2023-04-17 04:00:06
La Is Polynesia still a French colony? Legally, certainly not: the territory has had an Assembly for forty-six years – the second round of elections is scheduled for April 30 – and a government that manages the country and its budget, apart from a few prerogatives – the international commitments, justice, the police, administrative control, the university – which remain the domain of the French government, represented by a high commissioner.
The colonial legacy is omnipresent on these archipelagos, scattered over an area as vast as Europe, but with only 280,000 inhabitants. “Tahiti continues, partly politically, and certainly economically and culturally, to be a colony, wrote the anthropologist Bruno Saura in 2021 (Tahitians, Frenchedition Au vent des îles). It is nevertheless a colony and a colonial situation of a particular type, of the XXIᵉ century. »
“Les Etablissements français de l’Océanie”, a protectorate since 1842, became a French colony in 1880, after merciless wars against the local populations; Polynesia was transformed into an Overseas Territory in 1946, before being granted management autonomy in 1977, completed in 2004: the State let go of ballast to obtain a certain political calm and continue its nuclear campaign : 193 tests from 1966 to 1996, including forty-six aerial ones. “The period of nuclear testing is another time of resorting to force, to surveillance, to the exclusion of certain opponents, continues Bruno Saura, a truly colonial moment. » Pouvanaa a Oopa, one of the fathers of the separatists, was one of these opponents, accused of having wanted to set fire to Papeete, and in reality vigorously dismissed in 1958 and exiled by the Gaullist authorities.
Slums
Today, Polynesians manage their destiny themselves, even if the State pays a little more than 1.5 billion euros each year for education, health, waste treatment, the reduction of unsanitary housing…
Because the other side of the Tahitian tourist paradise is dark, and the social inequalities, gigantic. In 2009, 27.6% of the population lived below the poverty line (405 euros per month), when 20% of the richest households capture almost half of the overall income. If we add that consumer prices are 39% higher than those in mainland France, we understand why so many Tahitians, deprived of family solidarity on the islands, sleep on the streets or pile up in slums.
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