“Only the struggle counts … death is nothing.” Eloi Machoro – ‘the Che Guevara of the Pacific’ – shortly before he was gunned down by a French sniper on 12 January 1985.

Eloi Machoro, one of the leaders of the newly-formed FLNKS – today the main organising movement for New Caledonia’s Kanak people – slowly bled to death as the gendarmes moved in. The assassination is an apt metaphor for what France is doing to the Kanak people of New Caledonia and has been doing to them for 150 years.

As the New Zealand and Australian media fuss and bother over tourists stranded in New Caledonia, the Kanaks are gripped in an existential struggle with a heavyweight European power determined to keep the archipelago firmly under the control of Paris. We need better, deeper reporting from our media – one that provides history and context.

According to René Guiart, a pro-independence writer, moments before the sniper’s bullets struck, Machoro had emerged from the farmhouse where he and his comrades were surrounded. I translate:

“I want to speak to the Sous-Prefet! [French administrator],” Machoro shouted. “You don’t have the right to arrest us. Do you hear? Call the Sous-Prefet!”

The answer came in two bullets. Once dead, Machoro’s comrades inside the house emerged to receive a beating from the gendarmes. Standing over Machoro’s body a member of the elite mobile tactical unit said: “He wanted war, he got it!”

Days earlier David Robie, a New Zealand journalist, had photographed Machoro shortly before he smashed a ballot box with an axe and burned the ballots inside. “It was,” said Robie, “symbolic of the contempt Kanaks had for what they saw as the French’s manipulated voting system.”

Every year on 12 January on the anniversary of Machoro’s killing people gather at his grave. Engraved in stone are the words: “On tue le révolutionnaire mais on ne tue pas ses idées.” You can kill the revolutionary but you can’t........

© Pearls and Irritations