France deployed troops to New Caledonia’s ports and international airport, banned TikTok and imposed a state of emergency Thursday after three nights of clashes that have left four dead and hundreds wounded.
Pro-independence, largely Indigenous protests against a French plan to impose new voting rules on its Pacific archipelago have spiralled into the deadliest violence since the 1980s, with a police officer among several killed by gunfire.
On major thoroughfares, the torched detritus amassed over four days of unrest was scattered amid fist-size hunks of rock and cement that appeared to have been flung during riots.
Armoured vehicles roved the city’s palm-lined boulevards, usually thronged with tourists.
Fearful locals set up make-shift roadblocks — piling wooden pallets, wheelbarrows, bedframes, plastic jerricans, tree fronds and scraps of fencing across the streets.
As part of a sweeping French response, security forces placed five suspected ringleaders under house arrest, according to a statement by the high commission, which represents the French state in New Caledonia.
House searches will be carried out “in the coming hours”, it said.
More than 200 “rioters” have been arrested since the clashes broke out, the high commission said.
Hundreds of people, including 64 police, have been wounded, officials said.
– ‘We need milk’ –
French authorities reported a third night of “clashes”, though AFP correspondents in the streets of the capital Noumea said it appeared calmer than previous nights.
White residents in some neighbourhoods sat on garden chairs, manned barricades and strung up improvised white flags, a symbol of their intention to keep peaceful watch over the streets.
Onlookers ambled around the husks of burned-out shops, navigating twisted shutters, looted shelves and discarded packaging.
“We just grabbed what there was in the shops to eat. Soon there will be no more shops,” said one woman in a suburb of the capital, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“We need milk for the children. I don’t see it as looting,” she told AFP.
France is establishing an “air bridge”, the high commission said, to rapidly move in troop and police reinforcements but also to bring in essential supplies for the population.
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