WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, OCL: The fight for a "socialist society in Kanak country" (and elsewhere) continues, Hnalaine! (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In tribute to our comrade Hnalaine Uregei, a Kanak activist and early

independence activist, we are publishing this testimony from Vanina
about their meeting. ---- The fight for a "socialist society in Kanak
country" (and elsewhere) continues, Hnalaine! ---- For forty years,
somewhere in the back of my mind I had the idea that I would one day go
to Kanak country and that then, of course, I would visit Hnalaine. ----
Hnalaine is no longer in Kanak country, but I have memories of him that
I share here with his loved ones.
I met Hnalaine in Paris at the end of 1984. He was on an international
information tour in Europe as a representative of the newly created
FLNKS. We met at the Association for Information and Support for the
Rights of the Kanak People (AISDPK), of which I was a member. I
appreciated Hnalaine for his great political culture, his liveliness of
mind, his humor, his kindness - in short, for his many qualities that
made him as interesting as he was endearing.

We quickly realized that we shared a certain number of analyses. An
early independence supporter with the Red Scarves, Hnalaine never forgot
that anti-colonialism must be accompanied by anti-capitalism so as not
to sink into reformism; that the fight of colonized peoples must not be
reduced to this anti-colonialism or to the recognition of their
particular identity, and must always defend a class position. Hnalaine
was an internationalist convinced that a revolution remains essential to
eliminate exploitation and social hierarchies...

I invited Hnalaine to the show "Peuples en lutte" that I hosted at the
time on Radio-Libertaire, and we also had discussions with Jimmy Ounei,
Isabelle Leblic and Daniel Guerrier, among others. All this collected
material became a special issue of the journal Informations et
réflexions libertaires; entitled "Solidarity with the struggle of the
Kanak people", it was published in January 1985[1].

With other libertarians involved in the AISDPK, we created an
anti-imperialist Libertarian Coordination at the beginning of 1985.
Among us were activists from the Anarchist Federation (FA), the Union of
Libertarian Communist Workers (UTCL), the Libertarian Communist
Organization (OCL), the Libertarian Student Coordination (CLE), the
editorial staff of IRL and L'Entraide, and the COJRA (organizing
committee for anti-authoritarian days and reflections).

Our manifesto "The time of colonies is over!", made public in April
1985[2], concluded with:

"The national liberation struggles, and first and foremost that of the
Kanaks, must be able to count on our solidarity here. The development of
a broad anti-colonial movement should make the government's repressive
practices more difficult, and neo-colonialist projects unjustifiable. (...).
Independence for Kanaky!
Solidarity with the people fighting against the French State! "

As we can see, if the French rulers and those of the Caledonian
institutions have changed, this manifesto is unfortunately still
relevant. Forty years separate the "events" from the "riots", but
repression has fallen today as yesterday on the people who participated
in them, the trap of the institutional approach has worked for many
independence leaders, and solidarity with the independence movement is
very weak in the "Hexagon".

For my part, I continued to follow the evolution of this movement from a
distance and to be in solidarity with the currents that defended social
emancipation[3]. I was thus able to see that Hnalaine had remained firm
in his positions and always ready to fight for a "socialist society in
Kanak" - this greatly delighted me.

If I will not see this old comrade again in the land of the Kanaks, he
will remain in my memory as a beautiful encounter.

Vanina

Notes
[1]This issue 59 of IRL can be found on the website of the Centre de
recherche pour l'alternative sociale (CRAS) in Toulouse

[2]It was republished in June 2011 in the issue "Luttes de libération
nationale. Une révolution possible?" produced jointly by the OLS
(Offensive libertaire et sociale) and the OCL: Offensive n° 30 / Courant
alternatif special issue n° 17.

[3]I wrote articles in Courant alternatif that can be downloaded from
the website oclibertaire.lautre.net

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4358
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca