By Andrew T.

Roscoe Lee Brown is a journalist, activist, and special rapporteur for Radio RATA. He is currently on a tour around Melbourne’s East, speaking to community and activists about the Kanaky struggle. Red Ant spoke with Roscoe in the days after CCAT and FLNKS leader, Christian Tein was released from French prison under strict bail conditions.

A Court of Appeal in Paris has ruled for the release of Kanak pro-independence leader Christian Téin from custody, almost one year after his arrest in New Caledonia.

On 13 May 2024, Noumea, the capital of Kanaky (New Caledonia), erupted in protests and riots. The unrest was a direct response to France’s efforts to extinguish any possibility of independence for the Indigenous Kanak people. France had attempted to gerrymander elections by adding 45,000 French settlers to voter rolls under the Marty Project (announced October 2023).

A month before the uprising, 30,000 people—an extraordinary number in a country of just 270,000—marched in Noumea against the law. French forces and settler militias conducted targeted attacks, resulting in deaths, mass arrests, and disappearances. In the aftermath, 2600 were arrested. 500 were ‘administratively disappeared’, aka ‘enforced disappearances’ – in the system but not accounted for, assumed to be in the French controlled jails. 76 were extradited to France.

Colonial Rule

Located just 1,300 kilometres off Australia’s coast, Kanaky/Nouvelle-Caledonie was established as a French penal colony in 1853. Settlers seized land, waging a genocidal campaign through massacres and disease that killed over 70% of the Kanak population. The penal colony had labour imported from other colonies in Algeria, Vietnam, & Martinique. Approximately 22,000 prisoners were sent, including Algerian rebels and Communards from the Paris Commune, to work in the nickel mines.

“The nickel that is extracted there is the same used in the casings for bullets in the Gaza genocide. The Kanak people, who make up roughly 40% of the population, have resisted colonization from the beginning and remain fiercely committed to liberation. The Kanak face systemic discrimination: a vast majority live below the poverty line, unemployment hovers near 40%, and 90% of Noumena’s prison population is Kanak.”

By implementing racist policies under the indigénat regime, Kanaks were denied citizenship and confining them to reservations. Despite repeated uprisings – the largest of which were in 1878, 1917, and 1984 – each rebellion was met with violent suppression.

A fragile peace followed the 1988 Matignon Accords and the 1998 Nouméa Accord, which promised gradual decolonization. These agreements recognized Kanak sovereignty while including settlers and migrant communities in the political process. But France’s recent push to expand voting rolls, disproportionately benefiting anti-independence settlers, has reignited tensions.

Under the 1998 accord, three more referendum votes, on whether to remain a special collectivity of France or become an independent state, were held. The first, in 2018, saw 43% vote for independence. The second, in 2020, rose to 47%—just 5,000 votes short. The third, held in 2021 during a COVID surge, was boycotted by the independence movement after France refused to delay it. France continues to do its utmost to prevent independence, guarding an estimated 30% of the world’s nickel reserves. Recently, Emmanuel Macron, in his victory speech after being elected, declared “New Caledonia is France.”

2024 Protests

The May 2024 protests were led by the pro-independence Field Action Coordination Cell (CCAT), labelled by the Loyalists and French a “mafia” under Christian Téin, who has overwhelming support from pro-independence Kanaks. The CCAT is made up of 80-100 cells. The GIGN (National Gendarmerie Intervention Group), an elite police tactical unit, were sent to Saint Louis, Thibault, and La Conception to quell the uprising.

Kanak youth took to the streets, blocking infrastructure, burning government buildings, and looting stores. The French state deployed over 3,000 paramilitary police, along with armoured vehicles and army helicopters, to suppress the uprising. Fourteen people were killed—all but one of them, Kanak, shot by police or settlers. The trigger for the riots was French President Emmanuel Macron’s push to pass a new electoral law, which would grant voting rights to 25,000 mostly French settlers in local elections. This move would drastically shift political power, undermining the independence movement. Yet, it was Christian Téin, the popular leader of FLNKS (the Socialist National Liberation Front) and CCAT, who was abducted and extradited to France, who the state attempted to prosecute for the deaths.

