Guadeloupéen Independantistes
ARC - Alliance Révolutionnaire Caraïbe
MPGI - Mouvement Populaire pour une Guadeloupe Indépendante
UPLG - Union Populaire Pour La Liberation De La Guadeloupe
The camp of Guadeloupean Freedom fighters has many small members. The Parti Communiste Guadeloupéen (PCG), founded in 1944, calls since 1988 for independence as a goal to be achieved in a step-by-step, democratic elected way. But the Communist Parties of Guadeloupe and Martinique do not have their former strength. A fraction that split off this party gave birth to the Parti Démocratique Guadeloupéen (PPDG). The Union Populaire pour la Libération de la Guadeloupe (UPLG) is the island nation’s most radical independent group. The Alliance Révolutionnaire Caraïbe (ARC), founded in Point-a-Pitre in 1983, launched violent actions.
Guadeloupe (as well as Martinique, Guyane, and Réunion) is one of the former colonies of France that chose to remain tied to the mother country rather than seek independence following World War II. Through the 1946 law of political assimilation, these territories became départements d'outre-mer. Departmentalization, however, failed to bring about full social and economic equality. As political integration increased economic and commercial dependency on the metropole, the pressure of homogenization to the French model precipitated the loss of cultural autonomy. There were key differences between the Creole movement in Guadeloupe and its counterpoint, créolité, in Martinique. Both succeeded the earlier formulations of difference in the French Antilles - négritude and antillanité.
In the 1960s, an anticolonialist movement pushing for a change in political status appeared in Guadeoupe. The nationalist movement was rejuvenated in the 1970s by the selection of the Creole language as a symbol of political and cultural resistance to assimilation, conduit and container of an alternate ideology, and emblem of Guadeloupean identity and island specificity. With this resurgence of interest in kréyòl, a proliferation of associations, groups, and individuals became actively engaged in research and efforts to standardize and develop the language and to popularize its use in new public domains.
Unable to gain substantial popular support, and unwilling to participate in the existing French political institutions, many independantistes turned to alternative forms of influence, specifically violence. In both Martinique and Guadeloupe, small parties came together in new alliances, the Conseil National des Comites Patriotiques (CNCP) in Martinique and the Mouvement pour l'Unification des Forces de Liberation Nationale de la Guadeloupe (MUFLNG) in Guadeloupe.
This new and tentative solidarity did not prevent some erosion of local support, though the independence movement, and specifically the UPLG, sought to gain new legitimacy by identifying parallels with New Caledonia. This emphasised the international nature of the struggle for decolonisation. They also attempted to have the Antilles recognised by the United Nations Committee on Decolonisation.
Beyond slogans, there was little to unite disparate movements in a global struggle against French colonialism. In the more liberal Socialist environment, where there was greater autonomy, decentralisation and liberalisation of local cultural policies and social institutions, the independence parties had no successful candidates in a series of elections between 1981 and 1983.
In this climate radical nationalists chose the only recourse still available - political violence. In Guadeloupe, where shootings, bombings and kidnappings had been endemic to the political scene, political violence was well under way by 1981. In 1982 two members of the Groupe de Lib eration Armee de la Guadeloupe (GLA) were arrested.
Of all the pro-independence parties in the Antilles, the Union Populaire pour la Liberation de Guadeloupe (UPLG) is the largest and best organised, with the most widespread popular support, especially from unions such as the Union Generale des Travailleurs de Guadeloupe (UGTG). It has its own radio program and weekly journal, Lendependans. Unlike the other more theoretical independence groups, the UPLG had a broad threefold strategy, and has rejected the violence of ARC or the 'Algerian way' while supporting a 'popular violence' through mobilisation in support of particular issues, and is oriented towards obtaining working-class support.
The UPLG emphasised the need to transform the dependent economy and ensure working-class agricultural production, through occupying unused land, establishing cooperatives of both factory workers and agriculturalists, opposing 'blancs creoles' and ensuring that sugarcane remained the base of the agricultural economy. The UPLG attempted to ensure that sugar factories are kept in operation since 'cane is inscribed in our culture', sugarcane can be developed further (for example, through rum and alcohol production and the extension of irrigation) though other crops, such as yams and potatoes, could diversify agricultural production.
At the international level UPLG began in 1981 to try to establish Guadeloupe with the United Nations Decolonisation Committee and found, as the FLNKS had previously done, that Guadeloupe and independantiste aspirations were barely known elsewhere.
The MPGI (Independentist organization, Guadeloupe - Mouvement Populaire pour une Guadeloupe Indépendante) was founded in 1981 by Luc Reinette, an historic independentist leader of the Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance in Guadeloupe. Reinette was arrested on 7 March 1981, a suspected member of GLA (Groupe de Libération Armée), a clandestine group that had claimed responsibility for attacks perpetrated in 1980-1981 against authorities, official buildings (including the Court of Justice in Paris), police and gendarmerie stations, hotels, and banks.
