kanak peoples of New Caledonia is not only about freedom from colonialism, but also about the terrible military violence inflicted upon these lands and waters by the Global North. The violence that ran from 1966 to 1996 mirrors the disregard that the French still feel for the islanders, treating them as nothing more than detritus, as if they had been shipwrecked on these lands.

In the backdrop of the current unrest in New Caledonia is the Global North’s growing militarisation of the Pacific, led by the United States. Currently, 25,000 military personnel from 29 countries are conducting Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), a military exercise that runs from Hawai’i to the edge of the Asian mainland. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked with an array of organisations – a number of them from the Pacific and Indian Oceans – to draft red alert no. 18 on this dangerous development. Their names are listed below.

They Are Making the Waters of the Pacific Dangerous

What is RIMPAC?

The US and its allies have held Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises since 1971. The initial partners of this military project were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which are also the original members of the Five Eyes (now Fourteen Eyes) intelligence network built to share information and conduct joint surveillance exercises. They are also the major Anglophone countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949) and are the members of the Australia-New Zealand-US strategy treaty ANZUS, signed in 1951. RIMPAC has grown to be a major biennial military exercise that has drawn in a number of countries with various forms of allegiance to the Global North (Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, the Philippines, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga).

RIMPAC 2024 began on 28 June and runs through 2 August. It is being held in Hawai’i, which is an illegally occupied territory of the United States. The Hawai’ian independence movement has a history of resisting RIMPAC, which is understood to be part of the US occupation of sovereign Hawai’ian land. The exercise includes over 150 aircraft, 40 surface ships, three submarines, 14 national land forces, and other military equipment from 29 countries, though the bulk of the fleet is from the United States. The goal of the exercise is ‘interoperability’, which effectively means integrating the military (largely naval) forces of other countries with that of the United States. The main command and control for the exercise is managed by the US, which is the heart and soul of RIMPAC.

Fatu Feu’u (Samoa), Mata Sogia, 2009.

Why is RIMPAC so dangerous?

RIMPAC-related documents and official statements indicate that the exercises allow these navies to train ‘for a wide range of potential operations across the globe’. However, it is clear from both US strategic documents and the behaviour of the US officials who run RIMPAC that the centre of focus is China. Strategic documents also make it clear that the US sees China as a major threat, even as the main threat, to US domination and believes that it must be contained.

This containment has come through the trade war against China, but more pointedly through a web of military manoeuvres by the United States. This includes establishing more US military bases in territories and countries surrounding China; using US and allied military vessels to provoke China through freedom of navigation exercises; threatening to position US short-range nuclear missiles in countries and territories allied with the US, including Taiwan; extending the airfield in Darwin, Australia, to position US aircraft with nuclear missiles; enhancing military cooperation with US allies in East Asia with language that shows precisely that the target is to intimidate China; and holding RIMPAC exercises, particularly over the past few years. Though China was invited to participate in RIMPAC 2014 and RIMPAC 2016, when the tension levels were not so high, it has been disinvited since RIMPAC 2018.

Though RIMPAC documents suggest that the military exercise is being conducted for humanitarian purposes, this is a Trojan Horse. This was exemplified, for instance, at RIMPAC 2000, when the militaries conducted the Strong Angel international humanitarian response training exercise. In 2013, the United States and the Philippines cooperated in providing humanitarian assistance after the devastating Typhoon Haiyan. Shortly after that cooperation, the US and the Philippines signed the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (2014), which allows the US to access bases of the Philippine military to maintain its weapons depots and troops. In other words, the humanitarian operations opened the door to deeper military cooperation.

RIMPAC is a live-fire military exercise. The most spectacular part of the exercise is called Sinking Exercise (SINKEX), a drill that sinks decommissioned warships off the coast of Hawai’i. RIMPAC 2024’s target ship will be the decommissioned USS Tarawa, a 40,000-tonne amphibious assault vessel that was one of the largest during its service period. There is no environmental impact survey of the regular sinking of these ships into waters close to island nations, nor is there any understanding of the environmental impact of hosting these vast military exercises not only in the Pacific but elsewhere in the world.

RIMPAC is part of the New Cold War against China that the US imposes on the region. It is designed to provoke conflict. This makes RIMPAC a very dangerous exercise.

Kelcy Taratoa (Aotearoa), Episode 0010 from the series Who Am I? Episodes, 2004.

What is Israel’s role in RIMPAC?

Israel, which is not a country with a shoreline on the Pacific Ocean, first participated in RIMPAC 2018, and then again in RIMPAC 2022 and RIMPAC 2024. Although Israel does not have aircraft or ships in the military exercise, it is nonetheless participating in its ‘interoperability’ component, which includes establishing integrated command and control as well as collaborating in the intelligence and logistical part of the exercise. Israel is participating in RIMPAC 2024 at the same time that it is waging a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Though several of the observer states in RIMPAC 2024 (such as Chile and Colombia) have been forthright in their condemnation of the genocide, they continue to participate alongside Israel’s military in RIMPAC 2024. There has been no public indication of their hesitation about Israel’s involvement in these dangerous joint military exercises.

Israel is a settler-colonial country that continues its murderous apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. Across the Pacific, indigenous communities from Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Hawai’i have led the protests against RIMPAC over the course of the past 50 years, saying that these exercises are held on stolen ground and waters, that they disregard the negative impact on native communities upon whose land and waters live-fire exercises are held (including areas where atmospheric nuclear testing was previously conducted), and that they contribute to the climate disaster that lifts the waters and threatens the existence of the island communities. Though Israel’s participation is unsurprising, the problem is not merely its involvement in RIMPAC, but the existence of RIMPAC itself. Israel is an apartheid state that is conducting a genocide, and RIMPAC is a colonial project that threatens an annihilationist war against the peoples of the Pacific and China.

Ralph Ako (Solomon Islands), Toto Isu, 2015.

Te Kuaka (Aotearoa)
Red Ant (Australia)
Workers Party of Bangladesh (Bangladesh)
Coordinadora por Palestina (Chile)
Judíxs Antisionistas contra la Ocupación y el Apartheid (Chile)
Partido Comunes (Colombia)
Congreso de los Pueblos (Colombia)
Coordinación Política y Social, Marcha Patriótica (Colombia)
Partido Socialista de Timor (Timor Leste)
Hui Aloha ʻĀina (Hawai’i)
Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (India)
Federasi Serikat Buruh Demokratik Kerakyatan (Indonesia)
Federasi Serikat Buruh Militan (Indonesia)
Federasi Serikat Buruh Perkebunan Patriotik (Indonesia)
Pusat Perjuangan Mahasiswa untuk Pembebasan Nasional (Indonesia)
Solidaritas.net (Indonesia)
Gegar Amerika (Malaysia)
Parti Sosialis Malaysia (Malaysia)
No Cold War
Awami Workers Party (Pakistan)
Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (Pakistan)
Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan)
Partido Manggagawa (Philippines)
Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas (Philippines)
The International Strategy Center (Republic of Korea)
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Sri Lanka)
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Socialist)
CODEPINK: Women for Peace (United States)
Nodutdol (United States)
Party for Socialism and Liberation (United States)

When the political protests began in New Caledonia in May, I hastened to find a book of poems by Kanak independence leader Déwé Gorodé (1949–2022) called Under the Ashes of the Conch Shells (Sous les cendres des conques, 1974). In this book, written the same year that Gorodé joined the Marxist political group Red Scarves (Foulards rouges), she wrote the poem ‘Forbidden Zone’ (Zone interdite), which concludes:

Reao Vahitahi Nukutavake
Pinaki Tematangi Vanavana
Tureia Maria Marutea
Mangareva MORUROA FANGATAUFA
Forbidden zone
somewhere in
so-called ‘French’ Polynesia.

These are the names of islands that had already been impacted by the French nuclear bomb tests. There are no punctuation marks between the names, which indicates two things: first, that the end of an island or a country does not mark the end of nuclear contamination, and second, that the waters that lap against the islands do not divide the people who live across vast stretches of ocean, but unite them against imperialism. This impulse drove Gorodé to found Group 1878 (named for the Kanak rebellion of that year) and then the Kanak Liberation Party (Parti de libération kanak, or PALIKA) in 1976, which evolved out of Group 1878. The authorities imprisoned Gorodé repeatedly from 1974 to 1977 for her leadership in PALIKA’s struggle for independence from France.

During her time in prison, Gorodé built the Group of Exploited Kanak Women in Struggle (Groupe de femmes Kanak exploitées en lutte) with Susanna Ounei. When these two women left prison, they helped found the Kanak National Liberation and Socialist Front (Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste) in 1984. Through concerted struggle, Gorodé was elected the vice president of New Caledonia in 2001.

Stéphane Foucaud (New Caledonia), MAOW! (2023).

In 1985, thirteen countries of the south Pacific signed the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a nuclear-free zone from the east coast of Australia to the west coast of South America. As French colonies, neither New Caledonia nor French Polynesia signed it, but others did, including the Solomon Islands and Kūki ‘Airani (Cook Islands). Gorodé is now dead, and US nuclear weapons are poised to enter northern Australia in violation of the treaty. But the struggle does not die away.

Roads are still blocked. Hearts are still opened.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The voters in the second round of France’s national elections last weekend staved off an expected shift to the far-right. But the result in the Pacific territory Kanaky New Caledonia was also in many ways historic.

Of the two assembly representatives decided, a position fell on either side of the deep polarisation evident in the territory — one for loyalists, one for supporters of independence. But it is the independence side that will take the most from the result.

Turnout in the vote was remarkable, not only because of the violence in New Caledonia over recent months, which has curbed movement and public transport across the territory, but also because national elections have been seen particularly by independence parties as less relevant locally.

Not this time.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

The two rounds of the elections saw voters arrive in droves, with 60 percent and 71 percent turnout respectively, compared to typically low levels of 35-40 percent in New Caledonia. Images showed long queues with many young people.

Voting was generally peaceful, although a blockade prevented voting in one Kanak commune during the first round.

After winning the first round, a hardline loyalist and independence candidate faced off in each constituency. The second round therefore presented a binary choice, effectively becoming a barometer of views around independence.

Sobering results for loyalists
While clearly not a referendum, it was the first chance to measure sentiment in this manner since the boycotted referendum in 2021, which had followed two independence votes narrowly favouring staying with France.

The resulting impasse about the future of the territory had erupted into violent protests in May this year, when President Emmanuel Macron sought unilaterally to broaden voter eligibility to the detriment of indigenous representation. Only Macron then called snap national elections.

These are sobering results for loyalists.

So the contest, as it unfolded in New Caledonia, represented high stakes for both sides.

In the event, loyalist Nicolas Metzdorf won 52.4 percent in the first constituency (Noumea and islands) over the independence candidate’s 47.6 percent. Independence candidate Emmanuel Tjibaou won 57.4 percent to the loyalist’s 42.6 percent in the second (Northern Province and outer suburbs of Noumea).

The results, a surprise even to independence leaders, were significant.

It is notable that in these national elections, all citizens are eligible to vote. Only local assembly elections apply the controversial voter eligibility provisions which provoked the current violence, provisions that advantage longstanding residents and thus indigenous independence supporters.

Independence parties’ success
Yet without the benefit of this restriction, independence parties won, securing a majority 53 percent (83,123 votes) to the loyalists’ 47 percent (72,897) of valid votes cast across the territory. They had won 43 percent and 47 percent in the two non-boycotted referendums.

Even in the constituency won by the loyalist, the independence candidate Omayra Naisseline, daughter-in-law of early independence fighter Nidoïsh Naisseline, won 47 percent of the vote.

These are sobering results for loyalists.

Independence party candidate Emmanuel Tjibaou, 48, carried particular symbolism. The son of the assassinated founding father of the independence movement Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Emmanuel had eschewed politics to this point, instead taking on cultural roles including as head of the Kanak cultural development agency.

He is a galvanising figure for independence supporters.

Emmanuel Tjibaou is now the first independence assembly representative in 38 years. He won notwithstanding France redesigning the two constituencies in 1988 specifically to prevent an independence representative win by including part of mainly loyalist Noumea in each.

A loyalist stronghold has been broken.

Further strain on both sides
While both a loyalist and independence parliamentarian will now sit in Paris and represent their different perspectives, the result will further strain the two sides.

Pro-independence supporters will be energised by the strong performance and this will increase expectations, especially among the young. The responsibility on elders is heavy. Tjibaou described the vote as  “a call for help, a cry of hope”. He has urged a return to the path of dialogue.

At the same time, loyalists will be concerned by independence party success. Insecurity and fear, already sharpened by recent violence, may intensify. While he referred to the need for dialogue, Nicolas Metzdorf is known for his tough uncompromising line.

Paradoxically the ongoing violence means an increased reliance on France for the reconstruction that will be a vital underpinning for talks. Estimates for rebuilding have  exceeded 2 billion euros (NZ$3.6 billion), with more than 800 businesses, countless schools and houses attacked, many destroyed.

Yet France itself is reeling after the snap elections returned no clear winner. Three blocs are vying for power, and are divided within their own ranks over how government should be formed. While French presidents have had to “cohabit” with an assembly majority of the opposite persuasion three times before, never has a president faced no clear majority.

It will take time, perhaps months, for a workable solution to emerge, during which New Caledonia is hardly likely to take precedence.

As New Caledonia’s neighbours prepare to meet for the annual Pacific Islands Forum summit next month, all will be hoping that the main parties can soon overcome their deep differences and find a peaceful local way forward.

Denise Fisher is a visiting fellow at ANU’s Centre for European Studies. She was an Australian diplomat for 30 years, serving in Australian diplomatic missions as a political and economic policy analyst in many capitals. The Australian Consul-General in Noumea, New Caledonia (2001-2004), she is the author of France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics (2013).

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French Pacific results for the first round of French national snap elections yesterday showed a firm radicalisation, especially in the case of New Caledonia.

In both of New Caledonia’s constituencies, the second round will look like a showdown between pro-independence and pro-France contestants.

The French Pacific entity has been gripped by ongoing riots, arson and destruction since mid-May 2024.

Local outcomes of the national polls have confirmed a block-to-block, confrontational logic, between the most radical components of the opposing camps, the pro-independence and the pro-France (loyalists).

Pro-France leader Nicolas Metzdorf, who is a staunch advocate of the still-unimplemented controversial constitutional reform that is perceived to marginalise indigenous Kanaks’ vote and therefore sparked the current unrest in the French Pacific territory, obtained 39.81 percent of the votes in New Caledonia’s 1st constituency.

In the capital Nouméa, which has been suffering massive damage from the riots, he even received the support of 53.64 percent of the voters.

Also vying for the seat in the French National Assembly, the other candidate qualifying for the second round of vote (on Sunday 7 July) is pro-independence Omayra Naisseline, who belongs to Union Calédonienne, perceived as a hard-line component of the pro-independence platform FLNKS.

She obtained 36.34 percent of the votes.

Outgoing MP Philippe Dunoyer, a moderate pro-France politician, is now out of the race after collecting only 10.33 percent of the votes.

For New Caledonia’s second constituency, pro-independence Emmanuel Tjibaou topped the poll with an impressive 44.06 percent of the votes.

Tjibaou is the son of emblematic Kanak pro-independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a dominant figure who signed the Matignon-Oudinot Accord in 1988 with pro-France leader Jacques Lafleur, ending half a decade of civil war over the Kanak pro-independence cause.

In 1989, Tjibaou was assassinated by a hard-line member of his own movement.

Second to Tjibaou is Alcide Ponga, also an indigenous Kanak who was recently elected president of the pro-France Rassemblement-Les républicains party (36.18 percent).

Another candidate from the Eveil Océanien (mostly supported by the Wallisian community in New Caledonia), Milakulo Tukumuli, came third with 11.92 percent but does not qualify to contest in the second round.

In New Caledonia, polling on Sunday took place under heavy security and at least one incident was reported in Houaïlou, where car wrecks were placed in front of the polling stations, barring access to voters.

However, participation was very high on Sunday: 60.02 percent of the registered voters turned out, which is almost twice as much as the recorded rate at the previous general elections in 2022 (32.51 percent).

New Caledonia’s four remaining contestants for the run-off round of French snap elections next Sunday, July 7 are Nicolas Metzdorf (clockwise from top left), Emmanuel Tjibaou, Omayra Naisseline and Alcide Ponga. Image: NC la 1ère TV

French Polynesia
In French Polynesia (three constituencies), the stakes were quite different — all three sitting MPs were pro-independence after the previous French general elections in 2022.

Candidates for the ruling Tavini Huiraatira, for this first round of polls, managed to make it to the second round, like Steve Chailloux (second constituency, 41.61 percent) or Mereana Reid-Arbelot (third constituency, 42.71 percent) who will still have to fight in the second round to retain her seat in the French National Assembly against pro-autonomy Pascale Haiti (41.08 percent), who is the wife of long-time pro-France former president Gaston Flosse).

Chailloux, however, did not fare so well as his direct opponent, pro-autonomy platform and A Here ia Porinetia leader Nicole Sanquer, who collected 49.62 percent of the votes.

But those parties opposing independence, locally known as the “pro-autonomy”, had fielded their candidates under a common platform.

This is the case for Moerani Frébault, from the Marquesas Islands, who managed to secure 53.90 percent of the votes and is therefore declared winner without having to contest the second round.

His victory ejected the pro-independence outgoing MP Tematai Le Gayic (Tavini party, 1st constituency), even though he had collected 36.3 percent of the votes.

Wallis and Futuna
Incumbent MP Mikaele Seo (Renaissance, French President Macron’s party) breezes through against the other three contestants and obtained 61 percent of the votes and therefore is directly elected as a result of the first round for the seat at the Paris National Assembly.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Voters in New Caledonia will go to the polls this weekend under tight security, almost eight weeks after destructive and violent unrest broke out in the French Pacific archipelago.

They will vote for their two representatives in the 577-seat French National Assembly, which was dissolved by President Emmanuel Macron just before he — in a surprise move — called snap elections earlier this month.

The previous French general elections took place two years ago.

• READ MORE: Fresh violence flares up in New Caledonia – 35 arrested
• French National Assembly election: What’s at stake and what to expect?
• New Caledonia: France’s way or the Pacific way?
• Other New Caledonia crisis reports

The first round of voting takes place tomorrow and the second one next Sunday, July 7.

Since early May, the unrest has caused nine direct fatalities and the closure, looting and vandalism of several hundred companies and homes. More than 3500 security forces have been dispatched, with the damage now estimated at 1.5 billion euros (NZ$2.64 billion).

Earlier this month, 86.5 percent of New Caledonian voters abstained during the European Parliament elections.

It is anticipated that for these elections, the participation rate could be high.

Both incumbents are on the pro-France (loyalist) side.

