Armed forces have been deployed to protect New Caledonia’s two airports and port and hundreds of French police have descended on the Pacific territory after a third night of violent riots that killed four people. Thousands of people clashed with the police to the point of leading France to declare a state of emergency starting at 5 am yesterday, Wednesday 15 May, and which will last for 12 days. Riots erupted on Tuesday over a bill adopted by the French Parliament in Paris that will allow non-Caledonian French people who have lived in New Caledonia for 10 years to vote in provincial elections. A move that according to some local leaders will dilute the vote of the indigenous Kanak people. France annexed New Caledonia, a collection of islands in the South Pacific with a population of about 270,000, in 1853. It was one of the few colonies, along with Algeria, that France purposely populated with white settlers. The indigenous Kanak people today represent around 40% of the population, while the Europeans are around a quarter: we talk about it with Adriano Favole, full professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Turin and Visiting Professor at the University of New Caledonia. He taught at the University of La Réunion (Indian Ocean) and at the University of French Polynesia. | There are the Olympics and Paris kicks homeless people out of the city. Homeless people evicted and taken out. Politics denies the connection with the event, but the associations are in revolt. France’s top state human rights body said as early as Monday, January 29, it would look into criticism of efforts to relocate the city’s homeless ahead of this year’s Paris Olympics. Some charities have accused local authorities of carrying out a “social cleansing” operation in the capital ahead of the Games, clearing out homeless people, migrant camps and slums. Meanwhile, according to a recent report, almost one million people across Europe are homeless every night. Feantsa, the Federation of national organizations working with the homeless, said the figure, which reflects only the “most visible forms” of homelessness, “highlights the failure of European countries to make housing a fundamental right” and said estimated at at least 895,000 people who are homeless every night, “a population comparable to that of a city like Marseille or Turin”: we talk about it with Alessandra De Stefano, RAI correspondent from Paris and with Raffaele Rauty, former professor of History of sociological thought at the universities of Perugia and Salerno. At the microphones, Laura Silvia Battaglia.
17 May 2024
