South Pacific
Messmerising the Pacific
Molly Mortimer
M. Messmer's pronouncements on the New Hebrides condominium bode not well for Anglo-French co-operation in Africa. As Minister for Overseas Territories and now Prime Minister M. Messmer can make Spiro Agnew-like noises not permitted to M. Pompidou, but which nevertheless represent French policy. For France is not merely aggravated at Australian and, New Zealand actions over her nuclear tests in the Pacific (she appears to be going ahead on Eiao, an ininhabited Marquesan island, for underground tests), she is afraid of British weakness.
France has always kept UN meddling out of her dependencies, but the ill-judged remarks of the Fijian Indian delegate in New York re-aroused all her suspicions. Fiji Indians have always been favoured at the UN, through their espousal of a oneman-one-vote common roll, which would give them power in an independent Fiji where they have outbred the indigenes. Their support for a UN Mission to the condominium found no French favour. Indeed the British High Commissioner's visit was practically boycotted and the visit of the Commonwealth Secretary General to the Pacific, regarded dourly.
Although M. Messmer's actual statement was only to the effect that economic development must precede political progress (in face of the almost unanimous demand by the Advisory Council to become a Leg. Co.), it was an unprecedented unilateral statement of policy, without the customary prior consultation with the British, and could well prove a watershed in condominium history. So far as the French Pacific is concerned, independence is not necessarily the result of economic progress, for in nickel rich New Caledonia, M. Messmer described the island as "for ever French," and the 1972 Tahiti elections, dispersing power to fortyfour new communes, is seen by autonomists as mere divide and rule.
Indeed M. Messmer's whole tour can be seen as a counterbalance to British weakness in face of UN pressures, with the clear vision of leaving France in place to fill any British vacuum. Doubtless 'la co-operation' on the African model would follow. Any sign that Jacques Foccard, presently Secretary General for French African affairs, is following his leader to the Pacific would be action for a Messmerised Pacific.
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