Pro-France Parties Win in New Caledonia

Anti-independence parties in this French South Pacific territory won an overwhelming majority in elections Sunday for a new regional Parliament that were marred by ethnic violence.

In Paris, French officials said that 11 of 27 paramilitary gendarmes taken hostage Friday in a bloody attack on a police station on the island of Ouvea have been released unharmed.

In Noumea, police said Melanesian separatists handed over the captives, who were in good health, under pressure from local church and tribal authorities. Officials also said that a fourth policemen died Sunday of injuries suffered in Friday’s attack.

A high percentage of French settlers and a low number of indigenous Melanesian Kanaks turned out at the polls as militant members of the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, which seeks independence from France, attacked polling places.

Eight police officers were injured Sunday in fights with masked Kanaks who barricaded streets outside polling places and ransacked election offices. Five officers were wounded in a bomb blast in Canala, on the main island of Grand Terre.

The local elections, held in conjunction with French presidential polls, gave 35 of 48 seats to the Rally for the Republic in Caledonia, a neo-Gaullist settler’s party that strongly supports continued ties to Paris.

The ultra-right National Front gained eight seats, and another rightist party won three. A slate of Socialist and separatist candidates won two seats.

Voter turnout in Kanak areas was less than 25%, but it exceeded 85% in the settler-dominated capital.

An election boycott had been urged by the liberation front, which believes that the new Parliament and a governmental system endorsed last September in a referendum, also boycotted by Melanesians, would further disadvantage Kanaks.