The situation is improving in Nouméa, but the page of violence is still far from being completely turned. A fragile return to normal life began this Thursday morning, for the first time after ten days of crisis in New Caledonia.
In the city center of the Caledonian capital, cars are driving and children are playing, at a time when Emmanuel Macron is on site to begin “as quickly as possible” a return to “peace, calm, security”.
Large queues in front of bakeries
The violence shaking this territory has left six dead, including two gendarmes. In question, the thawing of the electoral body through a constitutional reform, rejected by the independence camp.
This Thursday, significant vehicle traffic resumed, where in the previous mornings the streets were largely abandoned to the scars of the nights of violence, while the state of emergency remains in force, as does the nighttime curfew. Many stores have reopened their doors, even if large queues are lengthening in front of certain businesses, particularly bakeries, in a city center crisscrossed by a massive presence of law enforcement.
Further south in the capital, children play on swings, accompanied by their parents, while others take advantage of this lull to ride bikes. Extremely rare scenes for a week and the closure of schools throughout the archipelago.
A withdrawal of the law against calm
In the popular district of Montravel, mainly populated by the Kanak and Oceanian communities, calm reigns at the end of the morning this Thursday, while the police occupy the roundabout. The roadblock, held the day before by separatists, was removed. “If Macron withdraws his law”, a constitutional reform which ignited the powder, “everything will return to lasting calm”, observes a thirty-year-old from Ouvéa.
In the meantime, the night from Wednesday to Thursday “was calm,” said the representative of the French State in the territory, the High Commissioner of the Republic Louis Le Franc. There was “no additional damage”.
“Let the fight continue”
A sign, however, that this calm remains very precarious is that groups of young people are moving around with masked faces in the streets, carrying slingshots made of odds and ends. In the same district, the Le Froid company factory was ravaged by flames. Inside, walls are tagged: “Let the fight continue”, or even “Kanaky”, the name given to the archipelago by supporters of independence.
The situation is even more tense in the rest of the city: on the road which connects Dumbéa, in the north, to Nouméa, numerous filter dams and the remains of burned cars continue to chop up traffic. In Greater Nouméa, these dams were even reinforced overnight. The separatists raised their flags and hung banners with one reading: “No to thaw”.