Bulletin No47 juin 2024 Wednesday June 19, eleven Kanak independence activists were arrested by the French colonial repression forces, in particular activists from the Cellule de Coordination des Actions de Terrain (CCAT). Two of them were released under judicial supervision, two others were given time for their defense. The pretext used by the colonial state was that the activists had“organized unrest against electoral reform”.
During the night of Saturday 22 to Sunday 23, the seven other prisoners were transferred to France, 17,000 km from home. The public prosecutor declared on this subject: “ This transfer was organized during the night by means of a specially chartered plane […] an assignment to a penitentiary establishment in mainland France was ordered due to the sensitivity of the procedure […] this must allow investigations to continue in a calm manner, free from any pressure or fraudulent consultation .”
Among them, Christian Tein, the spokesperson for the CCAT, must be imprisoned in Mulhouse. Brenda Wanobo, in charge of communications for the CCAT, is on her way to the Dijon penitentiary center while Frédérique Muliava, chief of staff to the President of the Congress of New Caledonia Roch Wamytan, is to be incarcerated in Riom, near Clermont- Ferrand.
The Caledonian Union, the main independence party, reacted to this deportation: “ All the leaders, activists and sympathizers of the Caledonian Union learned with astonishment of the deportation to mainland France during the night of the leaders and activists of the CCAT, including our general commissioner Christian Tein as well as two mothers of young children. »
Finally, on Tuesday 25 in the morning, the last two, Gilles Jorédié and Joël Tjibaou, son of the independence leader and signatory of the Matignon agreements Jean-Marie Tjibaou, who was assassinated in 1989, were in turn placed in pre-trial detention.
The colonial state seeks to make pay for the wave of revolt of the Kanak people and in particular of their youth against the reform of the electoral thaw while stifling the most combative fringes of the movement for the right to self-determination of the Kanak people. Extremely heavy charges thus weigh on the activists, indicted in particular for “ complicity in attempted murder, organized gang theft with a weapon, organized gang destruction of the property of others by dangerous means ”. A clear signal of the determination of the colonial state to repress the separatists, while the judge of freedoms and detention also followed in every respect the requisitions of the public prosecutor against Joël Tjibaou and Gilles Jorédié.
This judicial and police relentlessness against the CCAT and the activists for the self-determination of Kanaky triggered the anger of the Kanak population and revived the anti-colonial struggle, with new nights of revolts Monday and Tuesday in the urban area of Nouméa and several points of the archipelago. Once again, the police response was brutal with 38 arrests on Monday June 24. Deportation is an old practice used since the beginning of colonization; we remember Toussaint-Louverture, fighter for Haitian independence, captured and deported by the army of the first consul Napoleon Bonaparte, at the time of the reestablishment of slavery, died in the sad and cold Fort-de-Joux or even of Abd-El-Kader, Algerian independence fighter, imprisoned at Fort Lamalgue in Toulon, by Louis-Philippe, then transferred by the Second Republic to the castle of Pau, then to that of Amboise. And more recently we can cite the ICC, the unofficial organ of Western imperialists, holding Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in detention for years, captured by the French army, that of the former colonial power.
The Communist Revolutionary Party strongly condemns all these neocolonialist practices. We have already written, in Kanaky as in Palestine, it is a colonial question, and peace and serenity can only begin when the colonial state has disappeared. And this is not what Macron and Big Capital for whom he works want. The repression is increasing, despite the suspension of the electoral thaw reform with the dissolution of the National Assembly.
Faced with this, the Communist Revolutionary Party renews its support for the Kanak people and their right to self-determination and independence. We demand the dropping of all charges and prosecutions against activists and leaders of independence organizations, as well as the immediate release of all political prisoners.
Paris on June 26, 2024