On the pro-independence side, internal divisions have resulted in only the hard-line party (part of the FLNKS umbrella, which also includes other moderate parties) managing to field their candidates.

Public meetings and gatherings banned
French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc told media he did not want to take chances, even though no party or municipality had openly called for a boycott or any action hostile to the vote.

He said all public meetings would be banned, on top of a dusk-to-dawn curfew and a ban on the sale and transport of firearms, ammunition and alcohol.

“There are 222,900 registered voters for the legislative elections; the voting habits in New Caledonia are that it happens mostly in the morning. So, the peak hours are between 9 am and noon,” Le Franc said.

He said during those peak hours, queues could be expected outside the polling stations, especially in the Greater Nouméa area (including the neighbouring towns of Païta, Dumbéa and Mont-Dore).

“Provision has been made to ensure that voters who go there are not bothered by collective or individual elements who would like to disrupt the exercise of this democratic right.”

Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’ in class
This week, more public buildings, including schools and fire stations, have been burnt to the ground, and several schools have closed in the wake of the violence.

However, in Dumbéa, Apogoti High School and 13 other schools partly reopened on Friday, with teachers focusing on workshops.

“We met with all the teachers and we decided to mix several subjects,” music teacher Nicolas Le Yannou told public broadcaster NC la 1ère TV.

“We chose a song from John Lennon (‘Give Peace a Chance’) which calls for peace and then we translated the lyrics into Spanish, French and the local Drehu language.

“That allowed everyone to express themselves without having to brood over the difficult situation we have gone through. For us, music was our way to escape,” Le Yannou said.

Psychological assistance and counselling were also provided to students and teachers when required.

On Thursday, a new fire station under construction near Nouméa-La Tontouta Airport, which was scheduled to be opened later this year, was burnt down.

Pro-independence leader’s house destroyed
The home of one moderate pro-independence leader, Victor Tutugoro (president of the Union Progressiste en Mélanésie, PALIKA), was burnt down by rioters on Wednesday morning.

This prompted condemnation from Le France and New Caledonia’s local government, as well as from the president of New Caledonia’s Northern Province, Paul Néaoutyine.

Néaoutyine, who belongs to the Kanak Liberation Party, said several other politicians from the moderate fringe of FLNKS had also been targeted and threatened over the past few weeks.

PALIKA’s political bureau also condemned the attacks and destruction of Tutugoro’s residence.

PALIKA spokesman Charles Washetine called for calm and for all remaining roadblocks to be lifted.

“The right to vote is the fruit of a painful common history which commands us to fight for independence through the ballots and through the belief in intelligence which we have all inherited,” the party said.

The elections coincide with the 36th anniversary of the signing of the Matignon-Oudinot Accord between Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Jacques Lafleur, who were the leaders, respectively, of the pro-independence FLNKS and pro-France RPCR parties.

This year, there was no official commemoration ceremony.

After intense talks with then French Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard, they both shook hands on 26 June 1988 to mark the end of half a decade of quasi-civil war in New Caledonia.

One year later, Tjibaou and his deputy, Yéwéné Yéwéné, were gunned down by a member of the radical fringe of the pro-independence movement.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

After the surprise announcement of the French National Assembly’s dissolution last Sunday, French Pacific territories are already busy preparing for the forthcoming snap election with varying expectations.

Following the decision by President Emmanuel Macron, the snap general election will be held on June 30 (first round) and July 7 (second round).

• READ MORE:  Kanaky New Caledonia unrest: Fiji, PNG call for UN decolonisation mission
• Pacific churches call at UN for France to drop ‘limbo law’ to restore peace in Kanaky
• Kanaky New Caledonia unrest: What happens to limbo law change with French snap election?
• History ‘replaying itself’ in Kanaky but Pacific solidarity growing, says Tau
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Unsurprisingly, most of the incumbent MPs for the French Pacific have announced they will run again. Here is a summary of prospects:

New Caledonia
In New Caledonia, which has been gripped by ongoing civil unrest since violence broke out on May 13, the incumbents are pro-France Philippe Dunoyer and Nicolas Metzdorf, both affiliated to Macron’s Renaissance party, but also opponents on the local scene, marked by strong divisions within the pro-France camp.

Hours after the surprise dissolution, they both announced they would run, even though the campaign, locally, was going to be “complicated” with a backdrop of insurrectional roadblocks from the pro-independence movement.

Dunoyer said it was the “worst time for an election campaign”.

“It’s almost indecent to call [New] Caledonians to the polls at this time, because this campaign is not the priority at all,” he said.

“Not to mention the curfew still in place which will make political rallies very complicated.

“Political campaigns are always contributing to exacerbating tensions. [President Macron’s call for snap elections] just shows he did not care about New Caledonia when he decided this,” he said.

Dunoyer told NC la 1ère television on Monday he was running again “because for a very long time, I have been advocating for the need of a consensus between pro-independence and anti-independence parties so that we can exit the Nouméa Accord in a climate of peace, respect of each other’s beliefs”.

On the local scene, Dunoyer belongs to the moderate pro-French Calédonie Ensemble, whereas Metzdorf’s political camp (Les Loyalistes) is perceived as more radical.

“The radicalism on both parts has led us to a situation of civil war and it is now urgent to put an end to this . . .  by restoring dialogue to reach a consensus and a global agreement,” he said.

Dunoyer believes “a peaceful way is still possible because many [New] Caledonians aspire to living together”.

On the pro-independence side, leaders of the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) platform have also been swift to indicate they intend to field pro-independence candidates so that “we can increase our political representation” at the [French] national level.

The FLNKS is holding its convention this Saturday, when the umbrella group is expected to make further announcements regarding its campaign strategy and its nominees.

French Polynesia
In French Polynesia, since the previous general elections in 2022, the three seats at the National Assembly were taken — for the first time ever — by members of the pro-independence Tavini Huiraatira, which is also running the local government since the Tahitian general election of May 2023.

The incumbents are Steve Chailloux, Tematai Legayic and Mereana Reid-Arbelot.

The Tavini has held several meetings behind closed doors to fine-tune its strategy and designate its three fielded candidates.

But the snap election is also perceived as an opportunity for the local, pro-France (locally known as “autonomists”) opposition, to return and overcome its current divisions.

Since Sunday, several meetings have been held at party levels between the components of the pro-France side.

Former President and Tapura party leader Edouard Fritch told local media that at this stage all parties at least recognised the need to unite, but no agreement had emerged as yet.

He said his party was intending to field “young” candidates and that the most effective line-up would be that all four pro-French parties unite and win all three constituencies seats for French Polynesia.

“A search for unity requires a lot of effort and compromises . . .  But a three-party, a two-party platform is no longer a platform; we need all four parties to get together,” Fritch said, adding that his party was ready to “share” and only field its candidate in only one of the three constituencies.

Pro-France A Here ia Porinetia President Nicole Sanquer told local media “we must find a way of preserving each party’s values”, saying she was not sure the desired “autonomist” platform could emerge.

Wallis and Futuna
In Wallis and Futuna, there is only one seat, which was held by Mikaele Seo, affiliated to French President Macron’s Renaissance party.

He has not indicated as yet whether he intends to run again at the forthcoming French snap general election, although there is a strong likelihood he will.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The president and board of the Protestant Church of Kanaky New Caledonia has appealed in an open letter to French President Emmanuel Macron to scrap the constitutional procedure to “unfreeze” the electorate, and to complete the “decolonisation project” initiated by the Nouméa Accords.

“If anyone can help us roll back the tombstone that is currently preventing any possible
resurrection, it is you, Mr President,” said the letter.

The church’s message said a “simple word” from the President would end the “fear, resistance and despair” that has gripped Kanaky New Caledonia since the protests against the French government’s proposed electoral law change on May 13 erupted into rioting and the erection of barricades.

• READ MORE: France sends armoured vehicles with machine gun capability to New Caledonia
• Other New Caledonia crisis reports

Opposition is mounting against the militarisation of the Pacific territory since the strife and the church wants to see the peaceful path over the past three decades resume towards “Caledonian citizenship”.

The letter said:

Open letter to Mr Emmanuel Macron
President of the French Republic

The President and the Board of the Protestant Church of Kanaky-New Caledonia decided, this Wednesday 05/06/2024, to transmit to you the following Declaration:

God accepts every human being as they are, without any merit on their part. His Spirit
manifests itself in us, teaching us to listen to each other. The Church owes respect to the
political and customary authorities, and vice versa.

In the current context, which is particularly explosive for our country, the Church’s expression of faith and its fidelity to the Gospel challenge it to bear witness to and proclaim Christian hope.

God created us as free human beings, inviting us to live in trust with him. We often betray this trust because we are often confronted with a world marked by evil and misfortune.

But a breach was opened with Jesus, recognised as the Christ announced by the prophets
God’s reign is already at work among us. We believe that in Jesus, the crucified and risen
Christ, God has taken upon himself evil, our sin.

Freed by his goodness and compassion, God dwells in our frailty and thus breaks the power of death. He makes all things new!

Through his Son Jesus, we all become his children. He constantly lifts us up: from fear to
confidence, from resignation to resistance, from despair to hope.

The Spirit of Pentecost encourages us to bear witness to God’s love in word and deed. He calls us, together with other artisans of justice and peace, whether political or traditional, to listen to the distress and to fight the scourges of all kinds: existential concerns, social breakdowns, hatred of others, discrimination, persecution, violence, refusal to accept any limits .. .  God himself is the source of new things and possible gifts.

We testify that the truth that the Church lives by always surpasses it.

It is therefore with respect and humility, Mr President, that we ask you:

• on the one hand, to officially record the end of the constitutional procedure for unfreezing the electorate and no longer to present it to the Versailles Congress; and
• secondly, to pursue the decolonisation project initiated by the Nouméa
  Accords, which would lead to Caledonian citizenship.

If anyone can help us roll back the tombstone that is currently preventing any possible
resurrection, it is you, Mr President of the Republic.

Don’t be afraid to revisit this legislative process that you have set in motion and that is placing the children of God of Kanaky New Caledonia in fear, resistance and despair.

With a simple word from you, these children of God in Kanaky New Caledonia can regain
their confidence and hope.

To him who is love beyond anything we can express or imagine, let us express our respect and gratitude.

The letter was signed by the Protestant Church president, Pastor Var Kaemo.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The unrest that has gripped Kanaky New Caledonia is the direct result of French President Emmanuel Macron’s partisan and stubborn political manoeuvring to derail the process towards self-determination in my homeland.

The deadly riots that erupted two weeks ago in the capital, Nouméa, were sparked by an electoral reform bill voted through in the French National Assembly, in Paris.

Almost 40 years ago, Kanaky New Caledonia made international headlines for similar reasons. The pro-independence and Kanak people have long been calling to settle the colonial situation in Kanaky New Caledonia, once and for all.

• READ MORE: France sends armoured vehicles with machine gun capability to New Caledonia
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Kanak people make up about 40 percent of the population in New Caledonia, which remains a French territory in the Pacific.

The Kanak independence movement, the Kanak National and Socialist Liberation Front (FLNKS), and its allies have been contesting the controversial electoral bill since it was introduced in the French Senate by the Macron government in April.

Relations between the French government and the FLNKS have been tense since Macron decided to push ahead with the third independence referendum in 2021. Despite the call by pro-independence groups and the Kanak people for it to be deferred due to the covid pandemic and its high death toll.

Ever since, the FLNKS and supporters have contested the political legitimacy of that referendum because the majority of the indigenous and colonised people of Kanaky New Caledonia did not take part in the vote.

Peaceful rallies
Since the electoral reform bill was introduced in the French Senate in April this year, peaceful rallies, demonstrations, marches and sit-ins gathering more than 10,000 people have been held in the city centre of Nouméa and around Kanaky New Caledonia.

But that did not stop the French government pushing ahead with the bill — despite clear signs that it would trigger unrest and violent reactions on the ground.

The tensions and loss of trust in the Macron government by pro-independence groups became more evident when Sonia Backés, an anti-independence leader and president of the Southern province, was appointed as State Secretary in charge of Citizenship in July 2022 and then Nicolas Metzdorf, another anti-independence representative as rapporteur on the proposed electoral reform bill.

Macron can deploy thousands of troops and military arsenals. France will never silence Kanaky aspirations for freedom https://t.co/GJcXFCDvLY

— Jimmy Naouna (@JNaouna) June 3, 2024

This clearly showed the French government was supporting loyalist parties in Kanaky New Caledonia — and that the French State had stepped out of its neutral position as a partner to the Nouméa Accord, and a party to negotiate toward a new political agreement.

Then last late last month, President Macron made the out-of-the blue decision to pay an 18 hour visit to Kanaky New Caledonia, to ease tensions and resume talks with local parties to build a new political agreement.

It was no more than a public relations exercise for his own political gain. Even within his own party, Macron has lost support to take the electoral reform bill through the Congrès de Versailles (a joint session of Parliament) and his handling of the situation in Kanaky New Caledonia is being contested at a national level by political groups, especially as campaigning for the upcoming European elections gathers pace.

Once back in Paris, Macron announced he may consider putting the electoral reform to a national referendum, as provided for under the French constitution; French citizens in France voted to endorse the Nouméa Accord in 1998.

“To me Kanak independence is inevitable” /
“I think France is prolonging the inevitable.” Sir Collin Tukuitonga
New Caledonia’s fires for freedom https://t.co/PB0edo9XWg

— Jimmy Naouna (@JNaouna) May 27, 2024

More pressure on talks
For the FLNKS, this option will only put more pressure on the talks for a new political agreement.

The average French citizen in Paris is not fully aware of the decolonisation process in Kanaky New Caledonia and why the electoral roll has been restricted to Kanaks and “citizens”, as per the Nouméa Accord. They may just vote “yes” on the basis of democratic principles: one man, one vote.

Yet others may vote “no” as to sanction against Macron’s policies and his handling of Kanaky New Caledonia.

Either way, the outcome of a national referendum on the proposed electoral reform bill — without a local consensus — would only trigger more protest and unrest in Kanaky New Caledonia.

After Macron’s visit, the FLNKS issued a statement reaffirming its call for the electoral reform process to be suspended or withdrawn.

It also called for a high-level independent mission to be sent into Kanaky New Caledonia to ease tensions and ensure a more conducive environment for talks to resume towards a new political agreement that sets a definite and clear pathway towards a new — and genuine — referendum on independence for Kanaky New Caledonia.

A peaceful future for all that hopefully will not fall on deaf ears again.

Jimmy Naouna is a member of Kanaky New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS Political Bureau. This article was first published by The Guardian and is republished here with the permission of the author.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Cook Islands Prime Minister and Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) chair Mark Brown has written to the president of the government of New Caledonia to offer support in finding a way forward.

Brown said the political situation in the French territory — which is a full member of the PIF — remains deeply concerning to the Forum family.

He said there were a number of mechanisms and processes available to PIF members to help resolve “complex and historical issues” which remain “unsettled”.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: French Ambassador for the Pacific Véronique Roger-Lacan talks to Lydia Lewis
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

He also stressed implementing an agreed way forward “must not be rushed”.

“Our Pacific region is home to independent experts and skilled personnel, that are familiar with this region, its history, its people, and importantly, its context, that can support all parties to move this process forward,” Brown said.

“Pacific Islands Forum [is ready to] to facilitate and provide a supported and neutral space for all parties to come together in the spirit of the Pacific Way, to find an agreed way forward that safeguards the interests of the people of New Caledonia.”

French President Emanuel Macron came and left Nouméa last week without announcing a return to a freeze or scrapping of the controversial constitutional amendment, which indigenous Kanaks and pro-independence groups have been calling for.

Dialogue promised
He promised dialogue would continue, “in view of the current context, we give ourselves a few weeks so as to allow peace to return, dialogue to resume, in view of a comprehensive agreement,” he said.

Indigenous Kanaks have also called for Macron to investigate the death toll, with more young rioters feared dead, and for the proposed constitutional amendments to be withdrawn.

Concerns have also been raised around the Kanak population facing a great deal of inequity and poor health, education and job outcomes.

Vanuatu Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu told the media at the fourth UN Small Islands Developing States conference that “everyone could see this coming three years ago”.

“France has caused this crisis by its failure to recognise the Kanaks’ call for the third referendum to be deferred,” Regenvanu said.

Regenvanu said Macron’s visit made no difference “because France has to withdraw its legislative change to open the electoral rolls to allow for a resolution through dialogue”.

He said if that did not happen it will push the situation back to the cycle of violence that was prevalent in the 1980s.

“We are calling on France to withdraw the legislative proposals, and come back to the table and set up a new accord with the indépendantistes and the anti-independentists in the territory,” Regenvanu said.

“If France does not withdraw the legislative amendments, the violence will continue.”

‘France’s credibility challenged’
Massey University Defence and Security Studies associate professor Dr Powles said the PIF had produced a “fairly scathing” report on the third and final New Caledonia referendum.

But the French President’s stand on the issue of the third self-determination referendum (held in December 2021 and boycotted by the pro-independence camp) is: “I will not go back on this.”

Dr Powles said there were options for the Forum Secretariat, including using the existing regional crisis mechanism under the Biketawa Declaration.

The declaration has been used on a number of occasions in the Pacific, in Nauru, in Solomon Islands, as well as in several other cases, she said.

“France’s credibility was strongly challenged by virtue of the fact that it is a colonial power in the Pacific,” Dr Powles said.

“A resilient Pacific is a Pacific in which all Pacific peoples are free and independent. And that is really the best type of resilience which will keep the region safe.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Nothing is more evident of this than his treatment of New Caledonia, a Pacific French territory annexed in 1853 and assuming the title of a non-self-governing territory in 1946.  Through its tense relationship with France and the French settlers, the island territory has been beset by periodic bursts of violence and indigenous indignation.  Pro-independence parties such as L’Union Calédonienne have seen their leaders assassinated over time – Pierre Declerq and Eloi Machoro, for instance, were considered sufficiently threatening to the French status quo and duly done away with.  Kanak pro-independence activists have been butchered in such confrontations as the Hienghène massacre in December 1984, where ten were killed by French loyalists of the Lapetite and Mitride families.

As for Macron, New Caledonia was always going to feature in efforts to assert French influence in the Indo-Pacific.  In 2018, he visited the territory promising that it would be a vital part of “a broader strategy” in the region, not least to keep pace with China.  Other traditional considerations also feature.  The island is the world’s fourth ranked producer of nickel, critical for electric vehicle batteries.

In July 2023, Macron declared on a visit to the territory that the process outlined in the Nouméa Accord of 1998 had reached its terminus.  The accords, designed as a way of reaching some common ground between indigenous Kanaks and the descendants of French settlers through rééquilibrage (rebalancing), yielded three referenda on the issue of independence, all coming down in favour of the status quo. In 2018, the independence movement received 43% of the vote.  In 2020, the number had rumbled to 47%.

