France's Corsican Conundrum
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
A Mountain in the Sea France's Corsican Conundrum By Janice Valls-Russell Paris When James Boswell "inquired into the situation of the affairs of Corsica, he found the utmost...
...Intimidation may be one reason, high-level pressure another...
...Erignac's assassination remains unsolved and Yvan Colonna, a Corsican separatist believed to be the main suspect, is on the run...
...This blossomed in the 1970s, when aspirations to self-rule produced separatist violence in other parts of Europe, such as Northern Ireland and Spain's Basque region...
...in Corsica there is one for every 100...
...Separatist violence has discouraged investment...
...This rule of silence makes it very difficult to investigate ordinary crime and separatist violence, even though there is a higher ratio of policemen and gendarmes—the rural, militarized arm of France's lawand-order forces—on the island than in the rest of France...
...Corsicans claim that wherever they go in France, there is a Corsican family ready to offer help if it is needed...
...Some can also be found in journalism (e.g...
...The idea was that official permits would then be granted for new premises...
...and local control of the island's share of the national budget...
...Indeed, Bonnet discovered when he was prefect that they inexplicably doubled between 1993 and '98...
...The protesters included former Defense Minister François Léotard, who like so many French politicians enjoys vacationing in Corsica...
...The country was in danger of being entirely uncultivated and the people of becoming a lawless and ungovernable rabble of banditti...
...A few hours after Erignac was assassinated, a Corsicanfriendconfidentlytoldme:"The murderer will neverbe arrested...
...Granting broad-ranging powers to a Corsican administration would require changing the FrenchConstitution...
...France, she says, is "an attractive country for anyone wanting to launder a few dozen million francs...
...According to an opinion poll taken in December 1999, though, 80 per cent of the Corsican population rejects independence...
...I once witnessed a meeting, in mainland France, between a pair of youngish Corsicans, a man and a woman...
...Bonnet, who denies all involvement, believes he was framed—by whom he does not say—because his attempts to restore law and order in Corsica were proving too unsettling for many people...
...A trial may—or may not—establish whatreally happened...
...The rest are mostly mainland French or immigrants from North Africa...
...Except for a fertile plain to the east, flat land is scarce...
...The rate of unsolved crimes is higher in Corsica than on the mainland...
...Like the separatists in Ireland and the Spanish Basque region, CN consists of a political arm as well as illegal activists who periodically blow up holiday homes belonging to nonCorsicans...
...Subsequently, ARC split into two movements, and each has spawned several groups that spend almost as much time fighting each other as attacking targets that represent the French state, particularly police stations and tax offices...
...He founded a university at Corte, a historic inland town, and invited Jean-Jacques Rousseau to write a constitution for the new nation...
...When island voting lists were checked in the early 1990s, they were found to include the names of more than 40,000 people who—if alive—were no longer residents...
...Tourism is a source of wealth, but the island is heavily dependent on subsidies from the French government and the European Union...
...Leading figures of the Corsican diaspora are also known to have interceded on occasion in favor of outlawed separatists...
...Corsican allocations for physically or mentally impaired people are three times higher than those of the average French region...
...As in Spain's Basque country, Corsican separatists levy what they call a "revolutionary tax" on businesses owned by non-Corsicans, which sometimes get destroyed even when the protection money has been paid...
...Over the centuries, Greeks, Romans, Genoese, Jews, Maltese, Sardinians and others have settled there...
...More than three centuries later they are still apt...
...The failure of the police to arrest Yvan Colonna is all the more disturbing when one reflects that his father, a former Socialist deputy, was for a time a senior official at the Interior Ministry...
...CENTURY was marked by a couple of brief attempts at independence...
...A facet of the vendetta spirit is, as in Sicily, omert...
...In 1764, after 10 years of fighting, Pascal Paoli became the head of an independent Corsica...
...Bonnet, who has been free on bail and is awaiting trial, denies any involvement in illegal activities...
...But it would almost certainly have taken more than the will of one man to reverse what Eva Joly, a prominent French magistrate, describes as France's "discretion about matters like taxes...
...Publicly, Rossi called for a "democratic uprising of the Corsican people against the destruction of the paillotes...
...In 1768, though, before Rousseau had gotten around to penning it, Corsica passed to France...
...In addition, magistrates tend to deal leniently with suspected terrorists who are brought before them...
...Bonnet believes another holds the most "extremist" nationalist views...
...Corsica also has the highest rate of people receiving Social Security benefits, even though the overall standard of living is higher than in France...
