A Kanaky tale of mining skulduggery and environmental courage

AN EXTRAORDINARY story of mining skulduggery and a courageous struggle by indigenous Kanak environmental campaigners has been captured in a poignant new documentary, Cap Bocage – described by the filmmaker as a tale of “when a mountain fell into the sea”.

The culprit in this case is Ballande, one of the oldest nickel mining companies in New Caledonia with a record of three decades laying waste a coastal environment in north-east Grande Terre.

The documentary, made by director Jim Marbook, filmmaker and also a television and screen production lecturer in AUT University’s School of Communication Studies, is an astute piece of cinematography.

Made over a period of seven years, it patiently peels away all the complexities and subtleties of the environmental struggle against a hard-nosed mining company that employs most of the people in the remote Kanak community.

It also tells the story of articulate and charismatic campaigner Florent Eurisouké – who visited Auckland for the global premiere at this week’s New Zealand International Film Festival – and his environmental organisation Mèè Rhaari take on Ballande through boycotts and finally the lawcourts.

Vanuatu PM’s speech spotlights Indonesian Papuan atrocities and Pacific ‘blind eye

Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil (left) with Papuan journalist
Victor Mambor in Noumea. Photo: Tabloid Jubi

By DAVID ROBIE

SHAME on New Zealand politicians. With the courageous exception of the Green Party’s Catherine Delahunty, most of the rest offer a shameful silence over Indonesia’s human rights violations in West Papua.

The Melanesian brothers and sisters of the colonised region, forcibly invaded by Indonesian paratroopers in 1962 and annexed under the fraudulent United Nations “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, have suffered under Indonesian atrocities and brutal rule ever since.

But it took the Prime Minister of Vanuatu,  Moana Carcasses Kalosil, to take the podium at the United Nations Human Rights Council and condemn Jakarta for its past and ongoing crimes in West Papua, before the world took notice.

This not only shames New Zealand, it also exposes most Pacific leaders for their lack of spine over Papuan human rights.

When Vanuatu became independent from the British and French joint colonial condominium, better known as “pandemonium”, in 1980, founding Prime Minister Father Walter Lini was a champion for West Papuan independence.

Struggle for editorial independence at Noumea daily as Kanaks await promised referendum

Protesters supporting editorial independence for Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes say:
"Yes to information - No to propaganda!" Photo: NC Journalists Facebook

FEARS last year that drove journalists working for New Caledonia's only daily newspaper to go on strike have been borne out. At the time, journalists were worried about what would happen when Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes faced resale last April with a loss of journalistic independence.

According to Economist and Pacific Scoop reports, they wanted any new owners to sign an agreement guaranteeing their freedom.

The paper was being bought by New Caledonian business interests with reportedly close links to the territory's pro-French, anti-independence political forces. 

This followed the sale of the paper in December 2012 by its owners, Groupe Hersant Media, to a group including French businessman Bernard Taipe, which snapped up several newspapers across France and its overseas territories.

Since last May 17, when the assets were finally transferred to New Caledonian ownership,  Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes has been controlled by three local business interests.

Ouvéa massacre film gripping tale of betrayal and political opportunism

Kanak militant leader Alphonse Dianou … “played superbly by his cousin Iabe Lapacas”. Image: Rebellion

WHEN THE headlines hit France in April 1988 about the latest saga in “les évènements” down under in New Caledonia, filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz was just 18. He remembers the gritty images of the Gossanna cave siege on television.

Indigenous Kanaks had massacred a quartet of gendarmes with machetes and shotguns and taken 27 others hostage.

There were also false reports of alleged decapitations and rape on Ouvéa in the remote Loyalty Islands.

But 13 years ago, Kassovitz’s father handed him the League of Human Rights report on the cave siege and he read the chilling real story for the first time.

A French military force of some 300 had been deployed in a retaliatory “invasion” of the island and the report detailed atrocities and summary executions that had left 19 Kanak hostage-takers dead in a dawn assault on 5 May 1988.