The last of the three, the December 2021 referendum, was a contentious one, given its boycott by the Kanak people.  The situation was aided, in large part, by the effects of Covid-19 and its general incapacitation of Kanak voters.  Any mobilisation campaign was thwarted.  A magical majority for independence was thereby avoided.  The return of 97% in favour of continued French rule, despite clearly being a distortion, became the bullying premise for concluding matters.

The process emboldened the French president, effectively abandoning a consensus in French policy stretching back to the Matignon Accords of 1988.  With the independence movement seemingly put on ice, Macron could press home his advantage through political reforms that would, for instance, unfreeze electoral rolls for May 2024 elections at the provincial and congressional level.  Doing so would enable French nationals to vote in those elections, something they were barred from doing under the Nouméa Accord.  New Caledonian parliamentarians such as Nicolas Metzdorf heartily approve the measure.

On May 13 riots broke out, claiming up to seven lives.  It has the flavour of an insurrection, one unplanned and uncoordinated by the traditional pro-independence group.  Roadblocks have been erected by the Field Action Coordination Cell (CCAT).  It had been preceded by peaceful protests in response to the deliberations of the French National Assembly regarding a constitutional arrangement that would inflate the territory’s electoral register by roughly 24,500 voters.

Much of the violence, stimulated by pressing inequalities and propelled by more youthful protestors, have caught the political establishment flatfooted. Even Kanak pro-independence leaders have urged such protestors to resist resorting to violence in favour of political discussions.  The young, it would seem, are stealing the show.

Macron, for his part, promptly dispatched over 3,000 security officers and made a rushed visit lasting a mere 18 hours, insisting that, “The return of republican order is the priority.”  Various Kanak protestors were far from impressed.  Spokesperson for the pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), Jimmy Naouna, made the sensible point that, “You can’t just keep sending in troops just to quell the protests, because that is just going to lead to more protests.”  To salve the wounds, the president promised to lift the state of emergency imposed on the island to encourage dialogue between the fractious parties.

Western press outlets have often preferred to ignore the minutiae about the latest revolt, focusing instead on the fate of foreign nationals besieged by the antics of desperate savages.  Some old themes never dissipate.  “We are sheltered in place because it’s largely too dangerous to leave,” Australian Maxwell Winchester told CNN.  “We’ve had barricades, riots … shops looted, burnt to the ground.  Our suburb near us basically has nothing left.”

Winchester describes a scene of desperation, with evacuations of foreign nationals stalling because of Macron’s arrival for talks.  Food is in short supply, as are medicines.  “Other Australians stranded have had to scrounge coconuts to eat.”

René Dosière, an important figure behind the Nouméa Accord, defined the position taken by Macron with tart accuracy.  Nostalgia, in some ways even more tenacious and clinging than that of Britain, remains.  The French president had little interest in the territory beyond its standing as “a former colony”.  His was a “desire to have a territory that allows you to say, ‘The sun never sets on the French empire’.”

For the indigenous Kanak population, the matter of New Caledonia’s fate will have less to do with coconut scrounging and the sun of a stuttering empire than electoral reforms that risk extinguishing the voices of independence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced the 12-day state of emergency imposed in New Caledonia on May 15 would not be extended “for the time being”.

The decision not to renew the state of emergency was mainly designed to “allow the components of the pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) to hold meetings and to be able to go to the roadblocks and ask for them to be lifted”, Macron said in a media release late yesterday.

The state of emergency officially ended at 5am today (Nouméa time).

• READ MORE: French repressive policies in New Caledonia have ‘betrayed’ Kanak hopes — David Robie video
• Amid Kanaky New Caledonia’s unrest, I saw first-hand the same colonial white privilege that caused it
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It was imposed after deadly and destructive riots erupted in the French Pacific archipelago with a backdrop of ongoing protests against proposed changes to the French Constitution, that would allow citizens having resided there for at least 10 years to take part in local elections.

Pro-independence parties feared the opening of conditions of eligibility would significantly weaken the indigenous Kanak population’s political representation.

During a 17-hour visit to New Caledonia on Thursday last week, Macron set the lifting of blockades as the precondition to the resumption of “concrete and serious” political talks regarding New Caledonia’s long-term political future.

The talks were needed in order to find a successor agreement, including all parties (pro-independence and “loyalists” or pro-France), to the Nouméa Accord signed in 1998.

Attempts to hold these talks, over the past two-and-a-half years, have so far failed.

House arrests lifted
Not renewing the state of emergency would also put an end to restriction on movements and a number of house arrests placed on several pro-independence radical leaders — including Christian Téin, the leader of a so-called CCAT (Field Action Coordination Committee), close to the more radical fringe of FLNKS.

The CCAT is regarded as the main organiser of the protests which led to ongoing unrest.

In a speech published on social networks on Friday after Macron’s visit, Téin called for the easing of security measures to allow him to speak to militants, but in the same breath he assured supporters the intention was to “remain mobilised and maintain resistance”.

Since they broke out on May 13, the riots have caused seven deaths, hundreds of injuries and estimated damage of almost 1 billion euros (NZ$1.8 billion) to the local economy. Up to 500 companies, business and retail stores had also been looted or destroyed by arson.

Following Macron’s visit last week, a “mission” consisting of three high-level public servants has remained in New Caledonia to foster a resumption of political dialogue between leaders of all parties.

More reinforcements
In the same announcement, the French presidential office said a fresh contingent of “seven additional gendarme mobile forces units, for a total of 480” would be flown to New Caledonia “within the coming hours”.

Macron said this would bring the number of security forces in New Caledonia to 3500.

He once again condemned the blockades and looting, saying “this violence cannot pretend to represent a legitimate political action”.

In parallel to the lifting of the state of emergency, a dusk-to-dawn curfew remained in force.

On the ground, mainly in Nouméa and its outskirts, security operations were ongoing, with several neighbourhoods and main access roads still blocked and controlled by pockets of rioters.

At the weekend, intrusions from groups of rioters forced French forces to evacuate some 30 residents (mostly of European descent) some of whose houses had been set on fire.

La Tontouta airport still closed
Meanwhile, the international Nouméa-La Tontouta airport would remain closed to all commercial flights until June 2, it was announced on Monday. The airport, which remained cut off from the capital Nouméa due to pro-independence roadblocks, has been closed for the past three weeks.

French delegate minister for Overseas Marie Guévenoux, who arrived with Macron last week and has remained in New Caledonia since, assured on Sunday the situation in Nouméa and its outskirts was “improving”.

“Police and gendarmes are slowly regaining ground… The (French) state will regain all of these neighbourhoods,” she told France Television.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

By a Kanak from Aotearoa New Zealand in Kanaky New Caledonia

I’ve been trying to feel cool and nice on this beautiful sunny day in Kanaky. But it has already been spoiled by President Emmanuel Macron’s flashy day-long visit on Thursday.

Currently special French military forces are trying to take full control of the territory. Very ambitously.

They’re clearing all the existing barricades around the capital Nouméa, both the northern and southern highways, and towards the northern province.

• READ MORE: Macron delays New Caledonia voting rolls “unfreeze” after riots
• Media fuss over stranded tourists, but Kanaks face existential struggle
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Today, May 25, after 171 years of French occupation, we are seeing the “Lebanonisation” of our country which, after only 10 days of revolt, saw many young Kanaks killed by bullets. Example: 15 bodies reportedly found in the sea, including four girls.

[Editor: There have been persistent unconfirmed rumours of a higher death rate than has been reported, but the official death toll is currently seven — four of them Kanak, including a 17-year-old girl, and two gendarmes, one by accident. Lebanonisation is a negative political term referring to how a prosperous, developed, and politically stable country descends into a civil war or becomes a failed state — as happened with Lebanon during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.]

One of the bodies was even dragged by a car. Several were caught, beaten, burned, and tortured by the police, the BAC and the militia, one of whose leaders was none other than a loyalist elected official.

With the destruction and looting of many businesses, supermarkets, ATMs, neighbourhood grocery stores, bakeries . . . we see that the CCAT has been infiltrated by a criminal organisation which chooses very specific economic targets to burn.

Leaders trying to discredit our youth
At the same time, the leaders organise the looting, supply alcohol and drugs (amphetamines) in order to “criminalise” and discredit our youth.

A dividing line has been created between the northern and southern districts of Greater Nouméa in order to starve our populations. As a result, we have a rise in prices by the colonial counters in these dormitory towns where an impoverished Kanak population lives.

President Macron came with a dialogue mission team made up of ministers from the “young leaders” group, whose representative in the management of high risks in the Pacific is none other than a former CIA officer.

The presence of DGSE agents [the secret service involved in the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in 1985] and their mercenaries also gives us an idea of ​​what we are going to endure again and again for a month.

The state has already chosen its interlocutors who have been much the same for 40 years. The same ones that led us into the current situation.

Therefore, we firmly reaffirm our call for the intervention of the BRICS, the Pacific Islands Forum members, and the Melanesian Spearhead group (MSG) to put an end to the violence perpetrated against the children of the indigenous clans because the Kanak people are one of the oldest elder peoples that this land has had.

There are only 160,000 individuals left today in a country full of wealth.

New Caledonia police kill Kanak protester https://t.co/7fnNPlx5W8
A day after president Macron’s visit..

— Jimmy Naouna (@JNaouna) May 24, 2024

Food and medical aid needed
Each death represents a big loss and it means a lot to the person’s clan. More than ever, we need to initiate the decolonisation process and hold serious discussions so that we can achieve our sovereignty very quickly.

Today we are asking for the intervention of international aid for:

• The protection of our population;
• food aid; and
• medical support, because we no longer trust the medical staff of Médipôle (Nouméa hospital) and the liberals who make sarcastic judgments towards our injured and our people.

This open letter was written by a long-standing Kanak resident of New Zealand who has been visiting New Caledonia and wanted to share his dismay at the current crisis with friends back here and with Asia Pacific Report. His name is being withheld for his security.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron has ended a meeting-packed whirlwind day in New Caledonia with back-to-back sessions including opposing leaders in the French Pacific territory.

Macron left New Caledonia this morning, leaving some members of his entourage to deal with details in the still-inflamed situation.

After landing there yesterday morning as part of an emergency visit to address the current crisis, the president’s day was busy.

• READ MORE:  Macron says ‘peace, calm and security’ his top priority for New Caledonia
• LISTEN TO RADIO WAATEA: Interview with Jessie Ounei and David Small
• Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Macron held meeting after meeting first with economic stakeholders, as New Caledonia’s economy faced the bleakest situation in its history, after 11 days of rioting, burning and looting.

He also held meetings with elected members of the local Congress, the territorial assembly, as well as the mayors.

Later in the day, Macron met police and gendarmes and expressed his gratitude and condolences for the loss of two gendarmes killed during the riots.

He confirmed that some 3000 security force officers were stationed in New Caledonia and would stay “as long as it takes” to fully restore law and order.

By the end of Thursday, Macron managed to listen to opposing views from the antagonistic camps, with sometimes divisions seen even within each of the blocks.

Urgent economic measures
Paris will set up a special “solidarity fund” to assist economic recovery, in the face of “colossal” damage caused by more than a week of burning and looting of businesses — about 400 destroyed for an estimated cost bordering 1 billion euros (NZ$1.7 billion).

This would include measures such as emergency assistance to pay salaries, to delay payments and debts, to get insurers to move quickly and for banks to grant zero-interest loans for reconstruction.

Socio-economic roots to disorder
Macron also met groups of young New Caledonians who expressed distress at the lack of perspective they faced regarding their future.

Recognising that the violent unrest and rioting were still ongoing in Nouméa, its outskirts and other parts of New Caledonia, Macron labelled them “multifactor” and “in part, political”.

“They rely on delinquents who have sometimes overwhelmed their order-givers. Then there is this opportunistic delinquency that has aggregated. This has crystallised a political disagreement — and, let’s face it, this question of the electoral roll that was taken separately from everything else.”

As one of the major causes of New Caledonia’s current situation, the French president singled out social inequalities that “have continued to increase . . .  They are in part fuelling the uninhibited racism that has re-emerged over the past 11 days”.

Macron said those politicians, who had recently radicalised their talks and actions, bore an “immense” responsibility.

Distressed youth
“The question now is to restore confidence between all stakeholders, political forces, economic forces … and regain confidence in the future,” he said.

“We are not starting from a blank page. Our foundations are those on which the Nouméa and Matignon Accords [1988 and 1998] have been built.

“But one has to admit that still, today, vision for a common destiny . . .  and the re-balancing has not achieved its goal of reducing economic and social inequalities. On the contrary, they have increased,” Macron said.

“Today, I have met youths of all walks of life and what struck me was that they felt discouraged, afraid, sometimes angry and that they need a vision for the future,” Macron told media.

“Really, it’s now the responsibility of all those in charge to build this path.”

CCAT’s ‘public enemy number one’
On the sensitive political chapter, Macron spent a significant part of his visit to try and bring together political parties for talks.

He managed only in so far as he did meet with pro-independence leaders, even accepting that the controversial CCAT (“field action coordination committee” set up late in 2023 by the Union Calédonienne, one of the main components of the pro-independence FLNKS), be allowed to attend the meeting.

CCAT leader Christian Téin, despite being under house arrest, and regarded by critics as “public enemy number one”, was brought to the meeting — much to the surprise of observers.

Behind closed doors, at the French High Commission in downtown Nouméa, Macron also met pro-France (Loyalist) leaders, but because of their divisions, he had to arrange two separate meetings: one with Le Rassemblement and Les Loyalistes, and another one for Calédonie Ensemble.

But a meeting of all parties together remained elusive and did not take place.

Well into the evening, Macron held a press conference to announce the contents of his exchanges with a wide range of political, but also economic and civil society stakeholders.

Controversial electoral amendment delayed, not withdrawn
Elaborating on the outcomes of the talks he had with political leaders, Macron stressed that he had “made a very clear commitment to ensure that the controversial reform is not rushed by force and that in view of the current context, we give ourselves a few weeks so as to allow peace to return, dialogue to resume, in view of a comprehensive agreement”.

No going back on the third referendum
“I told them the state will be in its role of impartiality,” Macron said, but added that on the third self-determination referendum (held in December 2021 and boycotted by the pro-independence camp): “I will not go back on this.”

On the basis of the third referendum which was part of three consultations — held in 1998, 2020 and 2021 and that all resulted in a majority rejecting independence for New Caledonia — Macron has consistently considered that New Caledonia has chosen to remain French.

But under the 1998 (now almost expired) Nouméa Accord, after those three referenda have been held local political actors have yet to meet to consider “the situation thus created”.

The Accord’s terms were encouraging talks that would produce the much-referred to “local agreement” which would be the basis of the successor pact to the 1998 Accord.

“The political dialogue must resume immediately. I have decided to install a mediating and working mission and in one month, an update will be made,” Macron said, referring to a “comprehensive agreement” from all local parties regarding the future of New Caledonia.

Macron reiterated that he wanted a deal to be reached, which would become part of the French Constitution and automatically replace the controversial constitutional amendment focusing on New Caledonia’s electoral roll changes.

For the local agreement to emerge, Macron also appointed a team of negotiators tasked to assist.

Renewed call for local, comprehensive agreement
“The objective is to reach this comprehensive agreement and that it should cover at least the question of the electoral roll, but also the organisation of power . . .  citizenship, the self-determination vote issue, a new social pact and the way of dealing with inequalities,” he told reporters.

Other short to long-term pressing economic issues such as diversification of the nickel industry, which is undergoing its worst crisis due to the collapse of world nickel prices (-45 percent over the past 12 months), should also be the subject of political talks and be included in the new deal.

“My wish is also that this [local] agreement should be endorsed by the vote of New Caledonians.”

The controversial text still needs to be ratified by the French Parliament’s Congress (the National Assembly and the Senate, in a joint sitting with a required majority of two-thirds). This electoral change is perceived to be one of the main causes of the riots hitting New Caledonia.

Under the amendment there are two sections:

• “Unfreezing” New Caledonia’s eligibility conditions for provincial local elections, to allow everyone residing there for an uninterrupted 10 years to cast their vote, and
• However, it stipulates that if a comprehensive and wider agreement is produced by all politicians, then the whole amendment is deemed null and void, and that the new locally-produced text becomes law and will replace it.

The inclusive agreement has been sought by the French government for the past three years but to date, local parties have not been able to reach such a consensus.

Talks have been held, sometimes between pro-independent and Loyalist (pro-France) parties, but never has it been possible to bring everyone to the same table at the same time, mainly because of internal divisions within each camp.

But while evoking New Caledonia’s future political prospects, Macron stressed the immediate need was for all political stakeholders to “explicitly call for all roadblocks to be lifted in the coming hours”.

“As soon as those withdrawals are effective and observed, then the state of emergency will be lifted too,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron landed in Nouméa today under heavy security after pro-independence protests by indigenous Kanaks followed by rioting in the Pacific territory of New Caledonia.

Speaking to a pool of journalists, he set as his top priority the return to peace with New Caledonia still in the grip of violent unrest after 10 days of roadblocks, rioting, burning and looting.

The riots, related to New Caledonia’s independence issue, started on May 13, as the French National Assembly in Paris voted in favour of a controversial constitutional amendment which would significantly modify the rules of eligibility for local elections.

• READ MORE:  French President Emmanuel Macron lands in Nouméa amid unrest
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• Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

The pro-independence movement FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) objected to the text, saying this, by allowing people to vote locally after 10 years of uninterrupted residence, would have a significant impact on their future representation.

The amendment remains to be ratified by a meeting of the Congress in Versailles (a joint sitting of both Upper and Lower Houses) before it would take effect.

Earlier, Macron said he intended to call this joint sitting sometime before the end of June.

New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties, as well as some pro-France parties, agree the current situation is not conducive to such a vote.

Call to postpone key vote
They are calling for the Versailles Congress joint sitting to be at least postponed or even that the controversial text be withdrawn altogether by the French government.

During his trip, Macron is also accompanied by Home Affairs and Overseas Minister Gérald Darmanin (who has been dealing with New Caledonia since 2022); Darmanin’s deputy (“delegate” minister for overseas) Marie Guévenoux; and Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu (who was in charge of the French overseas portfolio before Darmanin).

He also brought with him several high-level public servants who would form a “dialogue mission” tasked to restore contacts with New Caledonia’s political stakeholders.

The “mission” will stay in New Caledonia “as long as it takes” and its goal will be to have a “local political dialogue with the view of arriving at a comprehensive political agreement” regarding New Caledonia’s long-term future.

Along with the presidential Airbus, a military A-400 also landed in New Caledonia, bringing more law and order reinforcements.

Macron plans to meet political, economic, custom (traditional) and civil society representatives.

Doubts remain on whether all of the local parties would accept to meet the French Head of State.

