TAHITI: Paradise Regained

Just about the last place France expected to be troublesome was Tahiti. The largest island of French Polynesia, Tahiti, 2,600 miles southeast of Hawaii, spends most of its time dreaming under swaying palms while the surf breaks gently on the coral reefs. Generations of expatriates—from Melville to Robert Louis Stevenson to Gauguin—have fled to the islands seeking forgetfulness in the company of sunlit skies and black-haired amoral vahines.

Trouble in paradise began in Papeete, capital city of the islands, when a Tahitian politician with the resounding name of Jean-Baptiste Céeran-Jeérusalemy and his governing R.D.P.T. Party (Rassemblement Democratique des Populations Tahitiennes) put forward a bill in the territorial assembly to impose an income tax, and announced a drive to seek independence from France for a new Republic of Tahiti.

Local businessmen, who are mostly Chinese, closed their shops in a strike against the income tax. And a throng of Tahitians who did not want to leave the protective custody of France gathered outside the territorial assembly building in protest. Someone thoughtfully arranged to bring up three truckloads of stones so that the demonstrators did not even have to bend down to find their missiles. Taking aim, the crowd managed to break 57 windows in the assembly building while Tahitian gendarmes tried vainly to recall what the textbooks said about riot control. An official who still retained a dim memory of how these things are handled in Europe ordered fire hoses turned on the crowd— but the water pressure proved so low that the demonstrators were gently sprayed instead of being driven from the street.

At week’s end a petition signed by prominent islanders was on its way to Paris urging President Rene Coty not to grant Tahiti an independence it does not want. Politician Ceéran-Jeérusalemy had second thoughts as well, and put in a long-distance call to President Coty to promise that he and his entire R.D.P.T. Party were “indefectibly” attached to France after all.