Kassovitz (La Haîne and Café au Lait) noted then how an elite police counter-terrorism unit negotiator, Captain Philippe Legorjus of the CIGN, was a central character in the disturbing events.

“I knew then there was the material for a wonderful movie and the script was virtually written,” Kassovitz recalled in a Femail interview. “The dramatic structure was in the report of those 10 days.”

Director Mathieu Kassovitz as the negotiator Captain Philippe Legorjus … “inspirational and credible”. Image: Rebellion
 

Many obstacles
On his first trip to Ouvéa to explore the possibility of making the movie, it seemed many obstacles could block getting such a project off the ground.

“Ten years had passed but people were still withdrawn into their grief. The subject was tabu. There had been no closure,” he says.

“There was a lot of religious and political in-fighting within the Kanak community.”

A decade on and 25 film scripts later, against all the odds and being forced to make the film on the French Polynesian island of Anaa instead of Ouvéa, a courageous 136min testimony to the Kanak struggle and search for justice has been finally achieved.

The film was released in France last November with the title L’Order et La Morale – a play on words from the title of the Legorjus autobiography, La Morale et l’Action, and on a statement by the hated Minister of Overseas Territories Bernard Pons, who said rather cynically: “Sometimes some deaths are necessary to uphold order and morality.”

Last night, the gripping docudrama was screened for the first time at the New Zealand International Film Festival – under the English-language title Rebellion, which loses the nuances of the French name.

But the film was never shown in New Caledonia on general release in the largest cinema chain. The Pacific territory's French operator refused to screen it.

Smaller cinemas played the film to packed audiences, both Kanak and French.

Inspirational performances
The movie succeeds with the inspirational and credible performances of both director Kassovitz as the frustrated but professional lead character Legorjus – who tried hard to seek a peaceful solution to the hostage crisis – and the Kanak pro-independence militant leader Alphonse Dianou, played superbly by his cousin Iabe Lapacas, aged only six at the time of the tragedy.

Negotiator Legorjus – who is also taken captive – and Dianou ironically form a trusting bond of fraternity and understanding and the French officer is released in a bid to broker a deal.

But tension builds as the film covers the 10 days of negotiations until the expediency of the power struggle between rightwing Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and socialist President François Mitterrand in Paris over the imminent outcome of the presidential elections takes over. Mitterrand calls for negotiations – but in reality orders the full catastrophe assault on the cave to free the hostages.

He wins the election.

Legorjus feels betrayed and subsequently resigns from the elite force after the assault. Dianou feels betrayed and is horrendously allowed to die from his wounds from the cave firefight.

Other Kanak prisoners were simply killed in cold blood.

And the Kanak community feel betrayed by both Legorjus and the pro-independence FLNKS. This sense of betrayal ultimately led to the assassination of charismatic FLNKS leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and his deputy Yéiwene Yéiwene a year later in a ceremony marking the anniversary of the martyrs.

History lesson
Pastor Djubelly Wea, whose character features in the film giving Legorjus a Kanak history lesson while manacled to a coconut tree, was the assassin. He never forgave the FLNKS leadership for failing to negotiate on their behalf. (Although the FLNKS villain portrayed in the film is Franck Wahuzue).

Wea (played by relative Macki Wea) in turn was gunned down by Tjibaou’s bodyguard.

Having reported on the Kanak independence struggle for several years, watching Rebellion was an emotional rollercoaster for me. (In fact, I shared a hotel room in Manila at a “peace brigade” conference with Wea just months before the assassination).

Gossanna cave was tabu – and the film portrays traditional “custom” and beliefs very evocatively. In Kanak tradition, a promise made face-to-face is never broken.

Legorjus promised that the militants that they would live, a pledge that his superiors sabotaged for political capital. 

I don’t believe the militants ever intended to harm their captives – they were simply negotiating leverage after things went wrong in the Fayaoué hostage-taking. In fact, as portrayed in the film, the hostages were about to be freed anyway.

At the time, I wrote an account in my book Blood on their Banner – the blood being that symbolised by the Kanak flag as being shed by the martyrs of more than a century of French rule.

