A step towards freedom in Kanaky

Last year, New Caledonia burned after colonial France attempted to renege on a hard-won decolonisation deal and unilaterally impose constitutional changes without the consent of Kanaks. But now, after months of negotiations, France has finally consented to a further devolution of power, making Kanaky a state within France:

One of the most notable developments in terms of future status for New Caledonia is the notion of a "State of New Caledonia", under a regime that would maintain it a part of France, but with a dual citizenship (France, New Caledonia).

[...]

The text also envisages a gradual transfer of key powers currently held by France (such as international relations), but would not include portfolios such as defence, currency or justice.

In diplomacy, New Caledonia would be empowered to conduct its own affairs, but "in respect of France's international commitments and vital interests."

[...]

On police and public order matters, New Caledonia would be entitled to create its own provincial and traditional security forces, in addition to national French law enforcement agencies.

Its not independence. But its getting close, and it will allow the people of Kanaky to run their own country in their own way. And from here, its a very small change to full independence, or being an "associated state" of France.

Whether the deal will stick remains to be seen. But on that front, there's an obvious question: when will France release the political prisoners it took hostage?

Colonial oppression in Kanaky

How does France deal with opponents of its colonisation of the Pacific? Arrest them and deport them to France to face prosecution in a foreign court:

A group of pro-independence leaders charged with allegedly organising protests that turned into violent unrest in New Caledonia last month was indicted on Saturday and have been transferred to mainland France where they will be held in custody pending their trial.

Christian Téin and ten others were taken by French security forces during a dawn operation in Nouméa on Wednesday 19 June.

[...]

On behalf of CCAT, Téin organised a series of marches and protests, mainly peaceful, in New Caledonia, to oppose plans by the French government to change eligibility rules for local elections, which the pro-independence movement said would further marginalise indigenous Kanak population votes.

There are strong echoes here with France's treatment of Tahitian independence leader Pouvanaa a Oopa: they charged him with arson following public protests, imprisoned him in France, and forbade him to return to his homeland. Sixty years later they finally admitted that the entire thing was a stitch up, based on fabricated evidence, and his conviction was quashed (in the interim he had been pardoned after a demand from Polynesia's pro-independence government, then elected to the French Senate). And that's how France deals with democratic dissent in its colonies: with the tactics of an oppressive colonial empire.

In Kanaky, the arrests and deportations have (predictably) led to more rioting - it turns out that people don't like their leaders being kidnapped to a foreign country. And of course its difficult to have proper negotiations when one party is arresting and jailing the people it is meant to be negotiating with. The arrests may make France feel powerful and in control. But in practice, they've made things worse. If France really wanted a peaceful solution, they wouldn't have done it.

A tyrannical move in France

The internet is how people communicate now, and social media has become a natural platform for sharing dissent and organising protests. As a result, one of the first things tyrants do when facing mass opposition is shut it down, with blocks on specific platforms, or just a system-wide blackout. We've seen such attacks on the public's right to free expression in places like Iran, Egypt, Myanmar, and India. And now, faced with widespread protests against police murder and institutional racism, Emmanuel Macron is suggesting that France follow suit:

Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest.

Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a “general blackout” but instead the “occasional and temporary” suspension of platforms.

The president’s comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week.

“We need to think about how young people use social networks, in the family, at school, the interdictions there should be … and when things get out of hand we may have to regulate them or cut them off,” Macron told a meeting of more than 250 mayors, whose municipalities were hit by the violence, on Tuesday.

Because obviously, only "young people" - non-pensioners? - use the internet nowdays...

This is simply not what democracies do. Instead, it is the action of a tyranny. Sadly, it seems like France is following Britain towards authoritarianism. The problem for Macron is that a government which walks away from democracy forfeits its legitimacy; if he behaves like a tyrant, there's no basis for complaint if he suffers a tyrant's fate.

Solar panels on car parks are a no-brainer

The Guardian reports that France is going to require all large car-parks to be covered by solar panels:

All large car parks in France will be covered by solar panels under new legislation approved as part of president Emmanuel Macron’s renewable energy drive.

Legislation approved by the French Senate this week requires existing and new car parks with space for at least 80 vehicles to be covered by solar panels.

The owners of car parks with between 80 and 400 spaces have five years to comply with the measures, while operators of those with more than 400 will have just three years. At least half of the area of the larger sites must be covered by solar panels.

The French government believes the measure could generate up to 11 gigawatts of power.

This seems like a total no-brainer. At the moment car parks are big, empty spaces which just turn solar energy into heat. Solar panels will provide shade for users, while turning that energy into usable, zero-emissions electricity.

