French President Emmanuel Macron pushed Thursday for a lifting of protesters’ barricades in riot-hit New Caledonia and pledged that reinforced police forces battling deadly unrest on the Pacific archipelago \u201cwill stay as long as necessary.\u201d
\nPro-independence Kanak leaders, who a week earlier declined Macron’s offer of talks by video, turned out Thursday to greet him in person, bringing them together at a meeting in the capital Noum\u00e9a, with rival loyalist leaders who want New Caledonia.
\nMacron opened the meeting by calling for a minute of silence for the six people killed in shootings during the violence, including two gendarmes, and read out their names. He subsequently urged local leaders to use their clout to help restore order. He said a state of emergency imposed by Paris the previous week to boost police powers could be lifted only if local leaders call for a clearing away of barricades that demonstrators and people trying to protect their neighborhoods have erected in Noum\u00e9a and beyond.
\n\u201cIt’s a simple phrase and it’s best to say because it can have an effect,\u201d Macron said.
\nBarricades have turned some parts of Noum\u00e9a into no-go zones and made traveling around perilous, including for the sick requiring medical treatment and for families fretting about where to find food and water after shops were pillaged and torched. Unrest continued to simmer even as Macron jetted in, despite a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew and more than 1,000 reinforcements for the archipelago’s police and gendarmes, now 3,000-strong, the French leader said.
\n\u201cI will be very clear here. These forces will remain as long as necessary. Even during the Olympic Games and Paralympics,” which open in Paris on July 26, Macron said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
French President Emmanuel Macron pushed Thursday for a lifting of protesters’ barricades in riot-hit New Caledonia and pledged that reinforced police forces battling deadly unrest on the Pacific archipelago \u201cwill stay as long as necessary.\u201d Pro-independence Kanak leaders, who a week earlier declined Macron’s offer of talks by video, turned out Thursday to greet him …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22812,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22808\/revisions\/22812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}