“The Corsican people are dying, they are disappearing! “denounced Monday the Corsica National Liberation Front (FLNC) in a press release, claiming in passing 16 attacks against second homes, construction companies or police vehicles, targeting two police vehicles, two construction companies and twelve residences private, including the burning of 36 mobile homes in a campsite in Aleria.
“What kills the Corsican people is France, the world economic system and part of our people who are complicit in it”, accuses in this document transmitted to Corse Matin the clandestine independence movement, which had officially deposited the weapons in 2014, after four decades of armed struggle marked by more than 4,500 attacks. Among these accomplices, the text notably targets Femu a Corsica, the autonomist party of Gilles Simeoni, the president of the Corsican executive, and “his desire for hegemony”.
Regretting the emergence of “a form of bobo patriotism, of assumed self-satisfaction, whatever the result obtained”, the FLNC considers, for example, that the election of three Corsican autonomist deputies in 2017 (all re-elected in the June legislative elections) brought “no tangible progress for the national rights” of the Corsican people.
The FLNC “extremely pessimistic”
Faced with a “France” whose attitude would have “rarely been so contemptuous and condescending”, the FLNC declares itself “extremely pessimistic” on the discussions announced with Paris and the expected visit to the island, probably at the end of July, of the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin.
During a trip to the Isle of Beauty in mid-March, to ease the tensions arising from the aggression in prison of Yvan Colonna, this independence activist sentenced to life imprisonment for his participation in the assassination of the prefect Erignac in 1998 in Ajaccio, Gérald Darmanin offered the island’s elected officials the prospect of “autonomy”. On this institutional theme, the FLNC repeated its demands on Monday: “official recognition of the Corsican people”, “immediate transitional political autonomy” and accession to self-determination “within 5 years”.
“The struggle continues”, insists the FLNC, specifying that it will not be a “passive spectator of the programmed death of the Corsican people on their land”, threatened by “the colonization of settlement” which would constitute the “5,000 arrivals each year” in the island. And the FLNC to denounce “the concreteization” of the island, the agricultural land, “new economic Eldorado, (now) overpriced”, or a tourism today dominated “by French groups”.