2023-07-29 05:45:08
“The Pacific will probably become the essential theater of our destiny for us men for a long time to come. » We are on September 6, 1966 and the words are those of President Charles de Gaulle visiting the Franco-British New Hebrides, which became independent Vanuatu in 1980.
Almost sixty years later, Emmanuel Macron adheres to the same discourse. On Friday July 28, the Head of State completed a visit to the Western Pacific, passing through New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. On the way back to Paris, he added a stopover in Sri Lanka, where he was to go on the night of Friday to Saturday to meet with Ranil Wickremesinghe, president of the Democratic Socialist Republic of this island in the ocean. Indian. Tuesday, July 25, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, for her part went for a few hours to Fiji, headquarters of the Pacific Islands Forum. And Paris announced the opening of a new embassy in Samoa.
After drawing up from Noumea the promised assessment of the “hundred days” of a new national policy around the need to “the order”Monday July 24, the diplomatic sequence of the president in Oceania enabled him to affirm everywhere “independence” et ” sovereignty “whether that of France or its partners.
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In Vanuatu as in Papua, the Head of State was warmly welcomed by many dancers from indigenous Oceanian tribes. He received as a gift from the authorities enough customary carved sticks to beat an army of political adversaries. Thursday, he played the stars in Port-Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, speaking in Bislama on the stage of the Melanesian Arts Festival, a huge cultural event that brings together artists from the “Pacific Family” every four years. Before ending up walking 2 kilometers in the magnificent Papuan forest of Varirata, Friday, in the company of the Prime Minister, James Marape, who had made the whole capital Port Moresby proud. Emmanuel Macron was followed by Catherine Colonna, focused on the ongoing crisis in Niger.
“New Imperialisms”
“There are, in the Indo-Pacific, and especially in Oceania, new imperialisms that are appearing and a logic of power that threatens the sovereignty of many States, the smallest, often the most fragile”, said the tenant of the Elysée, in Port-Vila. This imperialism of China and Russia, which he never named, being, in his eyes, ” the basis of a new colonization”.
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