The Politics of Nickel in Thio, New Caledonia PIERRE-YVES LE MEUR1
5. Conflict and Agreement: The Politics of Nickel in Thio, New Caledonia PIERRE-YVES LE MEUR1 Introduction In late July 1996, the entrances to Plateau and Camps des Sapins, the two main mines in Thio, were blockaded by the commune’s Kanak inhabitants. Blockades were also placed on the ore transfer belt in nearby Thio Mission and on a Japanese ore carrier, the Tango Gracia, which was in the process of being loaded by its Filipino crew. The stand-off between the Thio coutumiers (‘customary representatives’) and the company Société Le Nickel (SLN) lasted two weeks and culminated in a wide-ranging written agreement which, despite being local in scope, went beyond the context of work and touched on environmental and social issues, the question of the control of resources, and the redistribution of mining revenues (see Filer 1997; Bainton 2009). 1 This study was carried out as part of a research program financed by the National Centre for Technological Research, under the title ‘Nickel Politics between Local Governance and Corporate Governance: The Comparison of Mining and Industrial Development in New Caledonia’. I should like to sincerely thank Jean-Michel Sourisseau for his critical and constructive reading of an initial version of this text, and Susan Cox for translating it into English. 157 Large-Scale Mines and Local-Level Politics Thio, a commune located on the east coast of South Province, was the country’s ‘nickel capital’ for a long time, and SLN, which was established in 1880 and based in Thio during the interwar period, enjoyed a dominant position in the production and processing of nickel in New Caledonia.2 The town of Thio was also one of the focal sites of les événements (‘the events’), a period of violent clashes between 1984 and 1988 that combined elements of civil war between the Kanak separatists and New Caledonian loyalists with the Kanak decolonisation struggle, so the location and protagonists in this particular tale are not without significance.
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