Picture postcard Corsica, known as the island of beauty, one of the pearls of the Mediterranean, regularly clashes with the stubborn reality of endemic political violence and gangsterism. In this rugged and poor, conflictive and untamed territory, phases of relative tranquility and strong agitation alternate. For more than a year, a chain of events has once again inflamed a dispute with Paris that is always latent.
In September 2021, during a clandestine press conference of around thirty hooded individuals armed with assault rifles, the return to armed struggle of a faction of the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC) was announced. The organization had laid down its arms in 2014, after almost forty years of activity during which it claimed responsibility for some 6,000 attacks, a huge number considering the Corsican size and its population. Some fifty murders are attributed to him.
The atmosphere, then, already showed clear signs of radicalization when, last March, the death of Yvan Colonna took place, sentenced to life imprisonment for the shooting murder, in February 1998, of the then prefect of Corsica, Claude Érignac, maximum authority of the Republic on the island.
Colonna, admitted to a prison in Arles, had been attacked and almost strangled a few days ago by a fanatical Islamist prisoner. The victim was left in a coma and did not recover.
Corsican nationalism –and not only the most extremist sectors– accused the State of being indirectly responsible for the crime for having neglected the surveillance of such a sensitive prisoner and for having ignored, for years, the demand for a sentence reduction or concession of a regime of semi-freedom for Colonna and his accomplices. There were serious disturbances in Bastia, Ajaccio and other Corsican towns.
The burial of Colonna, a former cattle breeder, in his town, Cargèse, became a multitudinous expression of mourning and vindication at the same time. The president of the Corsican executive council himself, the autonomist Gilles Simeoni, whose party achieved an absolute majority in the last elections, attended. The coffin was covered with the Head of Moor, the Corsican flag. In the procession there was a banner with the slogan Statu francese assassinu, which does not require knowledge of privateering to be understood.
Since then Corsica has been the scene of dozens of criminal fires and bombings, often against second homes of French people from the continent, always without victims. These attacks were the trademark of the FLNC for decades. There have also been actions that reveal a deep division in the nationalist camp, a phenomenon that is not new. A bar run by Marc'Andria Simeoni, a son of the president of the Corsican executive, was engulfed in flames.
The State's response to the deterioration of the situation was a matter of time. So far in December there have been 11 arrests of ultranationalist leaders, most of them from the Corsica Libera independence party, which has only one deputy in the Corsican Assembly. The arrested leaders were charged with alleged "association of criminals for terrorist purposes," as well as illegal possession of weapons and other crimes. Among those arrested were historical figures from the independence movement such as Charles Pieri, 72. Most of them were released, but are under judicial control. Pieri, suspected in the past of being one of the leaders of the FLNC and of having mafia connections, entered preventive detention.
Spokespersons for Corsica Libera, such as Josepha Giacomett-Piredda, vehemently denounced the attempt to "criminalize an entire political movement" and lamented that the State uses "disgraceful methods" and "political police", in addition to not respecting the principles of separation of powers.
The immediate consequence of these events is that the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron to engage in a political dialogue with the Corsican leaders aimed at expanding autonomy, suspended a scheduled visit to the island for the second time since October. Darmanin argued "an unfavorable climate for displacement." The minister outraged the nationalists with his ambiguous phrases in which he linked the recent police actions with the fight against the Corsican mafias.
The dialogue between Paris and Corsica, which has not really taken off, has no a priori taboos. There could be a token recognition of Corsican identity in the French constitution, but it is difficult for Paris to cede many real powers and, above all, it seems almost impossible for it to accept the old claim to co-officiality of the Corsican.
Corsica, with about 340,000 inhabitants, is the poorest region of metropolitan France. 18% of households lived below the poverty line in 2019, according to official statistics. Its incorporation into France, after the military conquest, was in 1768, just one year before the birth in Ajaccio of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsicans are still very proud of having liberated themselves, before mainland France, from German occupation during World War II.
The Corsican problems date from long before the French control of the territory more than 250 years ago. For more than four centuries it was ruled by the Most Serene Republic of Genoa, which exploited it as a colony and for mere strategic purposes in the Mediterranean. As Charles-Henri Filippi explains in his recent book La Corse et le probleme français (Gallimard), the Genoese “imposed their order on the commercially strategic ports of the island, and abandoned the interior to disorder and endemic violence, which they shaped lasting way the culture of the island”.
In the background of the endless Corsican crisis, in addition to this violent and anarchic social component, the result of geography and history, is the fear of losing one's identity. In the latest issue, the weekly Journal de la Corse, founded in 1817 and which claims to be the oldest publication in Europe, includes a very revealing editorial, under the title “Open community, yes; open bar, no.
The magazine warns that every year 5,000 people settle in Corsica, most of them “hexagonal” (from mainland France) or foreigners. Few are those that have Corsican ancestors. He acknowledges that the migratory flow is necessary, for demographic reasons and to prevent the island from becoming "a great asylum", but warns that little by little the native Corsican people are diluted and distorted. The editorialist speaks of "the threat that our children will have a future as reserve redskins" and defends making a policy like Israel's, which privileges the immigration of the Jewish diaspora in the world. According to the Journal de la Corse, that is not xenophobia but pure survival instinct.