Normal ‘health care, food supply’ aim
Talking to the media, Macron said a return to “peace, calm and security” was “the priority of all priorities”.

This would also imply restoring normal “health care, goods and food supply” which have been gravely affected for the past 10 days.

“I am aware the population is suffering from a great crisis situation. We will also talk about economic reconstruction. For the political questions, the most sensitive ones, I came to talk about New Caledonia’s future,” he said.

“At the end of today, decisions and announcements will be made. I have come here with a sense of determination. And with a sense of respect and humility.”

Since May 13, the riots have caused the death of six people, destroyed an estimated 400 businesses for a total estimated cost, experts say, is now bordering 1 billion euros (NZ$1.8 billion).

Asked by journalists if all this could be achieved in a matter of just a few hours, Macron replied: “We shall see. I have no set limit” (on his New Caledonia stay).

Macron’s schedule with a visit initially set to last not more than 24 hours, remains sketchy.

Visit extended to 48 hours
It appears to have been extended to 48 hours.

In many parts of New Caledonia, French law enforcement (police, gendarmes) were today still struggling to regain control of several strategic access roads, as well as several districts of the capital Nouméa.

Macron said the state of emergency, which was imposed Wednesday last week for an initial period of 12 days, “should not be extended”, but that security forces currently deployed “will stay as long as necessary, even during the Paris 2024 Olympics”.

He also urged all stakeholders to “call for the roadblocks to be lifted”.

“I am here because dialogue is necessary, but I’m calling on everyone’s sense of responsibility.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French president Emmanuel Macron has landed in Nouméa.

The French Ambassador to the Pacific Véronique Roger-Lacan was on the flight.

“The unrest in New Caledonia is absolutely unacceptable,” Roger-Lacan told RNZ Pacific in an interview.

• READ MORE: Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

She had just arrived back from Caracas where she represented France at this week’s United Nations seminar on decolonisation.

“As far as the French state is concerned, our door is open, we are welcoming everyone for dialogue, in Paris or in Nouméa. It’s up to everyone to join further dialogue,” Roger-Lacan said.

Roger-Lacan said the unrest had been provoked by very specific parts of the New Caledonian establishment.

She said she made a plea for dialogue at the United Nations decolonisation seminar in light of the deadly protests in New Caledonia.

‘Up to all the parties’
“Well, what I want to say is that the Nouméa agreement has enabled everyone in New Caledonia to have a representation in the French National Assembly and in the Senate,” Roger-Lacan said.

“And it is up to all the parties, including the independantistes, who have some representatives in the National Assembly and in the Senate, to use their political power to convince everyone in the National Assembly and in the Parliament.

“If they don’t manage [this], it is [an] amazingly unacceptable way of voicing their concerns through violence.”

While the French government and anti-independence leaders maintain protest organisers are to blame for the violence, pro-independence parties say they have been holding peaceful protests for months.

They say violence was born from socio-economic disparities and France turning a deaf ear to the territorial government’s call for a controversial proposed constitutional electoral amendment to be scrapped.

Roger-Lacan said while “everyone” was saying this unrest was called for because they were not listened to by the French state, France stands ready for dialogue.

She said just because one group failed to “use their political power to convince the Assembly and the Senate”, it did not justify deadly protests.

Composition questioned
A long-time journalist reporting on Pacific issues said the composition of the French President’s delegation to New Caledonia would anger pro-independence leaders.

Islands Business correspondent Nic Maclellan said Macron would be accompanied by the current Overseas Minister Gérald Darmanin and Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu.

“They will no doubt be welcomed by supporters of the French republic, anti-independence politicians who want to stay with France but Lecornu and Darmanin have been responsible for key decisions taken over the last three or four years that have lead to this current crisis,” Maclellan said.

President Macron has said the main objective of the trip is to resume political talks with all stakeholders and find a political solution to the crisis.

United Nations decolonisation
This year Véronique Roger-Lacan represented France at the table at a seminar which took place in the lead up to the UN Committee on Decolonisation in New York in June.

The right to self determination is a constitutional principle in the French constitution as much as it is in the UN Charter, Roger-Lacan explained.

The meeting she has just been at in Caracas, “prepares a draft, UN General Assembly resolution, that is being examined in the committee, which is called the C-24,” she said.

Roger-Lacan was appointed to the role of French ambassador to the Pacific in July last year.

Various groups have been calling for the United Nations to head a delegation to New Caledonia to observe the current situation.

Roger-Lacan said the New Caledonia coalition government representative and the FLNKS representative both called for a UN mission at the meeting.

“Then there were five representatives of the loyalists and they all made the case of the fact that a third referenda had been in compliance with the two UN General Assembly resolutions determining the future status of New Caledonia,” she said.

As the representative of the French state, she made the case that France had always been the only administrative power to sit in the C-24 — “and to negotiate and cooperate,” she said.

“The United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom never did that,” Roger-Lacan said.

She also welcomed the UN, “whenever they want to visit”, she said.

“That’s the plea that I made on behalf of the French government, a plea for dialogue.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A NZ Defence Force plane carrying 50 New Zealanders evacuated from New Caledonia landed at Auckland International Airport last night.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it would be working with France and Australia to ensure the safe departure of several evacuation flights amid civil unrest in the island state.

The efforts came as RNZ Pacific’s French Pacific correspondent Patrick Decloitre reported that President Emmanuel Macron would be flying to New Caledonia within hours to install a “dialogue mission” in the French Pacific dependency in the wake of violent riots for the past eight days.

• READ MORE: President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia independence unrest reports

The first flight took off from the capital of Nouméa after a short turnaround at Magenta local airport at 7pm, and landed in Auckland at about 10pm.

Those arriving to Auckland Airport on the NZ Defence Force plane said they were relieved to be back.

Many reunited with loved ones, while others were sent onto hospital for urgent medical treatment.

Chris and Mike Riley were arriving back from New Caledonia from what was meant to be a week-long trip.

‘Fireworks and gunfire’
Chris Riley said they heard lots of explosions, fireworks and gunfire from where they were.

“We were in a lovely place actually, it was quite peaceful, but we were trapped because we couldn’t get through because of all the troubles that were there,” she said.

Mike Riley said they were both relieved to be home.

“We’re not in a hurry to go anywhere apart from Kerikeri,” he said.

Carl, who did not provide a last name, was in a tourist area of New Caledonia for the past two weeks, which he said was sheltered from the riots.

He said it felt great to get on the Defence Force flight.

“It was a bit of a different type of trip back to New Zealand, but it was fun.”

La Tontouta still closed
Noumea’s La Tontouta International Airport remains closed.

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said the New Zealanders on the flight would have had a security escort to the airport.

Pacific Island nations were among those which had sought New Zealand’s help to evacuate citizens, he said.

Peters said there would be more flights over the next few days to get all 250 New Zealanders out of the French Pacific territory, which has been in the grip of riots and political unrest between anti- and pro-independence groups.

He hoped another flight would leave for New Caledonia this morning.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Africa Awakens.

Worried New Caledonian expats in Aotearoa admit they are “terrified” for friends and family amid ongoing violence and civil unrest in the French Pacific territory.

The death toll remained at four tonight, and hundreds have been injured after electoral changes sparked widespread rioting by pro-independence supporters in the capital of Nouméa.

French President Emmanuel Macron has declared a 12-day state of emergency and about 1200 police enforcements are due to arrive from France.

• LISTEN TO RNZ CHECKPOINT: Latest on unrest in New Caledonia
• Expats worried about families in New Caledonia
• READ MORE: Nouméa ‘was on fire’ – New Zealander in New Caledonia tells of unrest
  France declares state of emergency in New Caledonia – four die in riots
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Many worried locals have been confined to their homes.

New Zealand-based New Caledonians have explained how the situation in their homeland has left them on edge.

Pascale Desrumaux and her family have been in Auckland for two years.

With parts of the country in turmoil, she said she was scared for her family and friends back home in Nouméa.

“I’m terrified and I’m very stressed,” Desrumaux said.

“[My family] are afraid for their lives.”

‘Locked in’
The precarious situation is illustrated by the fact her family cannot leave their homes and neighbouring stores have been ransacked then torched by protesters.

“They are locked in at the moment, so they can’t move — so they feel anxiety of course,” Desrumaux said.

“On top of that, shortly they will run out of food.

“The situation is complex.”

Desrumaux is checking in with family members every few hours for updates.

Amid the current climate, she said she had mixed emotions about being abroad.

“This shared feeling of being relieved to be here in New Zealand and grateful because my kids and husband are not in danger,” she said.

“At the same time I feel so bad for my friends and family over there.”

‘A beautiful place’
She stressed her home country remained “a beautiful place” and hoped the crisis could be resolved peacefully.

Fellow Auckland-based New Caledonian Anais Bride said she had been left distraught by what was unfolding.

In the past 48 hours, her parents have vacated their Nouméa home to stay with Bride’s sister as tensions escalated.

Based on her conversations with loved ones, she said that international news coverage had not fully conveyed the fluid crisis facing citizens on the ground.

“It took my mother a little while for her to accept the fact that it was time to leave, because she wanted to stay where she lives.

“My sisters’ just told her ‘at the end of the day, it’s just your house, it’s material’.

“It’s been hard for my parents.”

One supermarket standing
She said there was only one supermarket left standing in Nouméa, with many markets destroyed by fire.

Kevin, who did not want his surname to be published, is another New Caledonian living in New Zealand.

While his family has not seen much unrest first hand, explosions and smoke were constant where they were, he said.

He said it was hard to predict how the unrest could be straightened out.

“It’s hard to tell,” he said.

“The most tragic thing of course is the four deaths, and many businesses have been burned down so many people will lose their job.

“The main thing is how people rebuild connections, peace and of course the economy.”

‘Timely exit’ from Nouméa
Christchurch woman Viki Moore spent a week in New Caledonia before making a “timely exit” out of Nouméa on Monday as civil tension intensified.

“There was a heavy police presence out at the airport with two [armoured vehicles] at the entrance and heavily armed military police roaming around.

“Once we got into the airport we were relieved to be there in this sort of peaceful oasis.

“We didn’t really have a sense of what was still to come.”

She admitted that she did not fully comprehend the seriousness of it until she had left the territory.

Warnings for travellers
Flights through Nouméa are currently grounded.

Air New Zealand said it was monitoring the situation in New Caledonia, with its next flight NZ932 from Auckland to Nouméa still scheduled for Saturday morning.

Chief Operational Integrity and Safety Officer Captain David Morgan said this “could be subject to change”.

“The safety of our passengers, crew, and airport staff is our top priority and we will not operate flights unless their safety can be guaranteed,” he said.

“We will keep passengers updated on our services and advise customers currently in Nouméa to follow the advice of local authorities and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron has declared a state of emergency in New Caledonia after several days of civil unrest in the capital.

Four people are dead due to the unrest and violence in the capital, Nouméa.

France TV reports that a 22-year-old gendarme who had been seriously wounded has become the fourth death. The other three were reportedly Kanaks killed by vigilantes.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Tourists stuck in New Caledonia as riots continue
• Period of instability on cards for New Caledonia, says former Australian consul-general
• READ MORE: Nouméa ‘was on fire’ – New Zealander in New Caledonia tells of unrest
  France declares state of emergency in New Caledonia – four die in riots
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Macron posted on X, formerly Twitter, a message saying the nation was thinking of the gendarme’s family.

Hundreds of others have been injured with more casualties expected as French security forces struggle to restore law and order in Nouméa amid reports of clashes between rioters and “militia” groups being formed by city residents.

According to local media, the state of emergency was announced following a defence and national security council meeting in Paris between the Head of State and several government members, including the Prime Minister and ministers of the Armed Forces, the Interior, the Economy and Justice.

In a press conference last evening in Nouméa, France’s High Commissioner to New Caledonia, Louis Le Franc, told reporters he would call on the military forces if necessary and that reinforcements would be sent today.

Local leaders called for state of emergency
The state of emergency declaration came after the deteriorating crisis on Wednesday prompted Southern Province President Sonia Backès to call on President Macron to declare an emergency to allow the army to back up the police.

“Houses and businesses are being burnt down and looted — organised gangs are terrorising the population and putting at risk the life of inhabitants,” Backes said.

“Law enforcement agents are certainly doing a great job but are obviously overwhelmed by the magnitude of this insurrection . . . Night and day, hastily formed citizen militias find themselves confronted with rioters fuelled by hate and the desire for violence.

“In the next few hours, without a massive and urgent intervention from France, we will lose control of New Caledonia,” Sonia Backès wrote.

She added: “We are now in a state of civil war.”

Backès was later joined by elected MPs for New Caledonia’s constituency, MP Nicolas Metzdorf and Senator Georges Naturel, who also appealed to the French President to declare a state of emergency.

“Mr President, we are at a critical moment and you alone can save New Caledonia,” they wrote.

More than 1700 law enforcement officers deployed
During a press conference on Wednesday evening, French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said two persons had died from gunshot wounds and another two were seriously injured during a clash between rioters and a local “civil defence group”.

He said the gunshot came from one member of the civil defence group who “was trying to defend himself”.

Other reliable sources later confirmed to RNZ the death toll from the same clash was at least three people.

High Commissioner Le Franc said that in the face of an escalating situation, the total number of law enforcement personnel deployed on the ground, mainly in Nouméa, was now about 1000 gendarmes, seven hundred police, as well as members of SWAT intervention groups from gendarmerie (GIGN) and police (RAID).

Le Franc said that a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been extended for another 24 hours.

“People have to respect the curfew, not go to confrontations with weapons, not to burn businesses, shops, pharmacies, schools.”

Armed groups formed on both sides
All commercial flights to and from the Nouméa-La Tontouta international airport remained cancelled for today, affecting an estimated 2500 passengers to and from Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Nadi, Papeete, Tokyo and Singapore.

The situation on the ground is being described by local leaders as “guerrilla warfare” bordering on a “civil war”, as more civilian clashes were reported yesterday on the outskirts of Nouméa, with opposing groups armed with weapons such as hunting rifles.

“We have now entered a dangerous spiral, a deadly spiral . . .  There are armed groups on both sides and if they don’t heed calls for calms — there will be more deaths,” French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc warned.

“I sense dark hours coming in New Caledonia . . .  The current situation is not meant to take this terrible twist, a form of civil war.”

Le Franc said if needed, he would call on “military” reinforcements.

Also yesterday, a group of armed rioters heading towards Nouméa’s industrial zone of Ducos, prompted an intervention from a RAID police squad.

As Nouméa residents woke up today the situation in Noumea remained volatile as, over the past 24 hours, pro-France citizens have started to set up “civil defence groups”, barricades and roadblocks to protect themselves.

Some of them have started to call themselves “militia” groups.

Political leaders call for calm
On the political front, there have been more calls for calm and appeasement from all quarters.

After New Caledonian territorial President Louis Mapou appealed on Tuesday for a “return to reason”, the umbrella body for pro-independence political parties, the FLNKS, yesterday also issued a release appealing for “calm and appeasement” and the lifting of blockades.

While “regretting” and “deploring” the latest developments, the pro-independence umbrella group recalled it had called for the French government’s proposed amendment on New Caledonia’s electoral changes to be withdrawn to “preserve the conditions to reach a comprehensive political agreement between all parties and the French State”.

“However, this situation cannot justify putting at risk peace and all that has been implemented towards a lasting ‘living together’ and exit the colonisation system,” the FLNKS statement said.

The FLNKS also noted that for the order to be validated, the controversial amendment still needed to be put to the vote of the French Congress (combined meeting of the Assembly and the Senate) and that French President Macron had indicated he would not convene the gathering of both Houses of the French Parliament immediately “to give a chance for dialogue and consensus”.

“This is an opportunity FLNKS wishes to seize so that everyone’s claims, including those engaged in demonstrations, can be heard and taken into account,” the statement said.

The President of the Loyalty Islands province, Jacques Lalié (pro-independence) on Wednesday called for “appeasement” and for “our youths to respect the values symbolised by our flag and maintain dignity in their engagement without succumbing to provocations”.

“Absolute priority must be given to dialogue and the search for intelligence to reach a consensus,” he said.

Paris vote which sparked unrest
Overnight in Paris, the French National Assembly voted 351 in favour (mostly right-wing parties) and 153 against (mostly left-wing parties) the proposed constitutional amendments that sparked the ill-fated protests in Noumea on Monday.

This followed hours of heated debate about the relevance of such a text, which New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties strongly oppose because, they say, it poses a serious risk and could shrink their political representation in local institutions (New Caledonia has three provincial assemblies as well as the local parliament, called its Congress).

New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties had been calling for the government to withdraw the text and instead, to send a high-level “dialogue mission” to the French Pacific archipelago.

The text, which is designed to open the restricted list of voters to those who have been residing in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted 10 years, has not completed its legislative path.

After its endorsement by the Senate (on 2 April 2024, with amendments) and the National Assembly (15 May 2024), it still needs to be put to the vote of the French Congress (a joint sitting of France’s both Houses of Parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate) and obtain a required majority of 60 percent.

The bigger picture
The proposed constitutional amendments were tabled by the French Minister for Home Affairs and Overseas, Gérald Darmanin.

Darmanin has defended his bill by saying the original restrictions to New Caledonia’s electoral roll put in place under temporary measures prescribed by the 1998 Nouméa Accord needed to be readjusted to restore “a minimum of democracy” in line with universal suffrage and France’s Constitution.

The previous restrictions had been a pathway to decolonisation for New Caledonia inscribed in the French Constitution, which only allowed people who had been living in New Caledonia before 1998 to vote in local elections.

Those principles were at the centre of the heated discussions during the two days of debate in the National Assembly, where strong words were often exchanged between both sides.

More than 25 years after its implementation, the Accord– a kind of de facto embryonic Constitution for New Caledonia — is now deemed by France to have reached its expiry date after three self-determination referendums were held in 2018, 2020 and 2021, all resulting in a rejection of independence, although the last vote was highly controversial.

The third and final referendum — although conducted legally — was boycotted by a majority of the pro-independence Kanak political groups and their supporters resulting in an overwhelming “no” vote to Independence from France, a stark contrast to the earlier referendum results.

Results of New Caledonia referenda

• 2018: 56.67 percent voted against independence and 43.33 percent in favour.
• 2020: 53.26 percent voted against independence and 46.74 percent in favour.
• 2021: 96.5 percent voted against independence and 3.5 percent in favour. (However, However, the third and final vote in 2021 — during the height of the covid pandemic — under the Nouméa Accord was boycotted by the pro-indigenous Kanak population. In that vote, 96 percent of the people voted against independence — with a 44 percent turnout.)

Since the third referendum was held, numerous attempts have been made to convene all local political parties around the table to come up with a successor pact to the Nouméa Accord.