Its an obvious measure to adopt here. But we should also be going further and requiring solar panels to be installed on all large buildings which receive decent sunlight. Malls and warehouses are obvious targets, since they have large roof areas. But ultimately we should be amending the building code to require them to be installed on new homes, and retrofitted to old ones (starting with rental properties). We're going to need a lot more power to decarbonise industry and transport, and to kick fossil fuels from our electricity network. This is one obvious way to do it.

Two elections

There were two elections over the weekend. In France, neo-liberal Emmanuel Macron managed to defeat neo-fascist Marine Le Pen, which should be a relief to everyone (especially given what a le Pen victory would have meant for Ukraine). But its hardly a particularly inspiring choice, effectively just a question of which flavour of racist you prefer, and the fact it was the second such contest raises questions about how long people will be willing to keep voting for the lesser of two evils rather than just stay at home. France's multi-round system is to blame here, and replacing it with a simple one-round preferential vote seems like it would help voters avoid disgust-fatigue.

But it was a happier story in Solvenia, where incumbent prime Minister Janez Janša, who was explicitly modelling himself on Trump and Orbán seems to have lost to green-liberal Robert Golob. Golob's Freedom Movement wants to close coal mines and other major polluters and protect social services, which sounds pretty good. Slovenia's Social Democrats have already announced they will support Golob as Prime Minister, so it looks like they're going to get a green-centre-left government.

The New Caledonia referendum

This weekend, France will be holding an independence referendum in New Caledonia. Normally this would be something to celebrate, part of the decolonisation process which should hopefully result in a peaceful transition to self-rule. Except that France is holding this referendum against the wishes of New Caledonia's indigenous people, who have called it a "declaration of war".

The problem is timing. Holding a referendum in the middle of a pandemic is obviously suboptimal. Holding a referendum in the middle of a pandemic which has killed more than 200 people (and overwhelmingly Kanaks) in a culture with a prolonged mourning period is even worse. The pro-independence parties have asked that the referendum be delayed. When that was refused, they have decided to boycott it. The outcome will be a foregone conclusion, but also not remotely representative of the wishes of New Caledonia's people.

Because of this, our Pacific neighbours have been pushing for a delay. Today, the Melanesian Spearhead Group Secretariat (representing Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and PNG) called for its members to refuse to recognise the result. The obvious question for Aotearoa is whether we will support them? Does the New Zealand government support actual decolonisation and self-determination in the Pacific, or a continuation of colonial rule?

Climate Change: Another legal victory

Across the world climate change activists have been going to court, seeking to make their governments act to protect future generations. And hot on the heels of victories in the Netherlands and Germany, there's been another one in France:

A French court has ordered the government to make up for its failure to meet its own greenhouse gas reduction targets, saying it needed to “repair” the emissions overshoots.

Four NGOs backed by a petition signed by 2.3 million people took the French state to court in 2019 in what they called “the case of the century”, asking the judges to rule on the government’s alleged climate target shortcomings between 2015 and 2018.

The Paris administrative court on Thursday found France emitted 15m tonnes of CO2-equivalent beyond its targets over that period.

It ordered the prime minister, Jean Castex, and his government to take measures “to repair the damage” caused by the failure to compensate for the excess emissions.

The court gave a deadline of 31 December 2022 to set things right, leaving the methods to achieve this up to the government.

The obvious method is for France to emit 15 million tons less next year, or buy 15 millions tons of EU-ETS credits and shred them. At current prices the latter would cost them around 900 million Euro. Which means that the court-ordered penalties for failure of 78 million Euro every six months are an order of magnitude too small to provide an incentive.

Note that Aotearoa's climate law specifically forbids this. Our government refuses to be accountable under the law if it fails to meet its obligations. Which is effectively a declaration of criminal intent.

AUKUS has consequences

Last week Australia announced a new security deal with the UK and US which would see it abandon its plans to buy conventional submarines from France and instead acquire nuclear-powered submarines from one of its new partners. France is pretty pissed about this - they were completely blindsided, and the submarine deal was worth tens of billions of Euros - and have threatened consequences for australia's betrayal. They've already withdrawn their ambassador (a fairly major step between ostensibly friendly countries), and now the other show is dropping: they're going to veto Australia getting a free trade deal with the EU:

France is seeking to enlist European Union support to delay a planned EU-Australia trade deal, as part of a plan to punish Australia for what it regards as serial deceit and subterfuge by Canberra before it cancelled the contract for 12 attack-class French submarines.

[...]

The EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, weighed into the diplomatic row on Monday, saying France had been treated unacceptably by the US, Australia and the UK and that many questions remained unanswered. EU foreign ministers were due to discuss the crisis on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York.

The next round of EU-Australia trade talks – the 12th – are due next month, and it remains to be seen how deeply other EU states wish to become embroiled in the fallout from the French loss of a commercial contract.

The French position makes sense. Why would you want to deal with a country which has just proven its duplicity? And the EU's qualified majority voting rule means they're not going to need too many friends to assemble a blocking majority if they really want to screw things up.