Wanted lists were plastered on sign boards around town, and despite promises, the GIGN death squads conducted night raids, using IDF-style tactics: storming houses, separating men from women, and isolating the children – threatening the lives of their fathers and uncles unless they inform on the suspect’s whereabouts. The French target the families of those involved in any of the many independence movements, even as far back as the 1970s.

Brown attended the protests in September when the centralised riots had died down and, protests were limited to a decentralised protest march once per month: “The Kanaky used static mobilisations. They set up 80 earth ovens around town [for community barbecues], with convoys honking at 3 PM …. They adapted to repression with creativity.”

Thousands of young Kanaks, disillusioned by systemic inequality and political marginalization, clashed with security forces. Over 200 buildings, symbols of colonial wealth and power, were looted and burned. Roscoe, speaking to those involved, said they were targeting symbols of French capitalist wealth “Mercedes, Renault and McDonalds.”

“We didn’t burn down the coke factory, the furniture factory where we work and were radicalised. It was targeted.” Kanak people are highly politicised: “The traditional folks [chiefs, etc,] were radicalised by the church while the politicians were radicalised by the trade unions”. The vast majority of Kanaks support the independence movement and they have recently been joined by many Pacific-island migrants. White New Caledonian loyalists have traditionally voted for right-wing conservative parties, while Marine Le Pen received 50% in the second round of the 2022 presidential election in Noumea.

Since this time, the French government has held the Kanaky people at ransom. The doctors have been withdrawn to punish the population. “… largely the frontline doctors and nurses are French or some form of European. When Kanaky needs medical attention, they’re being denied it.”

The crisis reflects France’s prioritising repression over dialogue. Pro-independence leaders were detained, while the voices of far-right loyalists like Sonia Backès, were amplified – pushing for a deepening of apartheid through intra-Kanaky separatism between loyalist and pro-independence areas. Paris is also deflecting, blaming “foreign interference” from countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, China and Russia, all ‘enemies’ of France.

Of these, only Azerbaijan is contributing to the struggle. The Baku initiative, by Azerbaijan, has put money towards conferences for decolonial movements – seen by many as a tit-for-tat against France for their support for Armenia during the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh, which resulted in the Azerbaijan flag being flown alongside the Kanaky flag during these recent protests.

France and Australia

Though the 2021 AUKUS pact and French submarine fiasco strained relations, Australia remains aligned with France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy. Australia, ever an eager deputy to the encirclement of China by the United States, continually backs French colonialism. In 2018, Macron and then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison, announced a France-India-Australia axis, including multi-billion-dollar arms deals. The 2024 Australian federal budget allocated $20.7 million over five years (plus $3.9 million annually afterward) to deepen military ties, including joint exercises with French forces in New Caledonia.

Colonisation and Resistance

Brown remarks on the importance of the struggle on our front door. Roscoe is optimistic about the resistance to colonialism on the “island kingdoms”, as he spends the next few months visiting community groups, and First Nations elders to spread consciousness about the situation in Kanaky.

On Tuesday 13 May 2025, Roscoe and a number of activists gathered at Camp Sovereignty on the unceded land of the Kulin Nation to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Kanaky Uprising, celebrating “a refusal to accept the slow suffocation of Indigenous sovereignty under bureaucratic disguise.” The ability for people in Australia to intervene against this conflict should not be underestimated. The main radio station that has kept dissent alive in Kanaky was set up in the 1980s by the pro-independence movement, with support from the Australian trade union movement’s foreign aid program, APHEDA (Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad), and birthed of pro-independence liberation music, Kaneka.

The imperialists have a shared consciousness, so does the resistance. While the Melbourne University Law School Professor Eric Descheemaeker, a rabid opponent of Indigenous land acknowledgement ceremonies, has promoted colonial propaganda, arguing in favour of French occupation, “It is we who have allowed them (Kanaks) to continue to exist”,

The Kanaky independence activists connect the colonisation regimes in their origins, settler colonialism – ‘Zionism’. This is not only through training – as the French death squads, the GIGN have been trained by Israelis, but the entire imperial military industrial apparatus. For Kanaky protestors: “This is the same struggle—whether it’s Kanaky, Gaza, or the Sahel. The coloniser is the same group of people.”