This would have to be the result of inclusive and bipartisan talks, but those meetings have not yet taken place, mainly because of differences between — and within — both pro-independence and pro-France parties.

Darmanin’s attempts to bring these talks to reality have so far failed, even though he has travelled to New Caledonia seven times over the past two years.

From the pro-independence parties’ point of view, Darmanin is now regarded as not the right person anymore and has been blamed by critics for the talks stalling.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A group belonging to New Caledonia’s pro-independence movement, UNI (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance), has released a communiqué saying they were “moved by and deplored the exactions and violence taking place“.

UNI member of New Caledonia’s Northern provincial assembly Patricia Goa said the violent unrest “affects the whole of our population”.

She said it was “necessary to preserve all that we have built together for over 30 years” and that the priority was “to preserve peace, social cohesion”.

New Caledonia’s territorial President, pro-independence leader Louis Mapou, in a news release from his “collegial” government, appealed for “calm, peace, stability and reason”.

He said they “must remain our goals” in the face of “those events that can only show the persistence of profound fractures and misunderstandings”.

He called on all components of New Caledonia’s society to “use every way and means to bring back reason and calm”.

“Every explanation for these frustrations — anger cannot justify harming or destroying public property, production tools, all of which this country has taken decades to build,” he said, strongly condemning such actions.

Referring to current debates in the Paris National Assembly on changing the French Constitution — to allow more voters at New Caledonia’s local provincial elections — Mapou also appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron, to “bear in mind” that at all times, the priority must remain for a comprehensive agreement to be struck between all political leaders of New Caledonia, to pave the way for the archipelago’s long-term political future.

This accord has not taken place and Macron at the weekend invited all of New Caledonia’s leaders to restart discussions in Paris.

Back in Paris, debates resumed last night in National Assembly, but the vote on a French government-proposed Constitutional change to modify the conditions of eligibility ended with a decisive yes 351-153 in spite of the strong opposition.

Left-wing MPs are supporting New Caledonia’s pro-independence movement in their struggle against a text they believe would seriously affect their political representation.

The constitutional change is regarded as the main cause of New Caledonia’s current unrest.

Meanwhile, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, is this week heading a political delegation in several Pacific island countries and territories, including Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and Tuvalu.

However, the New Caledonian leg of the tour was officially cancelled and will be rescheduled to another date.

As part of the official travel programme, the delegation was to “meet with government, political and cultural leaders, visit New Zealand-supported development initiatives and participate in community activities”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

President Biden began his State of the Union speech with an impassioned warning that failing to pass his $61 billion dollar weapons package for Ukraine “will put Ukraine at risk, Europe at risk, the free world at risk.” But even if the president’s request were suddenly passed, it would only prolong, and dangerously escalate, the brutal war that is destroying Ukraine.

The assumption of the U.S. political elite that Biden had a viable plan to defeat Russia and restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders has proven to be one more triumphalist American dream that has turned into a nightmare. Ukraine has joined North Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza, as another shattered monument to America’s military madness.

This could have been one of the shortest wars in history, if President Biden had just supported a peace and neutrality agreement negotiated in Turkey in March and April 2022 that already had champagne corks popping in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian negotiator Oleksiy Arestovych. Instead, the U.S. and NATO chose to prolong and escalate the war as a means to try to defeat and weaken Russia.

Two days before Biden’s State of the Union speech, Secretary of State Blinken announced the early retirement of Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, one of the officials most responsible for a decade of disastrous U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

Two weeks before the announcement of Nuland’s retirement at the age of 62, she acknowledged in a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the war in Ukraine had degenerated into a war of attrition that she compared to the First World War, and she admitted that the Biden administration had no Plan B for Ukraine if Congress doesn’t cough up $61 billion for more weapons.

We don’t know whether Nuland was forced out, or perhaps quit in protest over a policy that she fought for and lost. Either way, her ride into the sunset opens the door for others to fashion a badly needed Plan B for Ukraine.

The imperative must be to chart a path back from this hopeless but ever-escalating war of attrition to the negotiating table that the U.S. and Britain upended in April 2022 – or at least to new negotiations on the basis that President Zelenskyy defined on March 27, 2022, when he told his people, “Our goal is obvious: peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible.”

Instead, on February 26, in a very worrying sign of where NATO’s current policy is leading, French President Emmanuel Macron revealed that European leaders meeting in Paris discussed sending larger numbers of Western ground troops to Ukraine.

Macron pointed out that NATO members have steadily increased their support to levels unthinkable when the war began. He highlighted the example of Germany, which offered Ukraine only helmets and sleeping bags at the outset of the conflict and is now saying Ukraine needs more missiles and tanks. “The people that said “never ever” today were the same ones who said never ever planes, never ever long-range missiles, never ever trucks. They said all that two years ago,” Macron recalled. “We have to be humble and realize that we (have) always been six to eight months late.”

Macron implied that, as the war escalates, NATO countries may eventually have to deploy their own forces to Ukraine, and he argued that they should do so sooner rather than later if they want to recover the initiative in the war.

  The mere suggestion of Western troops fighting in Ukraine elicited an outcry both within France–from extreme right National Rally to leftist La France Insoumise–and from other NATO countries. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that participants in the meeting were “unanimous” in their opposition to deploying troops. Russian officials warned that such a step would mean war between Russia and NATO.

But as Poland’s president and prime minister headed to Washington for a White House meeting on February 12, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told the Polish parliament that sending NATO troops into Ukraine “is not unthinkable.”

Macron’s intention may have been precisely to bring this debate out into the open and put an end to the secrecy surrounding the undeclared policy of gradual escalation toward full-scale war with Russia that the West has pursued for two years.

Macron failed to mention publicly that, under current policy, NATO forces are already deeply involved in the war. Among many lies that President Biden told in his State of the Union speech, he insisted that “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine.”

However, the trove of Pentagon documents leaked in March 2023 included an assessment that there were already at least 97 NATO special forces troops operating in Ukraine, including 50 British, 14 Americans and 15 French. Admiral John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, has also acknowledged a “small U.S. military presence” based in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to try to keep track of thousands of tons of U.S. weapons as they arrive in Ukraine.

But many more U.S. forces, whether inside or outside Ukraine, are involved in planning Ukrainian military operations; providing satellite intelligence; and play essential roles in the targeting of U.S. weapons. A Ukrainian official told the Washington Post that Ukrainian forces hardly ever fire HIMARS rockets without precise targeting data provided by U.S. forces in Europe.

All these U.S. and NATO forces are most definitely “at war in Ukraine.” To be at war in a country with only small numbers of “boots on the ground” has been a hallmark of 21st Century U.S. war-making, as any Navy pilot on an aircraft-carrier or drone operator in Nevada can attest. It is precisely this doctrine of “limited” and proxy war that is at risk of spinning out of control in Ukraine, unleashing the World War III that President Biden has vowed to avoid.

The United States and NATO have tried to keep the escalation of the war under control by deliberate, incremental escalation of the types of weapons they provide and cautious, covert expansion of their own involvement. This has been compared to “boiling a frog,” turning up the heat gradually to avoid any sudden move that might cross a Russian “red line” and trigger a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. But as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned in December 2022, “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.”

We have long been puzzled by these glaring contradictions at the heart of U.S. and NATO policy. On one hand, we believe President Biden when he says he does not want to start World War III. On the other hand, that is what his policy of incremental escalation is inexorably leading towards.

U.S. preparations for war with Russia are already at odds with the existential imperative of containing the conflict. In November 2022, the Reed-Inhofe Amendment to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) invoked wartime emergency powers to authorize an extraordinary shopping-list of weapons like the ones sent to Ukraine, and approved billion-dollar, multi-year no-bid contracts with weapons manufacturers to buy 10 to 20 times the quantities of weapons that the United States had actually shipped to Ukraine.

Retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian, the former chief of the Force Structure and Investment Division in the Office of Management and Budget, explained, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

So the United States is preparing to fight a major ground war with Russia, but the weapons to fight that war will take years to produce, and, with or without them, that could quickly escalate into a nuclear war. Nuland’s early retirement could be the result of Biden and his foreign policy team finally starting to come to grips with the existential dangers of the aggressive policies she championed.

Meanwhile, Russia’s escalation from its original limited “Special Military Operation” to its current commitment of 7% of its GDP to the war and weapons production has outpaced the West’s escalations, not just in weapons production but in manpower and actual military capability.

One could say that Russia is winning the war, but that depends what its real war goals are. There is a yawning gulf between the rhetoric from Biden and other Western leaders about Russian ambitions to invade other countries in Europe and what Russia was ready to settle for at the talks in Turkey in 2022, when it agreed to withdraw to its pre-war positions in return for a simple commitment to Ukrainian neutrality.

Despite Ukraine’s extremely weak position after its failed 2023 offensive and its costly defense and loss of Avdiivka, Russian forces are not racing toward Kyiv, or even Kharkiv, Odesa or the natural boundary of the Dnipro River.

Reuters Moscow Bureau reported that Russia spent months trying to open new negotiations with the United States in late 2023, but that, in January 2024, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slammed that door shut with a flat refusal to negotiate over Ukraine.

The only way to find out what Russia really wants, or what it will settle for, is to return to the negotiating table. All sides have demonized each other and staked out maximalist positions, but that is what nations at war do in order to justify the sacrifices they demand of their people and their rejection of diplomatic alternatives.

Serious diplomatic negotiations are now essential to get down to the nitty-gritty of what it will take to bring peace to Ukraine. We are sure there are wiser heads within the U.S., French and other NATO governments who are saying this too, behind closed doors, and that may be precisely why Nuland is out and why Macron is talking so openly about where the current policy is heading. We fervently hope that is the case, and that Biden’s Plan B will lead back to the negotiating table, and then forward to peace in Ukraine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Macron said tensions in the Indo-Pacific zone were a matter for concern because France was an integral part of the Indo-Pacific — both in the Indian and the Pacific oceans.

He recalled the French version of the Indo-Pacific had been masterminded in 2018 and had since been developed in partnership with such key allies as India, Australia, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

• READ MORE: Other France in Pacific reports

“But we have also consolidated it and, may I say entrenched it, in our own (overseas) territories,” he said, citing New Caledonia as an example of French army presence to defend France’s sovereignty and “the capacity for our air force to deploy (from mainland France) to Oceania within 48 hours”.

He also praised the recent South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting held in Nouméa last month when “France was the inviting power”.

He said Paris was able to strike “strategic partnerships” with neighbouring armed forces.

“The year 2024 will see us maintain without fail the protection of our overseas territories,” he told the troops.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This “abaya ban” is a serious violation of the fundamental rights of presumed Muslim (i.e., racialized) pupils, who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against.

Though he is the youngest Minister of the Fifth Republic, 34-year-old Attal used the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book, namely the politics of scapegoating an oppressed, defenseless minority. Just like his predecessors, who were fond of such nauseating polemics that obscure the real and glaring problems of the French educational system.

Aminata, Assma, Yasmine, Alicia, Hassina, sent home for “non-compliant outfits”

What is an abaya?

The term “abaya” refers to a variety of dresses of varying lengths, which are in no way religion-specific garments, but simple fashion items with a cultural connotation at most. Major brands such as Zara, H & M and Dolce & Gabbana have been making their own for a long time.

As proof of this, when Sonia Backès, the French Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, was shown several types of dresses on TV and asked to identify if they were abayas and whether they should be accepted or forbidden in schools, she hesitated, stammered and side-stepped the question, replying that “it depends on the context.”

Thus, in a quasi-official manner, the criteria for acceptance or rejection depend not on the garment itself, but on the pupil wearing it and their supposed religion, something that has only been based on their skin color and/or name. At the height of hypocrisy, Attal justified this blatant discrimination by saying that “you shouldn’t be able to distinguish, to identify the religion of pupils by looking at them.”

A traumatic start to the school year

Yet this is exactly what has been happening since the start of the school year, with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle- and high- school girls being scrutinized, hounded, stigmatized and humiliated, even blackmailed, and ordered to partially undress or be sent home for wearing outfits as neutral as a tunic, skirt or kimono, deemed too loose or too covering, as if the suspected modesty was a crime of lese-laicity. This obsession with controlling women’s bodies is reminiscent of the colonial period.

 “Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Propaganda poster distributed in 1957 by the Fifth Bureau of Psychological Action of the French Colonial Army in Algeria, urging Muslim women to take off their Islamic scarf.

Ironically, such a step places France alongside retrograde countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that have instituted a “morality police” enforcing a strict dress code, with the notable distinction that French bans do not apply to everyone, but only to pupils presumed to be Muslim.

One can only be outraged by the criminalization of teenage girls through traumatizing interrogations and expulsions, which take place outside any legal framework and could only be justified by a proper disciplinary procedure. Attal’s office counted the cases of pupils wearing abayas to the nearest unit (unlike the number of missing teachers, a plague touching half the secondary schools, as a Teacher’s Union found out).

Attal even sent journalists a list of the middle schools and high schools concerned, inviting them to cover the start of the new school year there. This showed no regard for the serenity and safety of staff and pupils, sacrificed to the media hype surrounding this new witch-hunt.

This amounts to real institutional harassment, sponsored by the same person who claims to find it “unbearable that a pupil should go to school with a lump in his stomach because he is harassed” and to make this issue a priority (notably through “empathy courses,” a quality this government clearly lacks). It is another eloquent example of Macron’s famous “at the same time” (advocating one thing and doing the opposite).

Laicity or “laicism”?

The abaya ban has nothing to do with secularism, which is even flouted by this political attempt to unilaterally extend the domain of what is religious. Rather, it is the very thing that the candidate Emmanuel Macron himself denounced in 2016-2017 as “laicism,” this “radical and extreme version of secularism that feeds on contemporary fears”, and which targets Islam exclusively, turning millions of our fellow Muslims into “enemies of the Republic”.

By considering the wearing of simple clothing as a deliberate attack on secularism, a concerted offensive “in an attempt to challenge the republican system,” or even a reminder of the 2015 terrorist attacks and the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded for showing his pupils derogatory “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, Macron and his ministers unmask themselves, adopting a discourse that was reserved for the most hateful right-wingers.

By putting tens of thousands of teenagers under suspicion – behind their qamis and abayas –  of being “enemies from within,” united to bring down republican values and even of being potential terrorists and by urging us to be “relentless” against these migrants, they are descending into a kind of State conspiracy-mongering that is as absurd as it is abject.

This insidious logic of stigmatization and exclusion was already at work in the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools, opposed by teacher unions such as the CGT Éduc’action as it only really targeted the Islamic veil, described as “proselytizing” and “ostentatious” in a grotesque abuse of language that heralded current and future excesses.

Far from turning schools into a protected “sanctuary,” these politically driven measures are spreading racism, sexism and hatred and turning them into a veritable battleground. This alleged desire for emancipation through coercion to impose an arbitrarily defined “republican dress code” on suspicious middle- and high-school girls flouts the concept of equal treatment of pupils and the inalienable right of some of them to choose their clothing style, driving them to angst and failure at school. Will we have to wait for a tragedy to put an end to this “shame”?

Worse still, these vexatious measures may give rise to a whole generation of teenagers — an age that is particularly sensitive to injustice — who have a legitimate distrust and resentment of the institution and its staff, who are transformed into the zealous auxiliaries of a kind of “dress police,” coupled with a “police of intentions” summoned to track down alleged Islamist overtones (which would be both conspicuous and concealed — a very French oxymoron) behind inoffensive fabrics.

The “communitarianism” and “separatism” that are supposedly fought against can only emerge stronger, just like the far-right, which is closer to power than ever thanks to the institutional backing given to its prejudices, rhetoric and fallacious battles, adopted by a dubious “republican arc,” which reaches as far as the French Communist Party.

The real priorities

This umpteenth polemic, validated by docile and irresponsible media echo chambers, and by part of the left, conveniently eclipses from the headlines all the glaring problems from which public education, its staff and users are suffering: shortage of teachers and assistants for pupils with special needs; job cuts and class closures; incessant budget cuts; lack of attractiveness of our underpaid professions; difficult working conditions; overcrowded and overheated classrooms due to under-resourcing of establishments and inadequacy of equipment and premises; international downgrading in terms of achievements; inflation; impoverishment of the population, with nearly 2,000 children on the street and tens of thousands out of schools; and so on.

Instead of tackling these fundamental problems, the government prefers to continue its authoritarian headlong rush and its policy of deliberately destroying public services for the benefit of the private sector. Moreover, this same government will have no trouble presenting the General National Service [a monthly session in military facilities for high school pupils] and the uniform — symbols of its reactionary vision of schooling currently being tested — as a panacea for problems fully of its own creation, with measures which tend only to bring young people into line and divide society even further.

Every individual has the fundamental right to choose their clothing without being subjected to discriminatory restrictions. The abaya ban is an unacceptable intrusion into pupils’ privacy and constitutes an attack on their freedom and personal identity, trampling underfoot the ideas of inclusion, living-together and acceptance of differences that are officially advocated.

The lack of response from teachers’ unions and the civil society to this iniquitous law, which scorns the vocation of educational staff and tarnishes the image of France abroad, speaks volumes about the normalization of Islamophobia in the so-called “Cradle of Human Rights” and the oppression and helplessness of its millions-strong Muslim community.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Salah Lamrani.

After 10 years of non-attendance, France turned up to this week’s French Polynesia sitting of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation (C-24) — but the French delegate did not deliver the message that pro-independence French Polynesian groups wanted to hear.

French Polynesia was re-inscribed to the United Nations (UN) list of non-self-governing territories in 2013.

Pro-independence leader Moetai Brotherson, President of French Polynesia, came to power in May 2023.

• READ MORE: Macron warns of ‘new colonialism’ in Pacific, but clings to French ‘colonies’
• Other France in the Pacific reports

Since then he has claimed he received assurances from French President Emmanuel Macron that France would end its “empty chair” policy regarding UN decolonisation sessions on French Polynesia.

President Macron apparently kept his promise, but the message that the French Ambassador to the UN, Nicolas De Rivière, delivered was unambiguous.

He declared French Polynesia “has no place” on the UN list of non-autonomous territories because “French Polynesia’s history is not the history of New Caledonia”.

The indigenous Kanak peoples of New Caledonia, the other French Pacific dependency currently on the UN list, have actively pursued a pathway to decolonisation through the Noumea Accord and are still deep in negotiations with Paris about their political future.

French public media Polynésie 1ère TV quoted the ambassador as saying: “No process between France and French Polynesia allows a role for the United Nations.”

The ambassador also voiced France’s wish to have French Polynesia withdrawn from the UN list. At the end of his statement, the Ambassador left the room, leaving a junior agent to sit in his place.

This was just as more than 40 pro-independence petitioners were preparing to make their statements.

The C-24 session started on Tuesday morning.