...Still, Bonnet created an uproar early last year when, enforcing court injunctions, he ordered the destruction of illegal premises built on public land by leading Corsican personalities...
...Similarly, jobs and welfare handouts do not always go to individuals who deserve or need them most...
...Yvan Colonna, the man suspected of killing Claude Erignac in 1998, belongs to an FLNC faction...
...Having failed to enforce rule from Paris through Bonnet, Jospin has appointed a cautious, low-profile replacement, Jean-Pierre Lacroix...
...The Socialist Prime Minister has opened talks with representatives of Corsica's various political parties, too, about a plan for the future...
...Members of clans, Boswell noted, were apt to "assassinate each other on the most trivial occasion...
...Of the loans totaling $1.1 billion that it had authorized, $327.8 million were deemed unrecoverable...
...The high level of emigration has also led to dubious electoral practices...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...People in the entourage of Erignac's widow fear that Colonna could be included in a government amnesty if the various separatist groups agreed to a cease-fire...
...During the night of April 19, however, a paillote was blasted by a squad of gendarmes...
...Behind the scenes, he and other local politicians obtained from the paillote owners a promise that they would dismantle their premises after the summer season...
...After two gendarmes were killed in an ensuing fray, ARC was outlawed by the French government...
...But that is small stuff compared to the dealings of the local mafia...
...In 1995, former Prime Minister Raymond Barre exclaimed: "If Corsicans want independence, let them have it...
...The island's valleys were originally cut off from one another, making for tightly knit communities living back to back...
...These self-styled nationalist movements range from the Union of the Corsican People (UPC), which rejects violence and advocates autonomy, to the Corsican Nation (CN), whose virulently anti-French members compare Bonnet to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and want independence...
...Economists reckon, for example, that an independent Corsica would be barely more prosperous than Bosnia...
...After establishing that they belonged to allied clans, they relaxed and began swapping news about the island...
...Such is the island's beauty that members of France's political, intellectual and show biz jet sets have built holiday houses there—quite a few of them, it is rumored locally, without permits...
...The promptness with which Corsicans are reputed to take justice into their own hands grew out of their mistrust of the Genoese administration that ruled the island from the 12th to the 18th century and, later, of the centralist rule from Paris...
...Backed by various nationalist movements, the second motion advocated the compulsory teaching of Corsican, alongside French, in schools...
...The national average is one for every 250 inhabitants...
...For a few tense moments they questioned each other about their respective backgrounds and traced their families' origins to two specific villages...
...In their view, moreover, devolution would only be the first step toward outright independence...
...It takes a couple of hours to drive just 35 miles or so along the winding coast road south of Ajaccio, Corsica's largest town (population 59,500...
...He had discovered, for instance, that they controlled the security agencies that transport funds to and from banks...
...The island's biggest bank...
...The prefect was removed from office and jailed for two months, pending an investigation...
...active support for broadcasting and publishing in Corsican...
...The staunch cult of family and clannish solidarity has also proved a leaven for Corsican nationalism...
...Some are thought to have connections with the Russian mob...
...One is described by former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua as "the most dangerous and numerous...
...the chances of being caught red-handed are slight...
...He had started cracking down on the separatists' various fund-raising activities...
...THE 18...
...A champion of the island's independence, he recorded his observations in An Account of Corsica, published in 1768...
...The assassination, the first of a senior government official, was perhaps an attempt to provoke an antiCorsican mood in France that would lead to independence...
...This past March 10, it held a debate on devolution...
...Rival clans coalesced around leading families, like the Colonnas, Matteis or Rossis, and clan identity remains strong...
...One reads an unwitting echo of them in Préfet en Corse, a recent book by aformerprefectof Corsica, BeenardBonnet, who was appointed after the assassination of his predecessor, Claude Erignac, on February 6, 1998...
...According to a 1999 parliamentary report, European criminals known to deal in prostitution, drugs, weapons sales, and armed robbery who have settled in Corsica seem to be using it as a base for laundering money— largely through property investments on the island and the French Riviera...
...One of Bonnet's most spectacular achievements was exposing the inefficiency of the island's branch of Crédit Agricole, a leading French bank, by helping to arrange a surprise audit in March 1998...
...A Mountain in the Sea France's Corsican Conundrum By Janice Valls-Russell Paris When James Boswell "inquired into the situation of the affairs of Corsica, he found the utmost disorder and confusion...
...Its highest peaks soar to almost 10,000 feet yet, as the birds fly, they are only a few miles inland, hence a dramatic landscape of deep valleys plunges down to a sharply indented coastline...
