Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

Chapter 2.2: Challenges at the National Policy Level
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qualifications and professional skills necessary for upward social mobility.
For secondary education was still monopolized by the French in this
period. By 1953, not a single Kanak had obtained the baccalauréat, the
principal qualification of French high school students. This failure, on
the part of the French, to nurture an indigenous middle class, helps to
explain why an independence movement tool so long to appear in New
Caledonia. The lack of an indigenous elite until the 1970s made French
New Caledonia an anomaly in a largely decolonized world. It also meant
they were not able to benefit from a nickel boom in the period 1969-1974.
In 1976, few Kanaks were employed in the private sector, while 70 percent
of Kanaks were still engaged in subsistence agriculture, with a small cash
surplus.
The Kanak Independence Movement and its Effects on the Nickel
Industry
The Kanak, who had long seen the profits from natural resources leaving
Grande Terre and had become an impoverished minority in their own
land, began to express their agitation with the French colonialists. Such
conditions fuelled the struggle for independence from France, which
started in 1975 and continued in the 1980s with the period of violent
confrontations between Kanak activists, led by the FLNKS, and military
forces.
The resulting Matignon Accord, also devolved more responsibilities to
these regional governments and afforded the underdeveloped Kanak
provinces increased funding with which to manage them. The Accord set
the stage for economic reorganization in New Caledonia, which began
to concentrate more economic authority into the hands of Kanaks. The
Northern Province—politically controlled by an elected Kanak majority—
created a financial arm to buy the mining company, Société Minière du
Pacifique Sud (SMSP) for US$20 million, opening the way to big changes
in the existing structure of the nickel industry.
Once under Kanak control, the Société Miniere du Sud Pacifique made
astonishing progress under its head, Raphael Pidjot, who, before taking
the SMSP post, had been an active independence leader, FLNKS chief
of staff, and later a close associate of the late Kanak leader, Jean-Marie
Tjibaou. SMSP gained a solid reputation, which gave it the clout to go
looking for a partner among the world’s leading mining companies. It
persuaded Falconbridge, then the world’s third largest nickel producer
after Norilsk and Inco, to become a junior partner in a processing plant in