• Read the full article here at Pacific Media Centre Online
• The need to remember the Ouvéa tragedy 
• Gossanna cave - the hostage site [video] 
• Top protest videos

The Ouvéa massacre – film Rebellion sheds new light

FLASHBACK TO 1988: Excerpt from  David Robie’s 1989 book Blood on their Banner about the cave massacre of 19 Kanak militants by French troops at dawn on 5 May 1988 on Ouvéa in the Loyalty Islands:

Leaders of the [pro-independence] FLNKS immediately challenged the official version of the attack. Léopold Jorédie issued a statement in which he questioned how the “Ouvéa massacre left 19 dead among the nationalists and no one injured” and the absence of bullet marks on the trees and empty cartridges on the ground at the site”. [Yéiwene] Yéiwene insisted that at no time did the kidnappers intend to kill the hostages – “this whole massacre was engineered by [then Overseas Territories Minister Bernard] Pons who knew very well there was never any question of killing the hostages”.  [Nidoish] Naisseline also condemned the action: “Pons and Chirac have behaved like assassins.” - Blood on their Banner, p. 277.

REBELLION [L’ordre et la morale] 2012:
In his most visceral and impassioned outing since 1995’s La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz dramatises the extraordinary French military response to a New Caledonia hostage-taking in 1988. Starring as Philippe Legorjus, a captain in an elite counter-terrorist division hastily despatched to the Pacific territory, Kassovitz leads a uniformly excellent cast. Upon arrival, he discovers that the French army has been deployed too. Legorjus’ efforts to achieve a resolution through negotiation with the indigenous Kanak independence group clash with the blunter approach of the army and a different agenda from above.
 
His attempts to earn the trust of the hostage takers’ leader [Alphonse  Dianou], depicted in scenes of searing intensity, are constantly imperilled by a political battle playing out in Paris. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac is challenging François Mitterrand  for the presidency, and the distant conflict has become a central issue. Chirac is determined that the rebellion be quelled – by whatever means. And time is running out.
 
Based on the Legorjus memoir, Rebellion  has all the seat-edge of a thriller, buttressed by a real political heft. It delivers a gripping illustration of the bloody, expedient and far-reaching potential impact of colonial powers’ internal political squabbles. – NZ International Film Festival, July 2012

Rebellion is perhaps to the Kanak struggle what Balibo (portraying the killing of the Balibo Five journalists and Roger East) is to East Timor in popularising Pacific pro-independence campaigns on a global stage.  Screening at the NZ International Film Festival at the Civic, Auckland, on Monday, July 23, at 8.45pm.

• Blood on their Banner: Nationalist struggles in the South Pacific
• Other David Robie books

Goro mining struggle now on mission to Canada

Clashes in New Caledonia persist over nickel mining and coral reefs as indigenous Kanaks campaign for customary authorities to have more say in decision-making over resource development, says an environmental campaigner. Marina Kahlemu, former president and now secretary of the Corail Vivant environmental group, says the struggle to save the reef is critical in the face of major mining projects. She talked about her people's struggle on a visit to the Pacific Media Centre this week with Canterbury University internship student journo Yvonne Sargayoos. Marina is on her way to Quebec where the next stage of the campaign to have New Caledonia's coral reef classified by UNESCO as a world heritage site is set. Groups like Corail Vivant and the more militant Rheebu Nuu have been at the forefront of the struggle. AUT film maker Jim Marbrook is working on a doco about the dilemmas of nickel mining and economic development and protecting the fragile environment. From what we've seen of the rushes so far, Jim has a compelling and doco in the making - one that indigenous campaigners protecting a way of life will find inspiring. Photo: Marina Kahlemu ... campaigning to save New Caledonia's reefs. Photo: Jim Marbrook. Video: Jeffery Zweig at a meeting earlier this year planning to halt the pipeline work.

• Reef campaign steps up in bid for world heritage status
• Goro Nickel - non au tuyau
• Corail Vivant
• Rheebu Nuu