...President Jacques Chirac's spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna, is a Corsican, as is the Mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi...
...Pasqua admitted as much before a parliamentary committee some months ago...
...Successive French governments are known to have had off-the-record contacts with various separatist factions...
...For a few months in 1736, Corsica even had a self-appointed king, a German baron called Theodore von Neuhoff, who arrived in Turkish garb in March and left before the year was out...
...José Rossi, a former Minister of Industry and Telecommunications and an influential Corsican politician, thinks autonomy is the only way out of the current impasse, which he blames on three decades of separatist violence and government ineffectuality...
...Corsica is an ethnic mosaic of Mediterranean peoples that makes a country like Lebanon seem almost simple by comparison...
...Among the structures were unauthorized restaurants (called paillotes, huts, but built of masonry) and private y acht clubs...
...At Genoa's request, they dispatched troops to quell a Corsican uprising in 1740...
...Many Corsicans, meanwhile, sought their fortunes in France's colonies...
...After working for two weeks under police protection, a team of Finance Ministry inspectors returned to Paris with two tons of documents and microfilms...
...To some extent, these actions are viewed with sympathy by Corsicans who do not want their coasts messed up by sprawling resorts, à la stretches of the French and Spanish coastlines...
...a second one demanding autonomy obtained 24 votes...
...Nevertheless, its losses ran to over $32.8 million in 1996 and again in '97...
...The island is, in effect, a mountain in the sea, a part of the Pyrenees adrift in the Mediterranean, south of Marseilles...
...In the eyes of some, this gives them a kinship with France's Jewish community...
...the transfer of powers relating to the island from the French National Assembly to the Corsican Assembly...
...That appears to rule out devolution of the kind enjoyed by Scotland, but the Prime Minister and the Corsican Assembly's representatives have agreed to meet regularly over the next few months to discuss practical aspects of the situation...
...one of the people he worked with is an aide of Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou...
...While major decisions continue to be made in Paris, Corsica's Regional Assembly has wider powers than any other in France...
...It would be a sad thing for Corsica, and for France as a whole, if she were to be proved right...
...A motion urging more decentralization obtained 26 votes...
...It is unclear to what extent they compete with, or contribute to, the separatists' fund-raising activities BONNET SUGGESTS in his book that, had he been given more time, he would have tried to take on the mafia...
...There was no subordination, no discipline, no money...
...Corsicans reckon that fheir"diaspora,'as they call it, numbers at least as many of them as those left on the island, where they make up barely 100,000 of the 260,700 inhabitants...
...Decisions had relied not so much on objective financial criteria as on personal recommendations...
...Clandestine members of the separatist movements, interviewed by Le Monde in February, add a further condition: a blanket amnesty for imprisoned Corsican terrorists...
...the editor of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani), business and politics...
...Trying to make sense of Corsica was already difficult back in Boswell's day...
...The reason is to some extent rooted in geography...
...Most Corsicans have tended to join France's military, police force or customs service, or have become prison wardens, before returning to the island to retire...
...A feeling of being dispossessed by the newcomers fueled resentment, and in 1975 prompted a small group calling itself Corsican Regionalist Action (ARC) to occupy a wine cellar in Aleria, on the east coast, to protest "colonization...
...Among the thousands of people of French descent who left Algeria after independence and settled in France, a large number had Corsican names...
...The French had their eyes on the island for some time...
...its hooded, weapon-wielding activists regularly turn up at public gatherings demanding Corsican independence...
...Successive French rulers and heads of state were primarily interested in the island's strategic position...
...Tension was sparked by the arrival of French families from Algeria who bought large tracts of farming land, turning them into vineyards and citrus groves...
...Within 15 months Bonnet himself was in prison, following accusations that he had masterminded the illegal destruction of a beach restaurant built without a permit...
...for his part, Bonnet agreed to suspend all action...
...Crédit Agricole's Corsican branch, has 90,000 customers and $1.2 billion in deposits...
...They claimed they received their orders from Bonnet's personal assistant, Gérard Pardini, who in turn incriminated Bonnet...
...In midApril, Center-Right President Chirac told Jospin to go on seeking "original measures" that would enable the people of Corsica to "control more fully decisions concerning them" yet keep the French republic "as it is...
...The same two-tiered system is maintained by the Corsican Front of National Liberation (FLNC), although it embraces several rival militant factions...
...Bonnet was given a clear mandate by Prime Minister Lionel Jospin: Restore law and order on the island...
Vol. 83 • July 2000 • No. 3