Climate Change: A legal victory in France

A few years ago, people launched a series of high-profile court cases against governments over their inaction on climate change. Another one of these has just been successful, with a French court ruling that the French government has not done enough and is liable to damages for failing to meet its commitments:

A Paris court has convicted the French state of failing to address the climate crisis and not keeping its promises to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

In what has been hailed as a historic ruling, the court found the state guilty of “non-respect of its engagements” aimed at combating global warming.

[...]

The court ruled that compensation for “ecological damage” was admissible, and declared the state “should be held liable for part of this damage if it had failed to meet its commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

It did not uphold a claim for symbolic compensation, saying compensation should be made “in kind”, with damages awarded “only if the reparation measures were impossible or insufficient”.

However, the court ruled that the applicants were entitled to seek compensation in kind for the “ecological damage caused by France’s failure to comply with the targets it had set for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It said this needed further investigation and gave the state two months to respond.

It awarded each organisation a symbolic €1 for “moral prejudice”, saying the state’s failure to honour its climate commitments was “detrimental to the collective interest”.

Which means France is now on the hook for its proportionate share of all the damage that will be caused by climate change. Hopefully that will sharpen their minds about actually doing something about it.

Protest works

For the past month France has been brought to a standstill, as members of the yellow vest movement have protested against inequality, the cost of living, and president Emmanuel Macron. And today, a week after serious riots in Paris, Macron has made concessions:

Emmanuel Macron has bowed to pressure from the street to announce a catalogue of emergency measures aimed at pacifying the gilets jaunes after weeks of civil unrest in France.

In a long-awaited address on primetime television, the president tried to talk the protesters out of further action, promising a rise in the minimum wage and tax concessions.

In a mea culpa, Macron said he had heard and understood protesters’ anger and indignation, which he said was “deep and in many ways legitimate”.

[...]

To help struggling workers, he said the government had been ordered to introduce “concrete measures” from 1 January, including increasing the minimum wage by €100 (£90) a month. Overtime would be exempt from tax and social charges, and a planned tax on pensions under €2,000 a month would be cancelled. All employers “who can” were asked to give workers a tax-free bonus at the end of the year.

The question is whether he has offered enough. Macron pointedly refused to roll back his tax cuts for the rich, and that was one of the key issues people have been protesting over. But it will also be interesting to see if the yellow vests listen. They're a leaderless movement, which means both no leaders to sell them out, and no-one who can negotiate on their behalf, so it really is going to be a matter of whether the people protesting decide to keep going in the hope of getting something better. Or just taking revenge on the political system which ignores them.

Non

Voters in New Caledonia went to the polls yesterday in an independence referendum, and voted 56-44 to remain a colony of France. Which is what happens when you ship in colonists for generations and make the indigenous inhabitants a minority in their own country. At the same time, it is a much narrower result than anyone was expecting, meaning there is hope for a reversal. The Noumea Accord allows for future referenda, and the pro-independence parties are now likely to push for one. But no matter which way the territory votes, the situation where colonists enjoy a first-world lifestyle while the indigneous people are left in poverty can not continue. If France wants New Caledonia to stay, it needs to deliver to all its people.

Climate change: Ending oil

Fossil fuels are the primary cause of climate change. A significant chunk of those fossil fuels are burned in cars, so if we want to beat climate change, we need to stop doing that. And today, the French government signalled that it would do just that, announcing that it would ban the sale of petrol and diesel-fuelled cars by 2040:

Nicolas Hulot, the country’s new ecology minister, said: “We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040.” Hulot added that the move was a “veritable revolution”.

He said it would be a “tough” objective for carmakers but France’s industry was well equipped to make the switch. “Our [car]makers have enough ideas in the drawer to nurture and bring about this promise ... which is also a public health issue.”

This is exactly what governments need to do to end the oil age and stop us destroying the world: send a credible signal to fossil fuel-intensive industries that their era is over, giving them time to come up with solutions. Though there are real questions as to whether France's 2040 target is ambitious enough - both in terms of what needs to be done to decarbonise the economy, and because in France, electric cars will likely have taken over well before then. But hopefully, they'll find they're able to advance their deadline by five to ten years, depending on how well their car-makers rise to the challenge.

The rest of the EU is likely to rapidly follow suit on this. Norway has already set a 2025 target (though they will allow hybrids), and Germany is considering a 2030 target. And with major car manufacturers giving up on fossil fuels, governments might be behind the curve.

It does raise new problems: how to power all of those cars without burning fossil fuels in power plants. In France, their answer is probably to burn uranium instead (they seem quite happy to run the risk of poisoning themselves and their neighbours). Though at the rate solar and wind are going, it might be less of a problem than expected.