This week, French Polynesia’s 40-plus strong — mostly pro-independence delegation — of petitioners included the now-ruling Tavini Huiraatira party, members of the civil society, the local Māohi Protestant Church, and nuclear veterans associations and members of the local Parliament (the Territorial Assembly) and French Polynesian MPs sitting at the French National Assembly in Paris.

It also included President Moetai Brotherson from Tavini.

French position on decolonisation unchanged
For the past 10 years, since it was re-inscribed on the UN list, French Polynesia has sent delegates to the meeting, with the most regular attendees being from the Tavini Huiraatira party:

“I was angry because the French ambassador left just before our petitioners were about to take the floor [. . . ] I perceived this as a sign of contempt on the part of France,” said Hinamoeura Cross, a petitioner and a pro-independence member of French Polynesia’s Territorial Assembly, reacting this week to the French envoy’s appearance then departure, Polynésie 1ère TV reports.

Since being elected to the top post in May 2023, President Brotherson has stressed that independence, although it remains a long-term goal, is not an immediate priority.

Days after his election, after meeting French President Macron for more than an hour, he said he was convinced there would be a change in France’s posture at the UN C-24 committee hearing and an end to the French “empty chair policy”.

“I think we should put those 10 years of misunderstanding, of denial of dialogue [on the part of France] behind us [. . .]. Everyone can see that since my election, the relations with France have been very good [. . . ]. President Macron and I have had a long discussion about what is happening [at the UN] and the way we see our relations with France evolve,” he told Tahiti Nui Télévision earlier this week from New York.

President ‘for all French Polynesians’ – Brotherson
President Brotherson also stressed that this week, at the UN, he would speak as President of French Polynesia on behalf of “all [French] Polynesians, including those who do not want independence today”.

“So in my speech I will be very careful not to create confusion between me coming here [at the UN] to request the implementation of a self-determination process, and me coming here to demand independence which is beside the point,” he added in the same interview.

He conceded that at the same meeting, delegates from his own Tavini party were likely to deliver punchier, more “militant”, speeches “because this is Tavini’s goal”.

“But as for me, I speak as President of French Polynesia.”

Ahead of the meeting, Tavini Huiraatira pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru said that “It’s the first time a pro-independence President of French Polynesia will speak at the UN (C-24) tribune”.

Temaru, 78, was French Polynesia’s president in 2013 when it was reinscribed to the UN list.

Speaking of the different styles between him and his 54-year-old son-in-law — Moetai Brotherson is married to Temaru’s daughter — Temaru said this week: “He has his own strategy and I have mine and mine has not changed one bit [. . .] this country must absolutely become a sovereign state.

“Can you imagine? Overnight, we would own this country of five million sq km. Today, we have nothing.”

French Minister of Home Affairs and Overseas Gérald Darmanin wrote on the social media platform X, previously Twitter, earlier this week: “On this matter just like on other ones, [France] is working with elected representatives in a constructive spirit and in the respect of the territory’s autonomy and of France’s sovereignty.”

Darmanin has already attended the C-24 meeting when it considered New Caledonia.

The United Nations list of non-self-governing territories currently includes 17 territories world-wide and six of those are located in the Pacific — American Samoa, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, Pitcairn Island and Tokelau.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In a major electoral upset, Kanak independence politician Robert Xowie has won one of Kanaky New Caledonia’s two seats in the French Senate in Paris.

His second-round electoral victory over Loyalist leader Sonia Backès came on September 24, the 170th anniversary of France’s annexation of its Pacific dependency.

Xowie is the Mayor of Lifou and a former provincial president in the outlying Loyalty Islands.

• READ MORE: Other New Caledonia politics reports

He will take his seat in Paris alongside Georges Naturel, the Mayor of Dumbea and a dissident member of Rassemblement-Les Républicains, who ran against the endorsed candidate of the conservative anti-independence party.

The two new senators will replace the incumbents Pierre Frogier, the Senator from Rassemblement-Les Républicains first elected in 2011, and Gérard Poadja of the Calédonie Ensemble party, who won his seat at the last poll in 2017.

Unlike the popular vote for deputies in the French National Assembly, Senators are elected by 578 New Caledonian MPs, provincial assembly members and local government delegates.

The unexpected victory of two new senators is a major success for the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), with the independence movement gaining a seat in the French Senate for the first time, while dealing a stinging blow to the Loyalist bloc.

Naturel elected in first round
In the first round of voting on Sunday, Naturel won his seat with a majority of 351 votes against Robert Xowie (259), Sonia Backès (225), Pierre Frogier (180), Gérard Poadja (48), Macate Wenehoua (6) and Manuel Millar (2).

In the second-round run-off, incumbents Frogier and Poadja and Manuel Millar withdrew their candidacies. Xowie faced off against Loyalist leader Sonia Backès, who already serves as President of New Caledonia’s Southern Province and as a minister for citizenship in the Borne government in Paris.

Given the FLNKS could only count on about 250 of the 578 possible voters, Xowie’s second-round score of 307 suggests that many anti-independence politicians and mayors backed him over Backès, who only won 246 votes in the run-off (the third candidate Wenehoua gained just 2 votes).

Local news media had suggested Backès would use her profile to win the seat, then hand it to her alternate Gil Brial while keeping her ministerial post — an arrogance that raises questions about her political judgement.

The election result is a major blow to Backès, who stood as a representative of French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party and was publicly endorsed by France’s Overseas Minister Gérald Darmanin.

His support for Backès angered the FLNKS, who condemned the minister’s statement as a breach of the supposed impartiality that the French State often proclaims. This outcome reflects poorly on the Overseas Minister, who is due to travel again to Noumea in late October, hoping to advance negotiations over a new draft political statute for New Caledonia.

As a member of the independence party Union Calédonienne, Xowie will now be supported by his alternate Valentine Eurisouke of the Party of Kanak Liberation (Palika).

Crucial time in Paris
He takes up the Senate post alongside Georges Naturel at a crucial time in Paris, as President Macron plans revisions of the French Constitution in early 2024, to change the electoral rolls in New Caledonia before scheduled Congressional and Assembly elections next May.

As supporters and opponents of independence debate new structures to replace New Caledonia’s 1998 Noumea Accord, Xowie stressed the importance of his new post in Paris:

“It is important that when we are going to talk about constitutional revision, the debate takes place involving us. We have a chance to be able to present the views of the FLNKS directly in the plenary sessions.”

Nic Maclellan is a correspondent for the Suva-based Islands Business news magazine. Republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Civil society groups wanting to see an end to destructive logging practices by foreign companies in Papua New Guinea, say these companies are being given forest clearance authorities and then misusing them.

The PNG advocacy group, Act Now!, and Jubilee Australia said the forest clearance authorities (FCAs) are intended to allow limited pockets of forest to be cleared for agricultural or other use.

Eddie Tanago of Act Now! said a case study they conducted into West Sepik’s Wammy Rural Development Project, which is run by Malaysian logging company Global Elite Ltd, was meant to result in the planting of palm oil and rubber trees.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Large scale logging continues in PNG despite Govt opposition
• READ MORE: Other PNG illegal logging reports

“Instead, it used it as a front. And we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of round logs being exported. Now, this particular operation has been going on for almost 10 years, and this company has sold more than US$31 million worth of round logs,” he said.

Tanago said there was no sign of any attempt to rehabilitate the land for other use.

ACT Now! said the Wammy project was also breaking other laws because the land was subject to the SABL (Special Agricultural Business Leases) Commission of Inquiry in 2013 and it was evident then that the landowners’ free, prior and informed consent had never been given, so there should not have been any logging on it.

Tanago said Wammy was just one of about 24 logging operations making use of an FCA licence, resulting in huge quantities of logs being exported.

“Together this activity exploiting FCAs covers about 61,800 hectares of forest, and that’s equivalent to about 11,000 football fields. So that’s really, really massive,” he said.

Act Now is “calling on the Forest Board and the PNG Forest Authority to extend the current moratorium on the new FCAs”.

“There was one that was announced in the beginning of this year that says that they were not going to issue any new FCAs. We want that to extend. We want logging in all the existing FCAs to be also suspended. And there should be a comprehensive public review of these projects.”

The PNG government has previously stated it wanted to end round log exports by 2025, but Act Now! points out that in the first six months of the current year exports have totalled 1.1 million cubic metres.

“The export log volumes now are currently very high. And the PNG Forest Authority is really failing to meet the reduction targets as set down in the medium term plan,” he sid.

“This is in breach of the targets that are set out by the government, plus, all the promises that we’ve seen, like the recent one bill made by Prime Minister [James] Marape when the French President was around.”

On the visit to PNG, President Emmanuel Macron and Marape visited a lookout in the Varirata National Park picnic area, renaming it the Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron lookout point.

The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) reports that the walk through the lush national park was underlined by the signing of a new environment initiative — backed by French and European Union financing — that will reward countries that preserve their rainforests.

Marape said the country’s rainforest was the third largest and undisturbed tropical rainforest in the world and preserving its integrity was of the utmost importance.

Act Now! would agree, saying PNG has to be looking to preserve the rainforest and reduce deforestation, but the current signs are not good.

RNZ Pacific contacted Global Elite Ltd for comment on this story but there was no response.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The audio was first broadcast on Friday, 15 September 2023.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Inclusive talks in Paris between France and Kanaky New Caledonia’s politicians have yielded outcomes, including a French-submitted document on its future.

The talks, held last week, aimed at resuming all-round dialogue over a possible future status for New Caledonia.

Since the end of 2021 and a series of three referendums on New Caledonia’s independence, talks had stalled.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Paris has tried but failed to bring pro-French and pro-independence parties to the same table.

Instead, there were only “bilateral” talks, separately, between France and the pro-independence camp, and between Paris and the pro-France camp.

During the latest round of talks from September 4 to 8, all sides were present for the first time in almost two years.

French Home Affairs and Overseas Minister Gérald Darmanin put on the table a working document which, he said, albeit “ambitious”, remained open to modifications from all sides of New Caledonia’s political spectrum.

Sensitive topics
The document covers sensitive topics such as New Caledonia’s future right to self-determination, but also ways to build and strengthen the notion of a “New Caledonian citizenship”.

“I have been personally involved, I have travelled to New Caledonia four times over the past year . . . We have had a lot of exchanges and a climate of confidence has emerged,” Darmanin told the French newspaper Le Monde.

“There was goodwill from all sides … We have decided to put this project on the table because nobody was doing it,” he added.

The working document, Darmanin said, contained what he described as a “modernisation of New Caledonia’s institutions”, including changes to the areas of responsibilities both on New Caledonia’s government level, but also for its three provinces.

“The project also reaffirms that New Caledonia remains French, but retains a specific paragraph in the [French] Constitution, which means the 1998 Nouméa Accord will not be affected in terms of a New Caledonian citizenship within the French citizenship” he told Le Monde in the same weekend interview.

Another sensitive issue was New Caledonia’s electoral roll for local elections to be held next year.

For the past 25 years, as part of the autonomy Nouméa Accord signed in 1998, the list of eligible voters was “frozen” to only include residents who were born in New Caledonia or established there before 1998 (including their descendents).

Temporary measure
The measure was supposed to be temporary for the duration of the Accord, which is now deemed to have expired.

From France’s point of view, these special measures are no longer tenable and should be brought closer to a one-person, one-vote system before New Caledonia’s provincial elections are held in 2024.

On New Caledonia’s right to self-determination, Darmanin’s draft “no longer includes a date or a timeline to achieve it”, he said, adding this would remove the “Damocles sword” of a “binary question YES or NO to independence”.

Instead, any future project would be submitted “by New Caledonians themselves”, and should be endorsed by a minimum two-thirds of the local Congress.

The document is understood to serve as a basis for further discussions to be finalised by the end of 2023, Darmanin said, adding the final version would result in a French Constitutional amendment scheduled to be put to the necessary vote of the French Congress (both the Senate and the National Assembly).

He said if no agreement was reached by then, “we will amend the electoral roll in order to hold provincial elections [in 2024]. This is a democratic requirement”.

Darmanin said he would travel again to New Caledonia at the “end of October” to pursue talks with all parties.

‘Responsibility in face of history’
“[Last] week, pro-independence and anti-independence (politicians) have held meetings with me in the same room . . .  I am counting on those parties’ great sense of responsibility in the face of history,” he said.

French President Emmanuel Macron was in New Caledonia late July, when he announced plans for the Constitutional amendment and specific arrangements for New Caledonia sometime early 2024.

Last Friday, he met visiting New Caledonia politicians to mark the end of the week-long Paris talks.

“The President insisted on the need to reach an agreement in order to fully engage on the path of forgiveness and future,” Macron’s office said in a statement.

On the pro-French side, Sonia Backès — the pro-France President of New Caledonia’s Southern Province — said that “by October 11, we should have a document that lists all points of agreement and also those points of disagreement”.

“We have the feeling things are moving forward,” pro-independence FLNKS delegation member Victor Tutugoro told French public media television Outre-Mer la 1ère. “So we’re going to start working on this [document] and really open negotiations by the end of October,” he added.

All three referendums held between 2018 and 2021 have resulted in a majority of voters rejecting independence in New Caledonia.

Final steps required
France regards those results as one of the final steps required from the Nouméa Accord, signed 10 years after another deal, the Matignon-Oudinot Accord, was struck in 1988 to bring an end to half a decade of a bloody quasi-civil war.

But the FLNKS, the umbrella of pro-independence parties, is contesting the outcome of the third referendum held in late 2021, which was largely boycotted by the indigenous Kanak population, saying the covid restrictions and subsequent traditional mourning deterred many of the indigenous Kanaks from voting.

While pro-French parties have seen those three referendums results as evidence of the will for New Caledonia to remain French, the FLNKS is claiming it wants to bring the matter before the International Court of Justice.

It recently received in-principle support from the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders who held their summit in Port Vila, Vanuatu in late August.

The MSG consists of Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and FLNKS as a non-state member.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

But the new crime, the financial and military strategic econo-political colonization, needs to be brought to the fore now.

Among the coup countries are Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, but also Nigeria – a former British colony.

Of all these “coups”, Niger gets by far the most attention, and seems to be at the center of the controversy.

At the outset it looked like the military staged a coup to get the France-friendly President Mohamed Bazoum, out of the way and to move away from the French monetary hegemony, the Franc CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine, or African Financial Community). See also this pm+

On second thought, however, another image emerged, especially after Madame Victoria Nuland’s, US Deputy Secretary of State, personal visit to Niamey, Niger, where she was purportedly denied access to the deposed President, and was apparently snubbed by the new military leader, General Abdourahmane Tchiani.

The latter is not very plausible, but is once more a “media coup” against the truth. Ever more evidence emerges that Niger’s coup was supported by the US. Washington has three military bases in Niger and at least between 3,000 and 4,000 military personnel stationed in Niger.

One of the US bases is a strategically important drone base, in the Agadez region, known as Niger Air Base 201. Following its permanent base in Djibouti, Niger Air Base 201 stands as the second-largest US base in Africa.

France still has at least 1,500 military stationed in Niger. This, even though French President Macron had promised to withdraw them, as soon as General Tchiani “requested” him to do so. Everything must be questioned now. Did Tchiani really request a withdrawal of French troops?

What appears (almost) sure is that the US were supporting the military coup, if not helping General Tchiani – who served as the chief of the Nigerien presidential guard (2011-2023) – to the military take-over. See also this important analysis by Professor Chossudovsky.

What’s at stake?

The deposed President Mohamed Bazoum had Macron’s support, not only because he allowed France’s shameless exploitation of Niger through the CFA Franc (for more details see here), but also because France exploits Niger’s rich uranium and high-purity petrol – and has access to Niger’s other mineral riches.

Besides, and maybe most importantly, Niger is a landlocked Sahel country, strategically located in the center of North Africa, between Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad and Libya (see Google map, left).

Being in control of Niger is, in a way, like being in control of Kosovo, the US engineered cut-out piece of land from Serbia, in the middle of former Yugoslavia, bombed to rubble by President Clinton, to divide and conquer – conquer the area.

That is what Niger may become if the US has its say. Washington does not want France involved anymore. Being in control of Niger is like being in control of at least northern West Africa, a resources-rich, but an extreme poverty-stricken territory – which Washington suspects may also interest Russia and possibly China.

It is not a well-kept secret that the private Russian Wagner army has had a foothold in this part of Africa of several thousand mercenaries for at least a couple of years, maybe longer – in Chad, Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, and maybe even Nigeria.

Now the plot – a purely speculative plot – goes even further. The leader of the Wagner private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was supposedly killed in a plane crash last Wednesday, on 23 August 2023, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, rumors go that he may not have been on the same plane with all his other military brass, a custom he had followed in the past. Therefore he may have escaped the crash.

Rumors say he had been seen after the plane “accident”, in the Central African Republic, where he has his African headquarters, and where he is a hero.

He had been “killed” before and reappeared. So, who knows, this may be his final death. But there is apparently a super-modern clinic with three German plastic surgeons, near his Central African headquarters.

A Russian mercenary army in North Africa that may still be fighting for Russia would be most uncomfortable for Madame Nuland and her hegemonic ilk in Washington.

What to do about it? – An immediate question posed by Washington.

The US attempt is to make sure that Niger, the country of strategy, a member of the US / NATO France supported ECOWAS, will not slip out into liberty from “independence” some 60 years ago.

Shortly after the Niger military coup, Mr. Putin has cautioned not to interfere in Niger’s internal affairs. He was referring precisely to ECOWAS which has “warned” of an ECOWAS military intervention, if the French aligned deposed President Bazoum, would not be returned immediately to the Presidency. In hindsight, and knowing what we know now, the ECOWAS warning too, was a media manufactured untruth by “design”.

ECOWAS is The Economic Community of West African States. It is one of 8 African regional political and economic unions. ECOWAS has 15 member countries located in Central and West Africa. But ECOWAS is divided within. Without the support of the US / NATO and France, it may fall apart. Therefore, a warning from ECOWAS has only meaning when an “arrangement” has been reached before.

Niger’s main party, represented by General Tchiani, the Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP), roughly translated as “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland”, has had Pentagon support, including military training, since its creation.

This means the US is well-established within Niger, and by association within central and West Africa – and they do not want to lose out on this highly strategic – and resources-rich – African position; not to the French, not to the Russians – and not to China.

But, then there is still the unconfirmed suspicion of a mercenary army roaming through Western Africa – and who knows – just in case – what their plans might be, and for whom they might fight.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

But the new crime, the financial and military strategic econo-political colonization, needs to be brought to the fore now.

Among the coup countries are Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, but also Nigeria – a former British colony.

Of all these “coups”, Niger gets by far the most attention, and seems to be at the center of the controversy.

