Kanaky pour la Kanak!

Photo: Ile Ouvéa, Nouvelle-Calédonie, April 2018/AFP.


Comrades,

I note that the wildly popularly elected President of the Republic of France, Emmanuel Macron, has embarked on a Tour du Monde.
And who can blame him trying to escape that stinking old dump Paris, where he's not that extremely popular at all at the minute, almost exactly a year after his extraordinary landslide victory in the Presidential election.
The natives are restless, as usual.
He's got the workers offside with his proposed labour law reforms - they're just not having it, never will - with the most militant union, the train drivers leading the way with mass anti-Macron rallies and pulling the loco's off the tracks, and bomb throwing students from the most prestigious lycée chucking Molotov cocktails at the riot cops
Macron's probably thinking that generations of French President's have tried and failed with the labour laws, and what day of the week is there when there isn't a violent demo somewhere in Paris?
So, he pops on over to D.C. to see the DJ!
A State Visit, including a State Dinner of course, no less.
It's customary for French President's to be offered a State Dinner in any new US Presidency [you know, the Statue of Liberty thing and all that], and even though the Trumpotus is the first in a century not to hold an official chow-down in his first year in office, Macron could hardly refuse, could he?
Not with a goat's cheese gateau, with tomato jam, buttermilk biscuit crumbles and young variegated lettuces, followed by a rack of spring lamb with Carolina gold rice jambalaya and burnt cipollini soubise, with nectarine tart and crème fraîche ice cream to finish, served on the "Clinton China", accompanied by vintage Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Oregon and a Napa Valley demi-sec crémant sparkler for desert and the after dinner entertainment provided by the Washington National Opera.
The pundits say Macron was in town to try and cut a new deal on a keeping the Iran contra-deal alive...no nukes, no sanctions...nothing went down there...shit happens.
But the pair do certainly make an odd couple; a suave, highly educated and sophisticated 40-year-old Frenchman embracing a 71-year-old crass vainglorious ignoramus, but really, Macron was just there to play The Donald like a harp.
Never mind that DJ! was trying to brush some typically French dandruff off Emmanuel's immaculate shoulder - Trumpy was just trying to help.
Then he took his peculiar accent of fluent English to Congress, and later told people that the wildly oscillating flip-flopping completely-hopeless foreign policy being pursued by Le Imbecile was "insane" and "ridiculous", cleverly parroting Trump's own words, as he departed.
The Kid President reckons it was a good first stop as he tries to position himself as the new Leader of The Free World, now that Pax Americana is dead, buried & cremated.
There's no election for it of course, just a matter of grabbing enormous power by both hands when you see it.

Macron is due in Australie next week [May 1-3], for another State Visit, so he will do the required pleasantries with the assorted grandees & dignitaries around Canberra, but you'd reckon he'd also want to have a little lookie at how the $US50B project to supply the RAN with short-fin barracuda submarines [or whatever they're called] is getting along.
His scientists and engineers have worked the things out, but gawd help 'em trying to communicate the idea to Adelaide shipbuilders - who've been accused in the past of not being able to be trusted to "build a canoe" - given the management of the 25 year program is apparently "incredibly dense", according to the submersibles folk in Cherbourg who've got the contract.
They'd rather build them there, but that's a very long time to sort out any bugs, and tack on enormously expensive "variations" and over-runs.
Politics? Bah-humbug.
They can even nuclear-arm these subs if you want.

Then the President drops in to say bonjour and wave a happy wave in the colony of Nouvelle-Calédonie, another place close to my heart with a long-running independence insurgency.
Macron is making a very brave step indeed by going on May 5 to Ouvéa - an island way out there in the remote Loyalty Islands north of the Grande Terre - to mark the 30th anniversary of the killing of 19 militant Kanaks that prompted the signing of the outrageous 1988 Matignon Accords a few months later [a one-sided peace deal if ever there was one - dangle the carrot of promised independence sometime down the track as Paris's leisure while continuing to screw over the original inhabitants].
There were widespread claims that the gendarmerie murdered execution-style some of the insurgents of the Kanak and Socialist Liberation Movement in Ouvéa after they had released their hostages and given up, in an act of utter utter French bastardry that's still a weeping sore to this day.
It was a very tawdry affair all 'round with 25 people from both sides dead.
Why is he going?
Apparently, he wants to see the graves.
Is Macron going to say "sorry"?
Surely, Non?

