French Vessel Shells Rebels in New Caledonia

A French naval vessel opened fire Saturday on a beachfront encampment of about 30 armed Melanesian separatists in a marked escalation of France’s military efforts to defuse the deepening crisis in this South Pacific island territory.

In announcing the shelling of the separatist position Saturday night, the spokesman for France’s high commissioner here acknowledged that it was the first military assault by France since the conflict began, and for the first time he described the separatists as “rebels.”

Spokesman Philippe Berges said that apparently no one was injured in the naval barrage, which he said was provoked when the separatists opened fire on a land patrol of French paramilitary troops.

Asked whether the situation on the island, where France has rushed thousands of military reinforcements in the past week, was looking more and more like a war each day, Berges said, “It is beginning to look that way.”

Justifying his use of the word rebels, Berges said, “When armed groups are challenging the foundations of public order, we are talking about rebellion.”

Reacting to the naval attack in a radio broadcast today, the ranking separatist leader, Yeiwene Yeiwene, declared that France “has engaged cannons and is using the language of war.”

“France, a country of 55 million people, is engaged in a colonial war against 60,000 people. The world’s fourth-greatest power is waging a colonial war against what they call just a group of troublemakers.

” France’s return to the old policy of the cannon, 12 years before the year 2,000, can no longer work.”

The current conflict between New Caledonia’s native Melanesians, who call themselves Kanaks, and the French government, which has ruled the territory for nearly 150 years, began April 22 when Kanak separatists wielding axes and guns attacked a French police station on a remote outer island, kidnaping 27 gendarmes and killing four others.

Sixteen gendarmes remain hostage in a cave on the island of Ouvea, northeast of Noumea, along with seven other Frenchmen who were seized several days later while attempting to negotiate the release of the original hostages.

Among the hostages is France’s legendary chief of its elite military counterterrorism squad, who is doubling as a negotiator. Berges said there was no progress during the talks Saturday.

Island Sealed Off

The small island of Ouvea, a spectacularly lush atoll that was once a tourist haven, has been sealed off by the French military. All commercial flights and boats to the island have been stopped and turned back. Telephone lines have been cut, and the only information on the hostage drama has come from the French government’s daily briefings at the high commissioner’s office in the territorial capital of Noumea.

During Saturday’s briefing, Berges told reporters that the negotiator-turned-hostage, Philippe Legorjus, the leader of the anti-terrorist squad, has formed “a relationship of trust” with his separatist captors. He has been allowed to leave the cave, even for entire days and nights at a time, to convey the kidnapers’ demands to authorities, he said.

But Berges said the kidnapers keep one hostage tied to a tree under threat of death during Legorjus’ absences, and the spokesman said the government remains deeply concerned for the hostages’ safety.

The kidnapers, he said, have displayed “a fanaticism which approaches hysteria. They are very dangerous. Some of them are capable of killing the hostages.”

A French Cabinet official who was allowed to visit the hostages last week described the leader of the group--some of whom have received military training in Libya--as “a mad fanatic.”

Disclaim Militants

During their own briefing Saturday in Noumea, moderate leaders of the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, an umbrella group that includes both militant and moderate factions, again maintained that the hostage takers are members of local autonomous separatist groups over whom they have little or no control.

But the Kanak separatist leaders, who claim New Caledonia as their homeland and are seeking independence from France, indicated that the hostage taking was part of a broader strategy for the entire island territory, planned to coincide with the two-week presidential election period in France, which concludes next Sunday.

One leader said that the killing Friday of a French loyalist settler on New Caledonia’s main island of Grande Terre was “the same thing that is happening in Ouvea.”

And the French navy shelling of armed separatists Saturday was an indication that the government fears the current round of violence could spread to other towns on the main island.

Spotted ‘Rebel Camp’

Berges said the naval shelling took place near the town of Pouebo, on the main island’s northeast coast about 200 miles from Noumea. He said the “rebel camp” was spotted during a routine naval patrol. The 120-foot navy patrol boat La Moqueuse, he said, shelled the camp only after a 25-man contingent dispatched in rubber boats to inspect the area came under automatic weapons fire from the Kanak separatists.

After driving the separatists into the jungle, Berges said the gendarmes found citizens band radios and other materials in the camp.

Elsewhere on the main island, Berges said, “the situation was generally calm” Saturday. In many areas, the separatists have been waging what amounts to little more than a passive battle of barricades--constructing roadblocks with felled trees and explosives or digging trenches in main roads to prevent the movement of French troops and armored vehicles.

In the capital, where the white sand beaches were teeming Saturday with hundreds of European tourists and relaxing French troops in swimsuits, there was no sign of the trouble that the government now concedes is affecting more and more of the territory.

Has Seen It All Before

“We have seen this all before,” said one lifelong French resident of Noumea, who has traveled extensively throughout the territory during the past week.

“The situation gets tenser and tenser, and everyone thinks there’s going to be a war, and then suddenly it all seems to disappear. And if you are just sunbathing on the beach the whole time, you never know anything happened at all.”

Most analysts here said the uprising is linked to the presidential elections in France, 12,500 miles away, and many believe the crisis will subside after next Sunday’s vote.

In the meantime, French politicians react to events in New Caledonia, where the 43% Kanak population strongly supports Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and the territory’s majority French loyalists back right-wing Premier Jacques Chirac.

Mitterrand, in a Saturday campaign speech attended by 35,000 supporters in Paris, sharply criticized the government’s strong military response in New Caledonia, which was ordered and is being directed by Chirac.

Calling Chirac’s right-wing policies in Noumea “an absurd and contemptible colonial system,” Mitterrand told the crowd, “It is up to the French to act as an arbiter to establish law and justice” in the territory.