Missionary ministers through political unrest in remote French territory

French-born missionary Peter Hynes, pastor of the Evangelical Church of New Caledonia, is used to staying inside due to COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantine. Back then, he didn’t have to avoid going out because of gunfire.

“Things seemed to be going fairly well, up to what happened about three weeks ago,” Hynes said. “It happened so quickly, it caught everybody by surprise.”

New Caledonia, a French territory between Australia and Fiji, has had a long and occasionally violent conflict over independence. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron suspended action on a controversial change to voting policy after weeks of rioting and nine deaths.

The policy would have expanded New Caledonia’s provincial voting population from native Kanaks and French citizens who moved to New Caledonia before 1998 to all French citizens who have resided there for at least 10 years or were born there. The local Kanak population strongly opposed the bill, arguing that the measure would take away indigenous islanders’ influence as a voting bloc and destroy New Caledonia’s future chances of becoming a sovereign nation. On May 14, mass riots broke out. Since then, nine people have died. Protesters have caused over $1 billion in property damage, leading to the loss of over 5,000 permanent jobs due to the destruction of workplaces. Authorities arrested more than 460 people in the unrest.

Hynes and the members of his church, who number about 40, live in the hard-hit capital city of Nouméa. Hynes’ congregants often couldn’t drive during the unrest because roads were congested, blocked, or unsafe. At least two of the church’s members lost their jobs. At one point, Hynes’ wife, a nurse, had to stay at work for five days to cover shifts for co-workers who couldn’t come to the hospital due to the dangerous conditions.

The rioting kept the church from meeting in person. Hynes held services on Zoom and personally drove less-tech-savvy members to his home. He also led worship for those who lived close by.

“We started a service every day at 4 o’clock in one of the streets where anybody can come,” he said.

Hynes kept his congregation connected throughout the riots. But the broader effects on New Caledonia will likely be more difficult to recover from—especially the population’s loss of faith in the French government.

“It’s going to affect the confidence or the hope that we can do something because it feels like a bitter repeat of 40 years ago,” Hynes said. “I think the difficulty will be for people to be willing to try and work again together to try and achieve something. It’s not going to be easy.”

In 1984, pro-independence forces in New Caledonia boycotted provincial elections, and fighting broke out that caused 80 deaths. Four years later, the French government and pro-independence groups signed the Matignon Accords, a series of peace agreements that gave New Caledonia autonomous territory status for 10 years and scheduled an independence referendum for 1998. The agreements attempted to fix inequalities between Europeans and native Kanaks.

The 1998 Nouméa accord pushed the independence vote back by 20 years and provided for three successive referendums. In the first two, held in 2018 and 2020, just over half of voters rejected independence. The islands held the third vote in December 2021 after the government denied independence advocates’ request to delay the vote due to COVID-19. The pro-independence movement boycotted the referendum in response, and “no” won with 96.5 percent of the vote.

New Caledonia’s current laws limit voting to the Kanak population and French residents who have lived in the country since 1997. In April and early May, the two houses of French Parliament voted in favor of an amendment to the New Caledonian constitution that would have expanded the eligible voting population from pre-1998 residents to all French residents who had lived in the territory for at least 10 years and citizens who were born there. The voting population would have increased by 25,000. If the bill became a law, any further independence effort would likely be far more difficult to achieve.

“These riots are a combination of immediate unhappiness about the independence process and the introduction of new voters that’s overlaid on top of much deeper societal grievances that exist within this Kanak community,” explained professor James Ker-Lindsay, research associate at the London School of Economics. “They would say that their educational levels are lower, their health outcomes are worse. You know, life expectancy is worse…And they see this as all a product of French neglect, which is driving the process towards independence.”

Macron suspended action on the reforms, citing a need to “give full strength to dialogue on the ground and the return to order.”

Hynes, meanwhile, sees a silver lining through the chaos, violence, and uncertainty.

“When COVID arrived, everybody was praying again … but as soon as COVID was over, God was out of their lives again,’” Hynes explained. “What’s happening now is people are coming back to God … My hope for the country is, and for the church here, is that through the difficulties, people will return to the Lord.”