Three decades on, and there are still fringes of armed extremists in both the pro and anti-independence camps who won't have anything to do with each other except down the barrel of a gun, and Manuel Valls - a former PM under Hollande - has been in Noumea for weeks now trying to get the two sides who occupy the the middle ground talking, without much success, because they're both hopelessly splintered.
The fact that the journey has taken 30 tortuous years - 30 years! - to get to a binding independence vote, le référendum sur l'indépendance, which has now been set in stone for Nov. 4 this year, is simply astonishing.
He wants to cast himself as a peacemaker - The Kid President does not want to be seen interfering with the referendum in any way, [apart from this casual goodwill tour, of course] - but that's only because he knows well enough it's very likely to be a NO vote...a "stay in France" result.
I went to Noumea five years ago, and the Kanaks had occupied a small corner of central park Place des Cocotiers and built a stockade-like fence around the patch with pointed sharp poles, and were protest marching down the main drag every day for independence, but I saw more French flags flying in Noumea than I have ever seen anywhere else in the world, even in France itself.
They might as well hang THIS IS FRANCE! banners from the ornate art deco balconies, and probably will.
And there's yr dichotomy.
With the electorate roughly split between those who identify as Kanak or other South Sea Islander, and those who are European, and very largely French by descendance - and where French is the lingua franca - it's expected the status quo will remain by a fair majority after the vote; to have their Deputies and Senators in Paris left alone, and hope to continue to keep the Kanaks quiet with desultory hand-outs while ripping their nickel out of the ground as fast they possibly can.
Unlike every other French colony, from Africa to Indo-China, that were just given up as a bad loss, the French really still want New Caledonia; bugger the locals, it's a huge tract of real estate and the original colonists came from prison stock and Frenchmen who were sent there in exile - in other words crims and cowboys, the detested Caldoche - and to this day robber land barons and horses and beef cattle range far and wide over the 400km long island, while the Kanaks live in poverty-stricken villages.
The last colony the Frogs begrudgingly gave up, along with the Poms, was the Condominium of the New Hebrides [now Vanuatu], in 1980, so little wonder the bureaucrats in Paris - almost 17,000 kms from Noumea - have spent all that time throwing their hands in the air crying "le problème est beaucoup trop difficile".
The local Kanaks don't want Macron in Ouvéa; he's a symbol of conquering domination, a modern-day Napoleon, and that's not the way the Melanesian's operate.
If the referendum goes against independence, nothing will change and the UN will really start to lose their shit and run out of patience and immediately put it back on the drawing board as they are fed up to here with colonialism in this day and age, and who isn't?
Amid the shouts of "vive la France", I'm entirely sure that Pres. Macron will also hear the battle cry "Kanaky pour la Kanak! Kanaky pour la Kanak! Kanaky pour la Kanak!"

Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP

"Putin may have ties to Russia" - report

Comrades,

The murky worlds of International Diplomacy and the Miracle of Democracy rarely collide, but when K-Pop proved to be an overnight smash-hit sensation in Pyongyang, there's populism right there.
I'm voting for Red Velvet, the most popular all-girl band in all of South Korea at the minute - who would win the Eurovision Song Contest in a canter, if they were allowed in.
They were among the 120 strong troupe of performers and 70 roadies who made the 'soft diplomacy' tour; the South even sent 68-year-old crooner Cho Yong-pil to belt out his classic "Dear Friend" and the 61-year-old 'balladeer' Choi Jin-hee to crank up a rendition of one of Fat Boy's father's favourites "Maze of Love".
Fatboy himself was seen bopping along with the best of them as he took front and centre in a private box at the magnificently ornate post-Stalinist 1,500-seat East Pyongyang Grand Theater [which was nationally televised - of course], before the South Korean artistes went around again a couple of days later for 12,000 of the party faithful at the Ryugyong Jong Ju Yong Gymnasium.

