Crisis, Sunbathing in New Caledonia : Hostage Drama Plays On Against Resort Backdrop

NOUMEA, New Caledonia —  Hundreds of French paramilitary troops, dressed in T-shirts and swimming suits, sipped beers and swapped jokes at beachfront resorts here Friday as the island’s militant Melanesian separatists killed a French loyalist settler 190 miles from the capital and declared that “a colonial war” is raging in this French territory in the South Pacific.

At the same time, the French government announced here Friday evening that 15 armed members of the island’s native Melanesian community continued to man strategic coral perches as sentries outside a remote jungle cave, where they have held nearly two dozen French policemen hostage for more than a week.

However, the hostages were permitted to leave the cave several times to negotiate their own release after they promised to return at a specified time, a government spokesman said.

And, despite the fact that the ongoing siege here continues to play a major role in the French presidential election campaign 12,500 miles away, French tourists were sunbathing peacefully throughout the day Friday on the white sand beaches of the Club Med resort just outside Noumea.

The apparently conflicting scenes were typical of the confounding nature of New Caledonia’s current political crisis.

Although the hostage drama is all too real and the Melanesian separatists, also known as Kanaks, have made good on their threat to wage a concerted campaign of violence this month to further their cause of creating an independent Melanesian state on these lush isles, it is equally clear that the current unrest is neither a preamble to revolution nor a South Pacific version of Vietnam.

Hundreds of crack French riot troops have been flown into Noumea in the past few days. But most have traveled here innocuously in tourist garb in the economy sections of regularly scheduled French passenger flights, and they remain billeted in resorts in the capital merely as a contingency force.

French officials here have used a naval blockade, 300 ground troops, helicopters and a strict government travel ban to seal off the remote island of Ouvea east of Noumea, where the hostage cave is located. But officials added that, aside from the sporadic and isolated clashes Friday, there has been little violence since the initial attack last week by an armed band of Kanaks on a police barracks on Ouvea, which left four dead and more than 20 French gendarmes as hostages.

Dispute Runs Deep

Friday’s violence did illustrate, however, the depth and character of the dispute that has been simmering here for more than four years between a tribal-based culture of well-educated, well-to-do natives and that of French colonists, some of whose families settled here five generations ago.

The worst of the clashes was reported near the town of Voh on the main island of Grande Terre, where an unidentified group of armed Kanaks on Friday morning shot and killed a 31-year-old loyalist settler who, four years ago, had admitted his role in killing 10 prominent Kanaks near his settlement colony. His death brings to at least seven the number of people killed in separatist violence, including those who died in last week’s attack.

Philippe Berges, a top aide to France’s high commissioner here, told reporters Friday night that the killing was merely “a settling of accounts,” and he voiced none of the concerns of other analysts in Noumea who said today that they fear the settler’s killing could trigger revenge attacks on Kanaks by white settlers elsewhere on the island.

About 43% of New Caledonia’s population of 145,000 are native Melanesians. Most of the remainder are white, French-speaking European settlers, who the Kanaks allege have been seizing their native lands to prevent them from becoming a powerful majority in the territory’s three principal islands.

Acquitted on Self-Defense

Jose Lapetite, the 31-year-old settler who was murdered Friday, was charged with shooting and killing 10 Melanesian natives in November, 1984, but he and nine others were later acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.

The trial was seen as so potentially explosive by the French territorial authority that it deliberately packed the seats in the gallery with government employees to prevent clashes inside the court. And French government officials here have continued to take precautions to contain the conflict even amid the current crisis.

During his Friday press conference, Berges also reported sporadic gunfire in another region on New Caledonia’s main island between gendarmes and armed guerrilla separatists, who he said had also placed barricades booby-trapped with explosives on the road. But the spokesman said no one was injured in the firing, and the gendarmes did not pursue their attackers.

In another press conference Friday, at a nearby ramshackle building called “The Future”--the headquarters of the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front--Melanesian separatist leaders said they hope that neither the hostage drama nor the violence will continue much longer.

A New ‘Colonial War’

“In New Caledonia, a colonial war is taking place. . . . But no one wants a new colonial war,” said Edmond Nekiriai, who goes by the title of president of the independent nation of Kanaki.

Nekiriai’s Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front is an umbrella group of at least five semi-autonomous native groups that vary from moderates to Libyan-trained extremists. Nekiriai and other moderate leaders have said they hope the current crisis will instead force the French government into negotiations that would lead to a political solution to the conflict.

In an interview Friday, Rock Wamytan, a member of the executive commission of the largest and most moderate faction in the Kanak Liberation Front, said the hostage drama has put the entire Kanak separatist movement “in a really delicate position.”

“At the beginning of this action, we were very surprised, because the instructions we gave (to the groups within the Kanak Liberation Front) was not to kill. ‘Don’t kill men,’ we said. ‘It is not good.’

“But the Front is now obliged to support these hostage takers.”

Growing Concern

Wamytan acknowledged that the organization’s moderate leaders are increasingly concerned about their inability to control the extremist factions in the movement. He said the leaders in Noumea are not in direct contact with the hostage takers, whom he identified as members of several different groups within the Kanak Liberation Front.

“At the same time, though, we tried to contact them (through intermediaries) and tell them not to go to this point of killing,” he added. “We want to be calm. And we think our message is getting through.”

As proof, Wamytan cited the treatment the gendarmes are now receiving at the hands of their captors. A French government team that was allowed to visit the hostages inside the cave Thursday reported that all but one are healthy, and that the ailing gendarme was released. All the remaining captives were permitted to use the visit to write letters and send messages to their families and friends.

“The hostages are being well fed, they are getting water, they are being treated very well,” Wamytan said.

“I personally believe that this whole affair is not the beginning of a long period of violence. It is really just sort of an isolated event.”