Yanis Darras
modified to
9:34 a.m., May 20, 2024
Alain Bauer, professor of criminology at the national conservatory of arts and crafts, was the guest of La Grande interview Europe 1-CNews. At the microphone of Laurence Ferrari, he returned to the Caledonian situation by calling on the government to abandon the unfreezing of the electorate as quickly as possible, at the risk of having “a new little Algeria”.
Damaged cars, burned stores, violent clashes between demonstrators and the police… For a week, New Caledonia has been on fire. The territory located 17,000 kilometers from Paris is facing serious riots, a first in more than 35 years. At issue: the thawing of the electorate for local provincial elections. Currently, one in five inhabitants of the archipelago cannot vote in these elections. To be able to be registered there, you had to be present on the island for at least 10 years, during the Nouméa Accords in 1998. The descendants of voters registered on the lists can also vote in the provincial elections intended to elect representatives of the local Assemblies and the Caledonian Congress.
Invited this Monday morning on the set of La Grande interview Europe 1-CNews, Alain Bauer is particularly critical of the government’s management of the New Caledonia issue. “Restoring order is a necessity, if only to allow all the inhabitants of New Caledonia to find food, medicine, care and to allow free movement. But it cannot be done as usual. preliminary, as if we first had the stick and in the distance a possible carrot”, he explains at the microphone of Laurence Ferrari.
Do not hinder the irreversible process
For the criminology professor, the government’s method is “setting all those overseas on fire.” The presidents of four overseas regions (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana and Reunion) have called for the reform to be immediately withdrawn so as not to worsen the situation, while French Polynesia is closely following the case of its Caledonian neighbor.
“If we do not move forward intelligently on this matter, the State is taking a major risk, that of creating a little Algeria. It is in the general interest of the State that the President of the Republic, this Monday evening, decides to entrust a conciliation mission to the level of former Prime Ministers, under the aegis of the current Prime Minister, in order to move forward intelligently on a solution which resembles, according to what all the locals say, a sort of sovereignty association such as General de Gaulle himself had foreseen”, affirms Alain Bauer. The latter recalls that since the Nouméa Accords in 1998, the process of decolonization of the archipelago is irreversible and must therefore be completed.