France deployed troops to New Caledonia’s ports and international airport, banned TikTok and imposed a state of emergency Thursday after three nights of clashes that have left four dead and hundreds wounded.
The emergency measures give authorities greater powers to tackle the unrest that has gripped New Caledonia since Monday, when protests over voting changes pushed by Paris turned violent.
Additional powers under the state of emergency include the possibility of house detention for people deemed a threat to public order and the ability to conduct searches, seize weapons and restrict movements, with possible jail time for violators.
The last time France imposed such measures on one of its overseas territories was in 1985, also in New Caledonia, the interior ministry said.
“No violence will be tolerated,” said Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, adding that the state of emergency “will allow us to roll out massive means to restore order”.
Attal told a crisis ministerial meeting that troops had been deployed to secure ports and the international airport and the government representative in New Caledonia has “banned TikTok”.
The airport is already closed to international flights.
The state of emergency was announced hours after a French gendarme who was seriously injured during riots in New Caledonia died of his wounds, said Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, raising the death toll to four.
The death of the French gendarme followed two nights of rioting as protesters demonstrated against a constitutional reform being debated in the national assembly in Paris that aims to expand the electorate in the territory’s provincial elections.
Vehicles torched, shops looted
The unrest flared after French lawmakers approved a bill extending voting rights in provincial elections to residents arriving from mainland France – a change critics fear could marginalise Indigenous people and benefit pro-France politicians.
Following lengthy and at times tense debates, the National Assembly in Paris adopted the reform shortly after midnight, by 351 votes to 153.
Macron cancelled a planned visit to Normandy to chair cabinet-level national security talks on the crisis Wednesday morning, his office said.
Protests turned violent Monday night, with shots fired at security forces, vehicles torched and shops looted in the worst unrest the French overseas territory has seen since the 1980s.
In response, authorities deployed a heavy security contingent, imposed a curfew, banned public gatherings and closed the main airport.
French authorities in the territory said that more than 130 people have been arrested and more than 300 have been injured since Monday in the violence.
“More than 130 arrests have been made and several dozen rioters have been taken into custody and will be brought before the courts,” the French High Commission of the Republic in New Caledonia said in a statement early Wednesday morning.
Describing the “serious public disturbances” as ongoing, the High Commission decried widespread looting and torching of businesses and public property, including schools.
It added that classes will remain scrapped until further notice and the main airport shut to commercial flights.
Dispute over voting rights
Macron has been seeking to reassert his country’s importance in the Pacific region, where China and the United States are vying for influence but France has a strategic footprint through its overseas territories, which include New Caledonia and French Polynesia.
Lying between Australia and Fiji, New Caledonia is one of several French territories spanning the globe from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to the Pacific that remain part of France in the post-colonial era.
In the Noumea Accord of 1998, France vowed to gradually give more political power to the Pacific island territory of nearly 300,000 people.
Under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, all rejecting independence. But independence retains support, particularly among the Indigenous Kanak people.
The Noumea Accord has also meant that New Caledonia’s voter lists have not been updated since 1998 – meaning that island residents who arrived from mainland France or elsewhere in the past 25 years do not have the right to take part in provincial polls.
The French government has branded the exclusion of one out of five people from voting as “absurd” while separatists fear that expanding voter lists would benefit pro-France politicians and reduce the weight of the Kanaks.
‘Determination of our young’
Simmering protests over the planned changes to voter eligibility took a violent turn on Monday night, with groups of young masked or hooded demonstrators taking over several roundabouts and confronting police, who responded with non-lethal rounds.
One business group said around 30 shops, factories and other sites in and around the capital Noumea had been set ablaze, while an AFP journalist saw burned-out cars and the smoking remains of tyres and wooden pallets littering the streets.
Firefighters said they had received around 1,500 calls overnight and responded to 200 blazes.
Even after the curfew was put in place on Tuesday, there were acts of vandalism overnight, with the store of a major sports brand ransacked.
A prison rebellion involving some 50 detainees in the Camop-Est facility subsided after security forces regained control, local officials said.
Pro-independence party leader Daniel Goa asked the youths to “go home”, and condemned the looting.
But he added: “The unrest of the last 24 hours reveals the determination of our young people to no longer let France take control of them.”
The main figure of the non-independence camp, former minister Sonia Backes, denounced what she described as the anti-White racism of demonstrators who burned down the house of her father, a man in his 70s who was exfiltrated by the security forces.
“If he was not attacked because he was my father, he was at least attacked because he was White,” she told BFMTV.