On 28 May 1983, a new armed group named ARC (Alliance Révolutionnaire Caraïbe) claimed responsibility for a new series of attacks perpetrated in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, and Paris. From 1983 to 1989, ARC organized several attacks in the same areas, claiming three lives and injuring more than 50 people.
In Guadeloupe it was an open secret whispered about by everyone without anyone's being able to provide the details. "Yes," they positively stated at Pointe-a-Pitre. Luc Reinette, one of the independence movement leaders and presumed head of the Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance (ARC), which is respon- sible for several attacks, had had contacts with the French Government while he was hiding from the law.
Reinette and five other members of MPGI were tried in February 1985 for involvement in armed attacks. Sentenced to 23 years' imprisonment, Reinette escaped from jail on 16 June 1985. Reinette, once again on the run since 16 June after having succeeded in escaping from prison in Basse-Terre, broke his silence by making public a six-page statement dated 21 November 1984. In this document bearing his signature and his fingerprint, the Guadeloupian independence movement militant talks about the 6 months (from mid-April to October) during which he had contacts with "special envoys" from the French Government.
Finally and "with a profusion of precautions," the meeting took place "on Saturday, 26 May 1984 at 2050 hours in the vicinity of Les Abymes." Charriere- Bouinazel, who "made it clear that his presence was unofficial, the French Government desiring only to hear our demands," received Luc Reinette's demands: "liberation of political prisoners," "cessation of all manhunts engaged in to find members of the underground" and "official recognition of the right of the peoples of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guiana to self-determination." The contacts were reduced since the deaths of four UPLG militants who were blown up with their bomb "temporarily interrupted the process."
On 19 January 1987, he released a "call for civic and patriotic resistance". Reinette was eventually arrested in Saint Vincent on 21 July 1987 on his way to the prison of Basse-Terre in Guyana, where he had been granted political asylum, and transferred to Paris one week later. The Law No. 473 of 10 June 1989 granted amnesty to Caribbean political prisoners, including Reinette and 18 other members of ARC.
In 1997, the KLNG (Konvwa for Liberasyon Nasyonal Gwadloup), which also does not participate in the colonial elections, in the same way as the MPGI (Popular Movement for an Independent Guadeloupe), was created. in October 2004, the KLNG published a 22-page booklet mainly written by Luc Reinette entitled "Analyzes and prospects ... towards a Guadeloupean authority". The FKNG, which in 2010 took over the theses of the KLNG, reminded its founding Congress of its commitment to the establishment of a political authority in Guadeloupe.
Karesol Otorite Politik Gwadloup [KOPG], is not a political organization, but a "New Entity' to lay the foundations (the karesol) of a Guadeloupéenne political authority. The KOPG mission is to oppose frontally to the policy of the the French State in Guadeloupe dominated by France.
LKP is the acronym of Liyannaj Kont Pwotiasyon which means "collective against exploitation". The LKP is a Guadeloupean movement and collective comprising some 50 unions, political organizations or even cultural organizations that denounce the exploitation of the island and the relatively low standard of living of the populations. The LKP is a movement which goes back to December 2008, whose origin was to protest against the high surge of fuel prices on the island.
On 20 January 2009 Guadeloupe witnessed the launch of the largest political movement in its history. For 44 days a general strike brought the territory to a standstill: Schools and universities closed, major commerce was suspended, banks shut down, hotel rooms emptied, government services were discontinued, restaurants were shuttered, public transportation halted, and motorists became pedestrians as gasoline distribution was interrupted. Guadaloupeans marched in the thousands in what quickly became the largest political movement in the archipelago's history. (By Dominique Chomereau-Lamotte) Huge demonstrations accompanied the strike, with as many as 100,000 people marching in the streets demanding social and economic change.
Between 1,200 (according to Guadeloupe police) and 3,000 people (according to the organisers), rallied on June 30, 2009 in Pointe-a-Pitre in a demonstration concluding the “week of mobilisation” called by the LKP protest movement, the group that organised the general strike at the beginning of the year in Guadeloupe.
The spokesman of the group is Eric Domota, who is also the general secretary of the UGTG, the majority union in Guadeloupe. On October 24, 2015, Otorite Politik Gwadloup held its first public demonstration on the theme of Freedom. The Spokesman of the LKP Elie Domota, according to Reinette engaged in "an attack Incredible violence against us, claiming that we were financed by the Freemasonry, that our leaders were Freemason chiefs, that we were accomplices of the French Government and that in this respect our role was to cut the grass under The feet of the LKP taking back to our account its initiatives! ... It is now forty years that we have engaged in an unequal and difficult struggle against the French colonial forces in our Guadeloupe Country, in a political context where the collaborators of the System and the Resistance of which we are."
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