At the outset it looked like the military staged a coup to get the France-friendly President Mohamed Bazoum, out of the way and to move away from the French monetary hegemony, the Franc CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine, or African Financial Community). See also this pm+

On second thought, however, another image emerged, especially after Madame Victoria Nuland’s, US Deputy Secretary of State, personal visit to Niamey, Niger, where she was purportedly denied access to the deposed President, and was apparently snubbed by the new military leader, General Abdourahmane Tchiani.

The latter is not very plausible, but is once more a “media coup” against the truth. Ever more evidence emerges that Niger’s coup was supported by the US. Washington has three military bases in Niger and at least between 3,000 and 4,000 military personnel stationed in Niger.

One of the US bases is a strategically important drone base, in the Agadez region, known as Niger Air Base 201. Following its permanent base in Djibouti, Niger Air Base 201 stands as the second-largest US base in Africa.

France still has at least 1,500 military stationed in Niger. This, even though French President Macron had promised to withdraw them, as soon as General Tchiani “requested” him to do so. Everything must be questioned now. Did Tchiani really request a withdrawal of French troops?

What appears (almost) sure is that the US were supporting the military coup, if not helping General Tchiani – who served as the chief of the Nigerien presidential guard (2011-2023) – to the military take-over. See also this important analysis by Professor Chossudovsky.

What’s at stake?

The deposed President Mohamed Bazoum had Macron’s support, not only because he allowed France’s shameless exploitation of Niger through the CFA Franc (for more details see here), but also because France exploits Niger’s rich uranium and high-purity petrol – and has access to Niger’s other mineral riches.

Besides, and maybe most importantly, Niger is a landlocked Sahel country, strategically located in the center of North Africa, between Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad and Libya (see Google map, left).

Being in control of Niger is, in a way, like being in control of Kosovo, the US engineered cut-out piece of land from Serbia, in the middle of former Yugoslavia, bombed to rubble by President Clinton, to divide and conquer – conquer the area.

That is what Niger may become if the US has its say. Washington does not want France involved anymore. Being in control of Niger is like being in control of at least northern West Africa, a resources-rich, but an extreme poverty-stricken territory – which Washington suspects may also interest Russia and possibly China.

It is not a well-kept secret that the private Russian Wagner army has had a foothold in this part of Africa of several thousand mercenaries for at least a couple of years, maybe longer – in Chad, Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, and maybe even Nigeria.

Now the plot – a purely speculative plot – goes even further. The leader of the Wagner private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was supposedly killed in a plane crash last Wednesday, on 23 August 2023, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, rumors go that he may not have been on the same plane with all his other military brass, a custom he had followed in the past. Therefore he may have escaped the crash.

Rumors say he had been seen after the plane “accident”, in the Central African Republic, where he has his African headquarters, and where he is a hero.

He had been “killed” before and reappeared. So, who knows, this may be his final death. But there is apparently a super-modern clinic with three German plastic surgeons, near his Central African headquarters.

A Russian mercenary army in North Africa that may still be fighting for Russia would be most uncomfortable for Madame Nuland and her hegemonic ilk in Washington.

What to do about it? – An immediate question posed by Washington.

The US attempt is to make sure that Niger, the country of strategy, a member of the US / NATO France supported ECOWAS, will not slip out into liberty from “independence” some 60 years ago.

Shortly after the Niger military coup, Mr. Putin has cautioned not to interfere in Niger’s internal affairs. He was referring precisely to ECOWAS which has “warned” of an ECOWAS military intervention, if the French aligned deposed President Bazoum, would not be returned immediately to the Presidency. In hindsight, and knowing what we know now, the ECOWAS warning too, was a media manufactured untruth by “design”.

ECOWAS is The Economic Community of West African States. It is one of 8 African regional political and economic unions. ECOWAS has 15 member countries located in Central and West Africa. But ECOWAS is divided within. Without the support of the US / NATO and France, it may fall apart. Therefore, a warning from ECOWAS has only meaning when an “arrangement” has been reached before.

Niger’s main party, represented by General Tchiani, the Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP), roughly translated as “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland”, has had Pentagon support, including military training, since its creation.

This means the US is well-established within Niger, and by association within central and West Africa – and they do not want to lose out on this highly strategic – and resources-rich – African position; not to the French, not to the Russians – and not to China.

But, then there is still the unconfirmed suspicion of a mercenary army roaming through Western Africa – and who knows – just in case – what their plans might be, and for whom they might fight.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

The leaders of five Melanesian nations have agreed to write to French President Emmanuel Macron “expressing their strong opposition” to the results of the third New Caledonia referendum.

In December 2021, more than 96 percent of people voted against full sovereignty, but the pro-independence movement FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) has refused to recognise the result because of a boycott by the Kanak population over the impact of the covid pandemic on the referendum campaign.

Since then, the FLNKS has been seeking international support for its view that the referendum result was not a legitimate outcome.

• READ MORE:  Sad Regenvanu condemns MSG for ‘failing’ people of West Papua
• Wenda welcomes MSG call for UN visit and fights on for full membership
• OPM accuses Melanesian group of taking Jakarta’s ‘blood money’ at expense of West Papuan justice
• Wenda calls on MSG for urgent action to back pledge over human rights
• MSG throws away golden chance to reset peace and justice for West Papua
• MSG leaders defer Papua membership decision to Pacific Islands Forum
• Flashback: Fiji, PNG lead betrayal, but still West Papuans triumph (in 2015)
• Other MSG reports

The Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders — Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the FLNKS — met in Port Vila last week for the 22nd edition of the Leader’s Summit, where they said “the MSG does not recognise the results of the third referendum on the basis of the PIF’s Observer Report”.

FLNKS spokesperson Victor Tutugoro told RNZ Pacific the pro-independence group had continued to protest against the outcome of the December 2021 referendum.

“We contest the referendum because it was held during the circumstances that was not healthy for us. For example, we went through covid, we lost many members of our families [because of the pandemic],” Tutugoro said.

“We will continue to protest at the ICJ (International Court of Justice) level and at the national level. We expect the MSG to help us fight to get the United Nations to debate the cause of the Kanaks.”

The leaders have agreed that “New Caledonia’s inclusion on the UN List of decolonisation territories is protected and maintained”.

The MSG leaders have also directed the UN permanent representative to “examine and provide advice” so they can seek an opinion from the ICJ “on the results of the third referendum conducted in December 2021”.

They have also requested that the UN provide a report on the “credibility of the election process, and mandated the MSG UN permanent representatives, working with the MSG Secretariat and the FLNKS, “to pursue options on the legality of the 3rd referendum”.

Support for West Papua
New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS movement also said it would continue to back the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) to become a full member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group.

Tutugoro told the 22nd MSG Leader’s Summit in Port Vila that FLNKS had always supported West Papua’s move to join the MSG family.

He said by becoming a full member of the sub-regional group, FLNKS was able to benefit from international support to counterbalance the weight of France in its struggle for self-determination.

He said the FLNKS hoped the ULMWP would have the same opportunity and in time it could be included on the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The leaders of five Melanesian nations have agreed to write to French President Emmanuel Macron “expressing their strong opposition” to the results of the third New Caledonia referendum.

In December 2021, more than 96 percent of people voted against full sovereignty, but the pro-independence movement FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) has refused to recognise the result because of a boycott by the Kanak population over the impact of the covid pandemic on the referendum campaign.

Since then, the FLNKS has been seeking international support for its view that the referendum result was not a legitimate outcome.

• READ MORE:  Sad Regenvanu condemns MSG for ‘failing’ people of West Papua
• Wenda welcomes MSG call for UN visit and fights on for full membership
• OPM accuses Melanesian group of taking Jakarta’s ‘blood money’ at expense of West Papuan justice
• Wenda calls on MSG for urgent action to back pledge over human rights
• MSG throws away golden chance to reset peace and justice for West Papua
• MSG leaders defer Papua membership decision to Pacific Islands Forum
• Flashback: Fiji, PNG lead betrayal, but still West Papuans triumph (in 2015)
• Other MSG reports

The Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders — Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the FLNKS — met in Port Vila last week for the 22nd edition of the Leader’s Summit, where they said “the MSG does not recognise the results of the third referendum on the basis of the PIF’s Observer Report”.

FLNKS spokesperson Victor Tutugoro told RNZ Pacific the pro-independence group had continued to protest against the outcome of the December 2021 referendum.

“We contest the referendum because it was held during the circumstances that was not healthy for us. For example, we went through covid, we lost many members of our families [because of the pandemic],” Tutugoro said.

“We will continue to protest at the ICJ (International Court of Justice) level and at the national level. We expect the MSG to help us fight to get the United Nations to debate the cause of the Kanaks.”

The leaders have agreed that “New Caledonia’s inclusion on the UN List of decolonisation territories is protected and maintained”.

The MSG leaders have also directed the UN permanent representative to “examine and provide advice” so they can seek an opinion from the ICJ “on the results of the third referendum conducted in December 2021”.

They have also requested that the UN provide a report on the “credibility of the election process, and mandated the MSG UN permanent representatives, working with the MSG Secretariat and the FLNKS, “to pursue options on the legality of the 3rd referendum”.

Support for West Papua
New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS movement also said it would continue to back the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) to become a full member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group.

Tutugoro told the 22nd MSG Leader’s Summit in Port Vila that FLNKS had always supported West Papua’s move to join the MSG family.

He said by becoming a full member of the sub-regional group, FLNKS was able to benefit from international support to counterbalance the weight of France in its struggle for self-determination.

He said the FLNKS hoped the ULMWP would have the same opportunity and in time it could be included on the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“The Aspen institute is also involved in the arms industry, with links to arms manufacturing giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It has typically supported the US’s ‘democracy-defending’ or ‘democracy-propagating, humane and civilized’ wars.”

Prominent US politicians including Madeleine Albright, Condolezza Rice as well as Victoria Nuland have actively collaborated with the Aspen Institute.

The Aspen Institute is  generously funded by the Gates Foundation, the Rockefellers, Carnegie and the Ford Foundation, not to mention Goldman Sachs, which over the years has played a key role in the “selection” of Italian politicians.

It is worth noting that on February 20, 2023, Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kiev, meeting up with President Zelensky. And on the following day Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni promptly followed suit, traveling to Kiev to meet up with the corrupt Ukrainian president.

“She affirmed Italian support for Ukraine and said that her government intends to supply Spada and Skyguard air defence systems to the Ukrainian army”.

Is Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni an “Instrument”, Political Asset of Washington? The answer is obvious.

Timeline
PM Giorgia Meloni Arrives in Washington, July 26, 2023
PM Meloni had arrived in Washington prior to the Coup d’Etat in Niger (26th of July), i.e. a day prior to the Biden-Meloni meeting in the Oval Office.

There was no White House record of a discussion or exchange pertaining to the crisis in Niger.

Bloomberg in a July 26, 2023 report confirmed that private conversations had already been scheduled:

One suspects that in addition to China, the Niger Coup d’Etat was also discussed behind closed doors, –e.g. with Victoria Nuland and Christina Segal Knowles.

27 July 2023: PM Meloni meets President Biden in the Oval Office.

Rome aligns with Washington implying an almost unconditional stance with respect to the war in Ukraine: 

“Ukraine (and Italy’s new voice). PM Meloni and President Biden reiterated their support for Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression and vowed to “provide political, military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine for as long as it takes, with the aim to reach a just and lasting peace.” Later, at the presser, the Italian leader noted that Rome’s posture on the conflict “is extremely respected and held in high regard” by the US.

Oval Office 

PRESIDENT BIDEN: “And as NATO Allies, the transatlantic partnership is the cornerstone of our shared security. And the Italian troops are playing a critical role in Europe, in the Mediterranean, and beyond.

Italy and the United States are also standing strong with Ukraine. And I compliment you on your very strong support in defending against Russian atrocities. …

PM MELONI: Thank you. I am very pleased to be here today to testify the deep friendship that bonds the United States and Italy.

… Moreover, after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, for all together we decided to defend the international law. And I’m proud that Italy, from the beginning, played its part in it. We did it simply because supporting Ukraine means defending the peaceful coexistence of people and states everywhere in the world.”

PM Meloni also (unconditionally) endorsed Washington’s stance pertaining to Africa, which broadly consists in “dollarizing” the entire continent (including francophone Africa) while concurrently imposing IMF-World Bank “strong economic medicine”.

PM MELONI: … And on the other hand, we also need to be fair with nations that feel they have been exploited of their resources and that they show distrust towards the West. President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us, building with them a new relation based on a new approach, which is a peer-to-peer approach. Also to fight illegal migration and all the problems that we face. It’s all things that we will discuss in the G7 presidency of Italy next year.

Among those present in the Oval Office on July 27, 2023 were: Victoria Nuland, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, and National Security Council Director for International Economics, Christina Segal-Knowles.

Victoria Nuland Travels to Niamey, August 7, 2023

Victoria Nuland arrived in Niger on August 7, 2023 on an unannounced visit in the immediate wake of the coup d’Etat.

Nuland did not meet General Abdourahamane Tiani who had been declared head of the ruling military Junta on July 28, 2023.

It is worth noting that Tiani studied in Washington D.C at the National Defense University’s (NDU) College of International Security Affairs (CISA). CISA is the U.S. Department of Defense’s  “flagship for education and building of partner capacity in combating terrorism, irregular warfare, and integrated deterrence at the strategic level.”

Nuland’s meetings were with a team led by General Barmou.

“The Secretary asked me to make this trip – as you may know, I was in the neighborhood last week and then in Jeddah – because we wanted to speak frankly to the people responsible to this challenge to the democratic order to see if we could try to resolve these issues diplomatically, if we could get some negotiations going, …

And then we met with the self-proclaimed chief of defense of this operation, General Barmou, and three of the colonels supporting him.  I will say that these conversations were extremely frank and at times quite difficult because, again, we were pushing for a negotiated solution.”  (emphasis added)

Tacitly acknowledged by Nuland, both General Abdourahamane Tiani and General Barmou in terms of their military profile and background are “friends of America”. Barmou also undertook his military training in the U.S. at Fort Moore, Columbus, Georgia and at the National Defense University (ND) which operates under the Guidance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Barmou also collaborated with U.S. Special Forces. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

“At Center of Niger’s Coup Is One of America’s Favorite Generals: Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, long courted by Washington as a partner against Islamist extremism, has emerged as the main diplomatic channel between the U.S. and the junta (emphasis added)

“Speaking during a question and answer session [August 8 report],  Victoria Nuland, confirmed in so many words that the Coup d’Etat was undertaken on behalf of the U.S.: 

“With regard to the – to us, interestingly, General Barmou, former Colonel Barmou, is somebody who has worked very closely with U.S. Special Forces over many, many years.”

Ms Nuland stated this following a crucial first meeting of U.S. officials with members of the military junta in Niger in a significant diplomatic push to restore democratic rule to the country.

Ms Nuland said the U.S. was pushing for a negotiated solution in Niger and went “through in considerable detail the risks to aspects of our cooperation that he has historically cared about a lot.”

“So we are hopeful that that will sink in,” added the U.S. undersecretary.

While noting several regional meetings are going on to negotiate with coupists to release President Mohamed Bazoum and step aside, Ms Nuland said the U.S. would continue to watch closely with allies and partners needed to make the negotiations successful.

“If there is a desire on the part of the people who are responsible for this to return to constitutional order, we are prepared to help with that. We are prepared to help address concerns on all sides,” Ms Nuland stated. (emphasis added)

Let us be under no illusions, The architects of the coup “against the democratically elected government of Mr Bazoum” were acting on behalf and in coordination with Washington.

According to a carefully researched article by Nick Nurse, “At Least Five Members of Niger Junta Were Trained by the US”.

The unspoken objective is “Paris out of Africa.”

Our Message to the People of Africa:

While “France never stopped looting Africa, now the tables are turning”, in favor of the most oppressive and tyrannical form of US. neocolonialism, which must be forcefully opposed. 

Niger “Regime Change” on Behalf of Uncle Sam. “Paris Out of Africa”

Washington’s unspoken foreign policy objective is to remove France from Africa.

Niger is strategic. It produces 5% of the global supply of uranium, which is in part exported to France for use in its nuclear energy facilities.

USAFRICOM has a military base in Niger. The US military has been routinely collaborating with their Nigerien counterparts

The unspoken objective of Victoria Nuland’s mission was to ultimately to “negotiate”, of course unofficially Niamey’s “alignment” with Washington against Paris:

“The United States flies drones out of a base in the country’s arid heartland. French peacekeepers, effectively chased out of Mali, withdrew to outposts in Niger last year. Now, their status [France] and role in a country run by the junta’s transitional regime remains up in the air.” (WP, August 9, 2023, emphasis added)

“Divide and Rule”: Propaganda Against France’s President François Macron

Amply documented, Wall Street and the Financial Establishment, in liaison with the White House controls several (corrupt) European heads of State and heads of government, including Germany’s Chancellor Scholz, France’s President Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, among others.

The US is at war with both Europe and Africa. It’s an act of economic warfare. Washington is also quite deliberately creating political divisions within the European Union.

With regard to both Ukraine and Africa, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is aligned with Washington. Despite her fake humanitarian rhetoric, she has casually endorsed America’s hegemonic agenda in Africa, including the dollarization of the entire continent:

PM Meloni: “President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us.”

Washington is currently involved in a “soft coup” against French colonialism, coupled with a smear campaign (with the support of PM Meloni) against France’s president Macron. 

In the video below, which was recently released, Italy’s PM Meloni rightfully focusses on the exploitation of child labourers in Burkina Faso’ gold industry, while casually placing the blame on France’s President Macron for the payments system in CFA francs coordinated by the French Treasury.

What she fails to mention is that the gold industry in Burkina Faso is “dollarized” and controlled primarily by Canadian mining companies. See also here. There is not a single French colonial company involved in gold mining.

Video: “You Messed Up Macron”

Annex
A Brief Note on the History of U.S.- France Relations 

There is a long history of US-France relations going back the Louisiana purchase (1803), The Monroe Doctrine (1823),  the  Berlin Conference (1884-1885) organized by Germany’s Chancellor Otto van Bismarck. The U.S was politely excluded from participating in the colonial scramble for Africa. (Most of those former colonial powers have been progressively shoved out of Africa, starting in the 1970s).

The Wars against Indochina and Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos (1946-1975), Charles de Gaulle “Pulls the Plug on NATO” (1966-67), NATO Headquarters move from Paris to Brussels (1967).

Since the early 1990s, Washington has extended its sphere of influence: the entire African continent is currently in the stranglehold of a dollar denominated debt which has led to mass poverty, not to mention the imposition of “strong economic medicine”  by the IMF-World Bank. The U.S has numerous military bases throughout the continent.

There are many other dimensions. Washington’s current objective is to eventually eliminate “francophone countries” and exclude France from the African Continent.

