French President Emmanuel Macron's office on Wednesday said a state of emergency would be declared after at least three people were killed in New Caledonia amid violent protests that erupted over the passage of a constitutional reform that angered pro-independence forces.
"The president has requested that the decree aimed at declaring a state of emergency in New Caledonia be included on the agenda" of a cabinet meeting this afternoon, the Elysée Palace said in a statement.
Macron warned that any further violence would be met with an "unyielding" response and called for a resumption of political dialogue to end the unrest. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said France was dispatching security reinforcements that would arrive in the next few hours.
The unrest flared after French lawmakers approved a bill extending voting rights in provincial elections to residents arriving from mainland France – a change critics fear could marginalise Indigenous people and benefit pro-France politicians.
Following lengthy and at times tense debates, the National Assembly in Paris adopted the reform shortly after midnight, by 351 votes to 153.
French President Emmanuel Macron cancelled a planned visit to Normandy to chair cabinet-level national security talks on the crisis Wednesday morning, his office said.
Protests turned violent Monday night, with shots fired at security forces, vehicles torched and shops looted in the worst unrest the French overseas territory has seen since the 1980s.
In response, authorities deployed a heavy security contingent, imposed a curfew, banned public gatherings and closed the main airport.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said Wednesday that authorities were yet to establish the "circumstances" that led to one person being shot dead overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, and that dozens of homes and businesses had been torched during rioting linked to anger over the constitutional reforms.
French authorities in the territory said that more than 130 people have been arrested and more than 300 have been injured since Monday in the violence.
"More than 130 arrests have been made and several dozen rioters have been taken into custody and will be brought before the courts," the French High Commission of the Republic in New Caledonia said in a statement early Wednesday morning.
Describing the "serious public disturbances" as ongoing, the High Commission decried widespread looting and torching of businesses and public property, including schools.
It added that classes will remain scrapped until further notice and the main airport shut to commercial flights.
Dispute over voting rights
Macron has been seeking to reassert his country's importance in the Pacific region, where China and the United States are vying for influence but France has a strategic footprint through its overseas territories, which include New Caledonia and French Polynesia.
Lying between Australia and Fiji, New Caledonia is one of several French territories spanning the globe from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to the Pacific that remain part of France in the post-colonial era.
In the Noumea Accord of 1998, France vowed to gradually give more political power to the Pacific island territory of nearly 300,000 people.
Under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, all rejecting independence. But independence retains support, particularly among the Indigenous Kanak people.
The Noumea Accord has also meant that New Caledonia's voter lists have not been updated since 1998 – meaning that island residents who arrived from mainland France or elsewhere in the past 25 years do not have the right to take part in provincial polls.
The French government has branded the exclusion of one out of five people from voting as "absurd" while separatists fear that expanding voter lists would benefit pro-France politicians and reduce the weight of the Kanaks.
'Determination of our young'
Simmering protests over the planned changes to voter eligibility took a violent turn on Monday night, with groups of young masked or hooded demonstrators taking over several roundabouts and confronting police, who responded with non-lethal rounds.
One business group said around 30 shops, factories and other sites in and around the capital Noumea had been set ablaze, while an AFP journalist saw burned-out cars and the smoking remains of tyres and wooden pallets littering the streets.
Firefighters said they had received around 1,500 calls overnight and responded to 200 blazes.
Even after the curfew was put in place on Tuesday, there were acts of vandalism overnight, with the store of a major sports brand ransacked.
A prison rebellion involving some 50 detainees in the Camop-Est facility subsided after security forces regained control, local officials said.
Pro-independence party leader Daniel Goa asked the youths to "go home", and condemned the looting.
But he added: "The unrest of the last 24 hours reveals the determination of our young people to no longer let France take control of them."
The main figure of the non-independence camp, former minister Sonia Backes, denounced what she described as the anti-White racism of demonstrators who burned down the house of her father, a man in his 70s who was exfiltrated by the security forces.
"If he was not attacked because he was my father, he was at least attacked because he was White," she told BFMTV.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
