Killer’s funeral a powder keg in Corsica’s battle for independence
‘There is an uneasy calm for mourning but there is anger and a sense of injustice, which feeds revolt’
As a crowd of 2,000 gathered for a funeral on Corsica’s western coast overlooking the Mediterranean, a choir sang a requiem as flags depicting the silhouette of a beheaded Moor fluttered in the breeze.
But the colours red, white and blue were nowhere to be seen. “You won’t see the French flag around here today,” said one man. “It’s persona non grata.”
Crammed around a church in Cargèse, the throng had come to bury one of their own, a nationalist shepherd called Yvan Colonna notoriously convicted in 1998 of assassinating the highest French state representative on the island, prefect Claude Érignac.
Serving a life sentence in a jail in Arles on the French mainland for a crime he said he didn’t commit, Colonna was attacked by an inmate in prison on Mar 2 and died this week, plunging the ravishing but troubled island into a fresh chapter of violence and anger against France’s central government.
“I feel all the bitterness of Corsica rising in my throat,” said Massimo, a local 60-year-old who fought back tears as the coffin was carried from the church towards the family vault a few miles away.
Fists were raised during the Corsican anthem and a ripple of applause erupted when the choir sang pro-independence hymns.
Colonna never came out of a coma after an Islamist inmate placed a bag over his head and strangled him as he worked out in the prison gym, later telling guards a voice from above had ordered him to kill his friend because he had committed blasphemy. No guards came to help during the eight-minute attack.
Nationalists have accused the French state of having blood on its hands by denying him the legal right to be transferred to a Corsican prison on the
‘I fear the worst and we are dancing on a volcano’
grounds that the prison in mainland France wasn’t secure enough.
After prefect Érignac’s murder, some 30,000 – almost a tenth of the population – took to the streets to air their disapproval and shock.
Yet, the Corsicans were long ambivalent about the “shepherd from Cargèse”, caught after four years hiding in the Corsican countryside with his goats.
However, 25 years on, Colonna’s death and the failure of the French state to protect him have paradoxically sparked a similar sense of outrage and turned him into an overnight martyr for many Corsicans, particularly the young not born when he was arrested.
“He has become the symbol of all injustice against the island – a Corsican Che Guevara for much of its youth”, said Thierry Dominici, a political scientist and expert on Corsican nationalism.
A sign in French welcoming visitors to Corsica along the road to Cargèse had been graffitied with the Corsican words: “Gloria à tè Yvan” (Glory to you, Yvan). Another reads: “Tomorrow, the hour of revenge approaches.”
After the prison attack, thousands staged violent protests against the “killer French state” in Corsica’s Ajaccio and Bastia with more than 100 injured.
Taken aback by demonstrators who hurled nails and petrol bombs, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, dispatched his interior minister Gérald Darmanin to ease tensions by pledging to open discussions for greater “autonomy” on the island.
With just two weeks before the presidential election he is polling to win, Mr Macron’s rivals have accused him of pandering to violence.
“I fear the worst and we’re dancing on a volcano,” said Gilles Simeoni, the pro-autonomy head of Corsican regional government, who was Colonna’s lawyer and one of eight men who carried his coffin after it landed at Ajaccio’s airport on Wednesday.
In a controversial decision, he ordered flags to fly at half-mast as “a symbolic gesture to acknowledge the collective sadness”.
The move prompted fury in Paris, with Mr Macron condemning it as “an error, and inappropriate”. Manuel Valls, the former prime minister, called it an “apology for terrorism”.
Conservative presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse described it as an “outrage against the memory of prefect Érignac”.
In a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Simeoni said if Paris had taken more heed of Corsican voters, the situation would not be so explosive.
“Since 2015, nationalist ideas in Corsica have acquired a democratic legitimacy greater than any other political movement or leader in Europe,” he said.
“Over three elections, some 70 per cent of the vote has gone to nationalists – autonomists or pro-independence groups – with a turnout double the French national average.
“By refusing to acknowledge universal suffrage, the state has created the conditions for Corsicans, and notably the young, to consider that democracy doesn’t work. If democracy doesn’t work, then there is the street.”
Mr Simeoni said Paris was waking up late after having rebuffed many of their demands, including allowing only Corsican residents to own property on an island where 40 per cent of houses are second homes, and recognising the Corsican language as an official tongue alongside French.
On that point, he said Wales was an “inspiration”.
As for autonomy, he said Corsica wanted similar devolved powers to other Mediterranean islands in Italy, Spain, or Portugal, citing the Azores as a model.
Mr Simeoni faces being outflanked by more radical student movements and pro-independence groups who claim they have “won more in seven days of riots than seven years of politics”.
Some refused to sign a document setting out a framework for autonomy discussions with the government with some privately calling Mr Simeoni a “collaborator”. Paul-Felix Benedetti, head of the main pro-independence opposition Core in Fronte party, which didn’t sign, said: “There will be no violence if France enters into serious dialogue. But if it was all bluff to buy themselves two weeks of calm during presidential elections, then they’ll reap 20 years of war,” he said.
Last week, Corsica’s liberation front, FLNC, which laid down its arms in 2014, threatened to take up armed struggle and the “night path of the maquis” once again if the French state remained “deaf ” to its demands.
Mr Simeoni agreed Corsica was a powder keg. “Something has started and I don’t think anyone can control it. There is an uneasy calm, a calm for mourning, but there is anger and a sense of injustice, which feeds revolt.”
One mourner who knew the Colonna family said: “The Corsican people exist. It has its own flag, hymn, language, culture. You will see that for yourself in the coming days.”