What could reconcile Caledonians, when the painful memory of the violence of the 1980s is still vivid in many families? More than thirty years after the signing of the Matignon agreements in 1988, which brought civil peace to the archipelago, the question will be openly raised for the first time by the State within one of the working groups launched in October 2022 by the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, baptized “Values, common identity and reconciliation”.
If reconciling to build peace may seem obvious, the word “reconciliation” does not appear in the Matignon agreements or in the Nouméa agreement, in 1998, the aim of which is nevertheless to achieve “a community of destiny”. The subject has only been broached very recently, through this think tank set up at the request of the State and made up of around thirty members of civil society, historians and researchers. And the task is immense.
Because in the “land of the unsaid”, an expression created by the New Caledonian historian Louis-José Barbançon, we do not speak of “civil war” to designate the violence of the 1980s, which caused some 90 deaths for a population of around 160,000 inhabitants at the time, but “events”. If the word “forgiveness” is commonly used in Kanak culture, where moments of reconciliation between clans materialize through a “custom of forgiveness”, the word ruffles Caledonians of European origin, who associate it with repentance. “We therefore worked on a common semantics, which allows discussion in a peaceful way”, explains Jean-Pierre Flotat, member of the reflection group and president of the committee of “wise men”, an independent body made up of recognized personalities created in 2018. Exit overly connoted forgiveness, make way for work around the notions of “word”, “truth”, “memory” and “reconciliation”.
Opening of archives
The think tank will soon give way to an association, “but we are still looking for personalities who can reach a consensus, representative of civil society, to carry it”, says Jean-Pierre Flotat. Its mission will be to bring the reconciliation project to life, “by asking, for example, for historians to open the archives of the 1980s. In any case, this is what we, the committee of wise men, recommend. It has just been done for Algeria, it must be made possible here”emphasizes Jean-Pierre Flotat.
“The Nouméa agreement has bet on economic rebalancing, but that does not answer all the problems, we will have to reconcile anyway”, notes for his part Elie Poigoune, a figure in the independence struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, today a tireless activist for dialogue between communities. And Caledonia has only to look to its Pacific neighbors to see the path to be traveled: New Zealanders have celebrated every year for forty years the Treaty of Waitangi, which recognized the right to reparation for the Maori people. .
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