Rwanda in 1990 is the model. The president of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana dies in an air crash. A former Belgian colony largely within the political sphere of influence of France was from one year to the next  transformed into a de facto English speaking colony dominated by the U.S, French was eventually scrapped as an official language. Major General Kagame –(who subsequently became Vice-President and then President) was instrumental in leading the military invasion from Uganda. He does not speak a word of French.

The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.

Major General Paul Kagame had been head of military intelligence in the Ugandan Armed Forces; he had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth, Kansas which focuses on warfighting and military strategy. Kagame returned from Leavenworth to lead the RPA, shortly after the 1990 invasion.

Prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the RPA was part of the Ugandan Armed Forces. Shortly prior to the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, military labels were switched. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, Chapter 7)

On a personal note

In a United Nations mission to Rwanda in 1996-97, the author together with Pierre Galand submitted the following report to the Government of Rwanda:

• Michel Chossudovsky and Pierre Galand, L’usage de la dette exterieure du Rwanda, la responsabilité des créanciers, mission report, United Nations Development Program and Government of Rwanda, Kigali, 1997.

We were subsequently advised by Vice President Paul Kagame that the report had to be submitted in English. My  response to Vice President Paul Kagame: “You should have told us that, and we would have drafted the report in English, We suggest that you get it translated”.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michel Chossudovsky.

Many youth, particularly in France, have channeled this hopelessness into rage. For the past several months the country had been seeing a series of strikes and riots in response to the raising of the retirement age, and these riots intensified in late June after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. As the dust settles, inept politicians blame bad parenting and TikTok.

Meanwhile in Peru, protesters from around the country have gathered in Lima calling for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte and the dissolution of congress.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

One of the world’s top leaders and G7 member French President Emmanuel Macron had his one-on–one bilateral talks with PNG leaders at a forest lookout in Central Province today.

Prime Minister James Marape told media at APEC Haus yesterday that Macron himself wanted a walk through the famous Varirata Park in Sogeri and spend a few minutes at the lookout before heading back for more bilateral talks.

With his interest in climate change, Papua New Guinea will seek France’s support for an ultimate climate financing — a suggestion for a “Green Bond”.

• READ MORE: France, Vanuatu agree to sort out ‘southern land’ border dispute
• Macron to ditch Noumea Accord for self-determination and introduce new statute for New Caledonia
• Vanuatu traditional leaders call for Macron to address islands dispute
• Other France in the Pacific reports

Prime Minister Marape presented a ceremonial eagle wood spear with PNG totems to President Macron as a symbol of friendship with a message — “this spear will go with you all over the world and back to your country”.

“It may be just a piece of wood but this is a historical symbol of you taking a piece of PNG with you PM,” Marape said.

“Long live our friendship.”

Marape told media yesterday security and other details for Macron’s visit were all in place.

Forest nation identity ‘amplified’
“Everything is set, police and every security personnel are on standby,” Marape said.

“He himself said he wants to go to a forest. Papua New Guinea is a forest nation, with heaps of tuna, oil and gas.

“We are a forest nation so our identity as a forest nation will be amplified.

“The French President is a big leader in his own right — [leader of] a G7 member country, so him coming here is a privilege for us.

“There are conversations we cannot converse in terms of our forest conservation.”

France is member of the Group of Seven (G7) which is an informal grouping of seven of the world’s most advanced economies, including Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union.

“I had asked him in our Gabon meeting for him to be a forest advocate for the global nations so that’s why we going to Varirata is symbolic,” Marape said.

“We will have a 30-minute walk in the forest and then instead of having a one-on-one meeting here (APEC Haus), we set the Varirata Park and at the Lookout Point,” he said.

“Then much of these will be, you know, for me as a nation, forest is a resource. If we have to conserve, people must pay especially those with big carbon footprints, they must pay for the conservation of our forest.”

President Macron is also visiting Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu on his historic Pacific tour.

Gorethy Kenneth is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Vanuatu Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau have reached an agreement to settle the “land problem” in the southern region of Vanuatu before the end of this year.

Prime Minister Kalsakau made this declaration during his speech at the 7th Melanesian Arts and Cultural Festival (MACFEST) in Saralana Park yesterday afternoon, coinciding with President Macron’s visit to the festival.

“We have talked about a topic that is important to the people of Vanuatu in relation to the problem for us in the Southern Islands. The President has said that we will resolve the land problem between now and December,” he said.

• READ MORE: Macron to ditch Noumea Accord for self-determination and introduce new statute for New Caledonia
• Vanuatu traditional leaders call for Macron to address islands dispute
• Other France in the Pacific reports

Though not explicitly naming them, it is evident that the southern land problem mentioned refers to the islands of Matthew and Hunter, located in the southern portion of Vanuatu, over which significant demands have been made.

In addition to this issue, the boundary between New Caledonia and Vanuatu remains unresolved.

The hope was that during President Macron’s visit, Prime Minister Kalsakau — carried in a traditional basket by Aneityum bearers during the opening of MACFEST 2023 — would address the Matthew and Hunter issue with the French leader.

As part of Vanuatu’s traditional practice, Kalsakau and President Macron participated in a kava-drinking ceremony, expressing their wish for the fruitful resolution of the discussed matters.

Matthew and Hunter are two small and uninhabited volcanic islands in the South Pacific, located 300 kilometres east of New Caledonia and south-east of Vanuatu.

Both islands are claimed by Vanuatu as part of Tafea province, and considered by the people of Aneityum to be part of their custom ownership. However, since 2007 they had also been claimed by France as part of New Caledonia.

Elation over statement
The announcement of the two leaders’ commitment to resolving the southern land issue was met with elation among the people of Vanuatu, particularly in the Tafea province.

“France has come back to Vanuatu; President Macron has told me that it has been a long time, but he has come back today with huge support to help us more,” said Prime Minister Kalsakau, expressing gratitude.

The Vanuatu government head revealed that France had allocated a “substantial sum” of money to be signed-off soon, which would lead to significant development in Vanuatu.

This would include the reconstruction of French schools and hospitals, such as the Melsisi Hospital in Pentecost, which had been damaged by past cyclones.

In response to the requests made by PM Kalsakau and President Macron, the chiefs of the Tafea province conducted another customary ceremony to acknowledge and honour the visiting leaders.

President Macron at MACFEST 2023
More than 4000 people gathered yesterday at Saralana Park to witness the presence of President Macron and warmly welcome him to MACFEST 2023.

He delighted the crowd by delivering a speech in Bislama language, noting the significance of Vanuatu’s relationship with France and highlighting its special and historical nature.

“Let me tell you how pleased I am to be with you, not only as a foreign head of state but as a neighbour, coming directly from Noumea,” President Macron said.

He praised Prime Minister Kalsakau for fostering a strong bond between the two countries amid “various challenges and foreign interactions”, emphasising that their connection went beyond bilateral relations, rooted in their shared history.

President Macron further shared his satisfaction with the discussions he had with Kalsakau, expressing joy that his day could culminate with the celebration of MACFEST, symbolising the exchange between himself and Vanuatu’s PM.

“My delegation is thrilled to participate in the dances and demonstrations that bring together delegations from across the region, celebrating the strength and vitality of Melanesia and the spirit of exchange and sharing,” he said.

The President expressed his pride in being part of the region, particularly in New Caledonia, and witnessing the young teenagers of Melanesia coming together, dancing, and singing, driven by the belief that they will overcome the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Last night, President Macron departed for Papua New Guinea to continue his historic Pacific visit. He expressed his happiness in meeting members from PNG, Solomon Islands, Fiji, and other participating nations during MACFEST.

Doddy Morris is a Vanuatu Daily Post journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French president Emmanuel Macron says he will forge ahead with processing a new statute for New Caledonia, replacing the 1998 Noumea Accord.

New Caledonia held three referendums on independence from France under the Noumea Accord, and all resulted in a vote against it.

But the last referendum result, held in December 2021, is disputed, as it was boycotted by the indigenous Kanak people due to the devastation caused by the covid-19 pandemic.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Interview with Nic Maclellan
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia decolonisation reports

The main body of the independence movement has been quiet during the trip, waiting to see what was put on the table.

Islands Business correspondent Nic Maclellan told RNZ Pacific that Macron, speaking in Noumea yesterday, threw out a challenge to them.

He said independence leaders, particularly from the Caledonian Union party, the largest pro-independence party boycotted the president’s speech.

“Macron threw out a challenge to them, basically saying that the French state would forge ahead with the process to introduce a new political statute for New Caledonia, replacing the Noumea Accord, the framework agreement that’s lasted for three decades,” Maclellan said.

The President of the New Caledonia territorial government, Louis Mapou, did welcome Macron.

“[The French President] talked about the reform of political institutions. A major step which won large applause from the crowd was to unfreeze the electoral rolls for the looming provincial and congressional elections to be held in May next year,” Maclellan said.

“That will allow thousands more French nationals to vote than are currently able to under under the Noumea Accord.

“And he basically said that he would be moving ahead to review the Constitution in early 2024.

“The Noumea Accord is entrenched in its own clauses of the French constitution, so there needs to be a major constitutional change. He suggested he was going to move forward pretty strongly on that.”

Rebuilding the economy
Maclellan said Macron also talked about the future role of the French dependency around two key areas.

The first was about rebuilding the economic and social models of New Caledonia, addressing an inequality, particularly for poor people from the Kanak indigenous community, questions of employment.

He said a major section of his speech focused on the nickel industry, and the need to solve the energy crisis that powered nickel with improved productivity in this key sector.

France 1 television, the state broadcaster, reports Macron confirmed more than 200 soldiers for the armed forces of New Caledonia.

But there will also be the creation of a military “Pacific academy, right here, to train soldiers from all over the region”.

Emmanuel Macron is also visiting Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged New Caledonia to forge a common future after the most recent “no” independence vote.

During his visit to the capital Noumea, AFP reports Macron called the three independence referendums over the past five years “unprecedented”, and said “the choice that was expressed was to stay in France and the Republic”.

Pro-independence, indigenous Kanaks boycotted the third independence referendum in 2021, arguing a fair campaign was impossible during the covid-19 pandemic.

• READ MORE:PNG plans 21-gun salute for Macron in historic visit to an independent Pacific state
• Macron in New Caledonia to bolster France’s Indo-Pacific strategy
• Other French Pacific reports

Aux Calédoniennes et Calédoniens. https://t.co/OpMZanyN3q

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) July 26, 2023

He held out the prospect of a “slow, humble, demanding” process to build a “shared history” for New Caledonia through a process of “truth and reconciliation”.

“It is not a full stop, it is a semi-colon”, Macron said.

“I am with our compatriots during these days to define together the basis for this new path, of this new project for the future of New Caledonia — respectful of its identity, of its history but in the light of the choice that has been made.”

Macron is also seeking to reassert his country’s importance in the Pacific region, where China and the United States are vying for influence.

1.5m ‘overseas’ citizens
France has nearly 1.5 million citizens in its Pacific and Indian Ocean territories, as well as several thousand troops, including 1600 in New Caledonia.

After his first stop in New Caledonia, Macron will travel to Vanuatu on Wednesday night for a two-day visit before heading to Papua New Guinea, where he is expected to lay out a “French alternative” for the region.

He is the first French President to visit non-French territories in the Pacific.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron jets into Port Moresby late tomorrow for his historic visit to Papua New Guinea and will be met by Prime Minister James Marape with a 21-gun salute and other ceremonies.

Marape yesterday expressed profound enthusiasm for the upcoming visit of President Macron — currently in New Caledonia — considering it a significant milestone in the nation’s global engagement.

President Macron’s visit marks the first time a French president has visited an independent country in the Pacific, showcasing Papua New Guinea’s growing connectivity with the world, Marape said.

• READ MORE: Macron in New Caledonia to bolster France’s Indo-Pacific strategy
• Other French Pacific reports

“This historic visit by President Macron exemplifies the profound connectivity that Papua New Guinea, under my leadership, is forging with the international community,” he said.

“In today’s interconnected virtual realm of commerce, real-time trade, and foreign relations, the visit by the esteemed French president bodes exceedingly well for PNG.

“We eagerly anticipate strengthening our ties with this influential G7 economy.”

This meeting follows a previous encounter between President Macron and Prime Minister Marape earlier this year in Gabon, Central Africa, during the “One-Forest” Summit.

Bilateral cooperation
The forthcoming visit further cements the amicable relations between the two leaders and enhances bilateral cooperation.

In recent months, the Prime Minister has had fruitful discussions with several world leaders, demonstrating PNG’s growing prominence on the global stage.

A one-day state visit of Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, resulted in tangible benefits, including the establishment of direct flights between Port Moresby and Bali.

Discussions with the President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, during the Korea-Pacific Islands Summit, fostered constructive engagements and cooperation between the nations.

Papua New Guinea also hosted leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, further strengthening ties and fostering positive developments.

Leaders of all Pacific countries were also present for the visit of Prime Minister Modi.

Critical issues
Reflecting on these milestones, Marape expressed his commitment to advancing bilateral relations and addressing critical issues of mutual concern with visiting dignitaries.

He hailed the visit of Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, earlier this year, which marked a turning point in the relationship between Papua New Guinea and Australia after 47 years of independence.

“In anticipation of President Macron’s visit, Papua New Guinea stands ready to engage in productive dialogues and explore new avenues of cooperation with France.

“The visit bears the potential to further elevate PNG’s global presence and unlock new opportunities for mutual growth and prosperity,” Marape said.

President Macron will also be visiting Vanuatu and Fiji.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

France has deployed Rafale jet fighters during a military ceremony in New Caledonia, marking President Emmanuel Macron’s first official day in the Pacific.

Macron arrived in Noumea overnight on a visit aimed at bolstering his Indo-Pacific strategy and reaffirming France’s role in the region.

The historic five-day trip includes a visit to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. It is the first time a French president has visited independent Pacific Islands, according to French officials.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: French President begins tour of the Pacific
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia decolonisation reports

A big focus will be asserting France’s role in what Macron has called a “balancing force” between the United States and China.

France assumes sovereignty for three Pacific territories: New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna.

However, not everyone was happy about the presidential visit.

New Caledonia was politically divided and seeking a way forward after three referendums on independence.

Referendum boycott
The outcome of all three polls was a “no” to independence but the result of the third vote, which was boycotted by Kanaks, was disputed.

Rallies were expected during the French President’s visit.

Local committees of the main pro-independence party the Caledonian Union have called for “peaceful” but determined rallies.

Their presence will be felt particularly when Macron heads north today to the east coast town of Thio, as well as when he gathers the New Caledonian community together tomorrow afternoon for a speech, where he is expected to make a major announcement.

About 40 percent of the population are indigenous Kanak, most of whom support independence. Pro-independence parties, which have been in power since 2017, want full sovereignty by 2025.

Macron is expected to meet with all sides in Noumea this week.

A large delegation has joined Macron on his visit, including Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna and Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu.

Foreign minister in Suva
Colonna will also travel to Suva, Fiji today, the first visit of a French foreign affairs minister to the country.

She will meet with the Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and the Pacific Islands Forum Deputy Secretary General Filimon Manoni.

The move was to “strengthen its commitment in the region”, French officials have said.

Meetings have also been set with Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape when the delegation travels there on Friday.

France has investments in PNG to develop its gas resources under French-owned multinational oil and gas company TotalEnergies.

Vanuatu chiefs appeal
Emmanuel Macron will be in Port Vila on Wednesday.

Vanuatu’s Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs want Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau to let President Macron know that the Mathew and Hunter Islands belong to Vanuatu and are not part of New Caledonia.

Tanna chief Jean Pierre Tom said ni-Vanuatu people were expecting his visit to be a “game changer and not a re-enforcement of colonial rule”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

En vol vers la Nouvelle-Calédonie, accueilli par nos Rafale qui viennent confirmer que la France est une puissance de l’Indo-Pacifique ! pic.twitter.com/yj8r1PHOMi

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) July 24, 2023

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron will make a first official visit to Papua New Guinea next Friday as part of a short Pacific trip.

AFP news agency reports that Macron’s trip will start in New Caledonia before he travels to Vanuatu and Port Moresby.

A French official told the news agency the trip was “historic” because no French president had ever visited non-French islands in the region.

• READ MORE: Other French Indo-Pacific policy reports

Macron will use those two stops to outline his Indo-Pacific strategy, aimed at “recommitting” France to the region, the official said.

PNG Prime Minister James Marape said he would meet one-on-one with Macron, and the itinerary for the visit also included a courtesy call on Governor-General Sir Bob Dadae and the signing of various agreements.

Marape emphasised the significance of Macron’s visit in strengthening bilateral relations between France and Papua New Guinea.

“Under my leadership, France and PNG have been actively enhancing our bilateral relationship, along with other nations,” he said on his website.

“I appreciate President Macron’s commitment, as demonstrated by his decision to visit PNG and engage in discussions on matters of mutual interest between our countries.”

Final LNG decision
Macron’s visit comes on the eve of the final investment decision (FID) by French super-major TotalEnergies on the Papua LNG Project.

TotalEnergies is also involved in downstream processing of natural resources such as forests.

“In the midst of the evolving geopolitical landscape in the region, Papua New Guinea serves as ‘neutral ground,’ and I will urge France to consider PNG’s strategic position amid the changing regional dynamics,” Marape added.

“The visit of President Macron to PNG will further solidify the growing cooperation and shared goals between our two nations, particularly in the areas of forest conservation, French investments in PNG such as TotalEnergies, mobilising resources to support small Pacific Island countries and communities, and other relevant matters.”

Macron last year relaunched France’s Indo-Pacific approach in the aftermath of a bitter row over a cancelled submarine contract with Australia, casting France as a balancing power in a region dominated by the tussle between China and the United States.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

From that upending, the alliance started bungling.  It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians.  Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.

Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban.  As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.

In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.   While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect.  A continent was thereby destabilised.  The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.

The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project.  The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.

The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members.  Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine.  German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance.  Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv.  On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.”  To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.”  While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.

With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness.  The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread.  According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.  Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.”  With these views, conflict lurks.

The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia.  It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022.  That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching.  But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions.  “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan.  “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”

One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron.  Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit.  In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.”  With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson.  “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”  The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.

In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals.  “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue.  NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”

Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General.  In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.

The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself.  In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade.  Where NATO goes, war is most likely.  Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

From that upending, the alliance started bungling.  It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians.  Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.

Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban.  As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.

In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.   While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect.  A continent was thereby destabilised.  The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.

The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project.  The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.

The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members.  Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine.  German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance.  Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv.  On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.”  To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.”  While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.

With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness.  The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread.  According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.  Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.”  With these views, conflict lurks.

The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia.  It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022.  That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching.  But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions.  “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan.  “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”

One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron.  Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit.  In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.”  With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson.  “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”  The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.

In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals.  “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue.  NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”

Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General.  In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.

The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself.  In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade.  Where NATO goes, war is most likely.  Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.