Meanwhile, there is the obvious question: where's New Zealand's target? Is our government also going to commit to ending the age of oil, and by doing so, spark the necessary infrastructure changes? Or are we going to leave it all up to the market again - and essentially commit to failure?

New Fisk

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France’s unresolved Algerian war sheds light on the Paris attack

Paris

Over the weekend we were all horrified by the terrorist attacks in Paris. 132 people are dead (so far), over 350 injured. ISIS has already claimed responsibility, and made it clear why: because France is bombing them in Iraq and Syria.

The deliberate targeting of civilians is a violation of international law and a war crime - something western nations largely observe in the breach - and those responsible should be held to account in The Hague for that crime. But still: war is not a one-way relationship. When the citizens of France allowed their government to go to war in Iraq and Syria, they invited retaliation. And over the weekend, they received it. We've got used in the west to thinking that war is cost free, that the jets go out and rain down their bombs and its other people's children who die. We're wrong. When you try and kill someone, you invite them to kill you back. And they might not adhere to the rules we've forced our governments to pay lip service to.

Meanwhile, France's response to these attacks is more bombing, another invitation. And so round and round it fucking goes...

The other expected response - demanded but not yet implemented - is a further crackdown on French Muslims, with the usual arrests, trials, deportation, spying and abuses. This would be the height of stupidity. France's Muslim community are as appalled by these murders as everybody else. But nothing changes minds like oppression, and history abounds with examples of how government "anti-terror" campaigns turned sympathetic populations into bitter enemies and drove rather than prevented terrorist recruitment. The Fenian Brotherhood fed off British oppression in the wake of its risings, the British lost Ireland because they arrested and executed so many people after the Easter Rising, and (more recently) Australia now has a problem with homegrown Islamic terrorism because they set out to prevent one. France has not yet made this mistake. Sadly, given their past behaviour and present oppression of Muslims, its likely they will. And once again, it will be civilians who will pay the price for government stupidity.

Spying on their allies again

First the NSA was caught spying on Germany. This time, its France:

The French president, François Hollande, has called an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council for Wednesday morning after revelations that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012. According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.

The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, Socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.

The recorded conversations, which were handled by the summary services unit at the NSA, were said to reveal few state secrets but show clear evidence of the extent of American spying on countries considered allies. WikiLeaks documents suggest that other US spy targets included French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the United States.

“The documents contain the ‘selectors’ from the target list, detailing the cell phone numbers of numerous officials in the Elysée up to and including the direct cell phone of the president,” a report of the taps published in the French media revealed.

The NSA justifies its existence by saying it spies on the US's enemies. Instead, it seems to spend most of its time spying on their allies, gathering information which isn't about defence, but advancing economic interests and global prestige. In the process it sours those relationships and makes it clear that it is the US which is everyone's enemy. Americans might want to consider whether that sort of spying is really in their interests.

More blowback

The latest NSALeaks. First, the NSA spied on France, tapping and recording tens of millions of phone calls a month:

According to the documents retrieved from the NSA database by its ex-analyst, telephone communications of French citizens are intercepted on a massive scale. Le Monde has been able to obtain access to documents which describe the techniques used to violate the secrets or simply the private life of French people. Some elements of information about this espionage have been referred to by Der Speigel and The Guardian, but others are, to date, unpublished.

Amongst the thousands of documents extracted from the NSA by its ex-employee there is a graph which describes the extent of telephone monitoring and tapping (DNR – Dial Number Recognition) carried out in France. It can be seen that over a period of thirty days – from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70,3 million recordings of French citizens' telephone data were made by the NSA. This agency has several methods of data collection. According to the elements obtained by Le Monde, when a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target – or the meta-data.

And they hacked the email of Mexican President Felipe Calderon:

Der Spiegel said in May 2010, an NSA division known as "Tailored Access Operations" reported it had gained access to then-president Calderon's email account, and turned his office into a "lucrative" source of information.

It said details of the alleged NSA hacking of Calderon's account were contained in a document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden's leaked information has prompted angry recriminations against Washington in Latin America, particularly Brazil.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA succeeded in hacking a central server in the network of the Mexican presidency that was also used by other members of Calderon's cabinet, yielding a trove of information on diplomatic and economic matters.

Both revelations are causing significant diplomatic blowback for the US. And no wonder - these countries are US allies. And yet the US is spying on them as if they are enemies. And the US's only response is that its all legal (which rather misses the point).

Just another example of how US spying harms US interests...

The French panopticon

So, the French have a digital panopticon too:

France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

The data is stored on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the DGSE intelligence service, the paper says.

The operation is "outside the law, and beyond any proper supervision", Le Monde says.

And this isn't just an abstract thing - they're spying on us as well as their own citizens.

But the real problem is that its another country we thought was a modern democracy which actually turns out to be a totalitarian surveillance state. Apparently the only difference between "the west" and the Stasi now is that we have better technology and are a little more secretive about it.