Of course "Little Bomb Man" doesn't have any particular gripe with the South, evinced by the fact that he his due to have a face-to-face chit-chat with South Korean Presdt. Moon in the DMZ on 27 April.
He just hates America with a passion that knows no bounds, and is now taking full advantage of the chaotic chronic dysfunction in the White House to push his own wheelbarrow.
And everybody knows He's Got The Bomb in his push-cart.
Rapprochement, however, continues on unabated, as Fat Boy also felt obliged to drop in on his major sponsors in Beijing to make tribute, and didn't Pres. Mr Ping of China roll out the exceedingly long red carpet for him?.
Kim Jnr Jnr travelled in the famous British Racing Green Train which has been used by the Kim family dynasty for decades [and probably still runs behind a thumping great steam locomotive].and it was by all reports a very slow train to China indeed, with all that armour-plating on the carriages - 21 cars in total in the set - that travelled the roughly 1,100 km from Pyongyang to Beijing, and there are plenty of tracks going this way and that, so nobody is entirely sure which route the lavishly appointed choo-choo took, except for the Chinese signallers, and they aint talkin'.
They can hear the whistle blowin'.
One of the carriages was reported to be filled entirely with wine.
Now this is a good move as the Chinese are just mad for red, very good red, particularly Bordeaux, so the container car was likely stacked to the brim with cases of Château Lafite Rothschild and a bit of Vintage Champagne Krug as fruit for the sideboard, as French winemakers deny any knowledge of international trade sanctions and are not at all fussy about who they sell their booze to - there is no bargaining, just pay up front, in cash, preferably in Francs.
Fatboy would never in his wildest dreams consider getting on a little airplane to go anywhere [up until this point he hadn't left North Korea for seven years].
As soon as it departed North Korean airspace a guided missile could loom up out of no-where and poof! he turns into a an exploding fireball of flaming wreckage never to be seen again.
He's smarter than that and he's not having it, and he certainly won't be turning up in Washington DC in the foreseeable future, so The Donald will just have to lose face and go to China - again - where the POTUS is currently on the nose.
Mmm... The DJ! could be caught between a rock and a hard place there if he wants to go half way around the world to hook up with Kim.

meantime, it's been all fun and games over in Moscow, since that most unfortunate incident in Salisbury, involving a hitherto unknown minor double-agent by the name of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who got caught up as collateral damage.
Just to remind you, here's Ol' Skrippers - as he's known in British intelligence circles - and his offspring in happier times.

The KGB has form the length of yr arm when it comes to sneaky poisonings - it's their signature calling card - unlike Mossad, who prefer strangulation.
And this Novichok gear is an absolute ripper if you seriously want to dispatch yr enemies as it produces "involuntary contraction of all skeletal muscles that leads to respiratory and cardiac arrest and finally death from heart failure or suffocation as copious fluid secretions fill the victims' lungs".
Ouch.
I see that My Mate Vlad has for the first time come out via his Ambassador at the UN and publicly claimed what he's been telling the Russian populace all along in the lead up to his "re-election"..."This is crazy. We are accused of doing it? Nonsense. In the week before my Presidential Election? Impossible. It was a botched job! We don't do failure. It was MI5 who did it. They're bloody hopeless if they want the world to believe that I am the bad dude in this one. Nichto to do with me".
The Kremlin double-crosses the double-agent, eh, Putes?
Cute.
Regulation diplomatic expulsions are par for the course in such times.
Crikey, even Australia as a token in the game, chucked out two "Russian spies" and Our Julie Bishop said in a doorstop interview that "Russia has not been playing by the rules" - this in the same week as the Australian cricket team had been caught "not playing by the rules".
That is a touch harsh, as the recently former and current Australian XI does not contain any well-trained killers in the poisoning caper as far as I am aware.
In any case, word is that the only thing that the Canberra Diplomatic Corps wanted to chin-wag to Ms Bishop about over cocktails at the time was, you guessed it - the cricket - so I suppose you could put that down in the book as a "diplomatic incident" as well.

Gee, I almost forgot to explain why the Trumpotus' name is stinking mud in Peking at the minute.
It's because the Deranged American is in the middle of kicking off a Trade War with China.
He's not listening.
He never listens, so he never learns, that is if he is capable of learning, having never read a book.
The learned White House advisers might as well be invisible ghosts in the walls.
The carrot-topped loose cannon does not know that age old maxim that goes way back to the First Opium War [1839-42] that "no-one wins in a Trade War".
They had to have a Second Opium War to sort it out, as the outcome of stoush No.1, a peace treaty, left no-one satisfied.
There are a million ways to start a war, but only two ways to finish one - annihilate your enemy, or take all yr chips to the bargaining table at the Peace Conference.
Put in simple terms, the American economy will finish up in tatters and it will all end in tears.
The Chinese hold the whip hand here as they'll just flood the world with their excess produce at near or below cost-price, and all those economies will then go belly up as folks rush out to grab the super-cheap Chinese goods sending local companies to the wall, forget wage growth - all the jobs disappear - and financial markets go into nuclear melt-down GFC-style, and hello here comes a depression or something similarly appalling.
You know it makes sense.
Good luck with picking the next Boom Time.
Never mind the stupendous Mexico Wall insanity or the foolhardy idea of sending in the Texas National Guard with big shooters to keep the brown scum out, if any further evidence is required that The Donald is as mad as a cut snake, then surely, this must be it.

[China Daily/Li Feng]