In May 2024, information began to spread on Telegram channels about the crimes of the French military sent to New Caledonia to quell unrest. The bloggers cited a report by Human Rights Watch that allegedly reported numerous rapes. We decided to check if this is true.
Since May 22, messages about 23 cases of rape of New Caledonian women have appeared in Telegram channels. These statements were accompanied by a video with the Human Rights Watch logo. The video said that while suppressing the unrest, the French military, who had recently been sent to overseas territory, committed numerous crimes, including raping local women. Telegram channels, in particular, wrote about this “Russian engineer"(1.5 million views at the time of writing this analysis), "The world today with "Yuri Podolyak"" (1.4 million) and "Sheikh Tamir"(123,000).
New Caledonia is a Pacific overseas territory of France. Unrest there started May 13, after a discussion of constitutional reform in the French National Assembly. The Kanakas (representatives of the indigenous population) were dissatisfied with the new norm, according to which French citizens who moved to New Caledonia and lived there for more than ten years should have the right to vote in choosing the local legislative assembly. After this, rallies against the reform took place in the capital of Noumea and other cities. turned into riots - burning of buildings and cars, and then clashes between supporters of independence and loyalists. On May 15, French authorities declared a state of emergency in New Caledonia, and the islands reinforcements arrived: gendarmerie forces, police special forces and military (for airport security). May 23 to New Caledonia arrived French President Emmanuel Macron, who promised a compromise within the framework of the rule of law. By May 27 known about the death of seven people in the riots, including two gendarmes. According to official data, 122 law enforcement officers were injured and more than 460 people were arrested.
A video with the Human Rights Watch logo, distributed by Russian-language Telegram channels, claimed that since May 17, 23 women had been raped, 11 of them during interrogations during which law enforcement officers found out the connection of the detainees with riot participants. Residents of New Caledonia were allegedly kept not even in a police station, but in a school utility room. As stated in the video, according to human rights activists, more than half of the victims are girls under 16 years of age.
It was not possible to find a single report on this topic in the main French media. There is also no report on recent events in New Caledonia, website Human Rights Watch. Since the beginning of the unrest, the human rights organization has limited itself to two links to media news reports about the situation in its mailings. 15 And 16 May.
The video itself is an almost two-minute video (01:52), in which photographs of New Caledonia and the unrest that took place there are accompanied by text and voice-over music. In the lower left corner is the Human Rights Watch logo. At first glance, the font is similar to the original one that the organization uses in its videos, but it is still different from it - this is noticeable in the example of the capital letter R.
“Verified” asked the human rights organization to comment on the viral video, but at the time of publication of the analysis did not receive a response.
The earliest post about the supposedly released Human Rights Watch report, according to the TGStat service, appeared in the Telegram channel “Sheikh Tamir» May 22 at 16:53 Moscow time. This channel was mentioned more than once in “Verified” reviews, including in connection with the distribution fake videos with logos of world media.
In recent months, France and Macron personally have become one of the main targets of pro-Kremlin propaganda, which also spread disinformation: for example, fake news about upcoming Olympic Games in Paris or about sending to Ukraine And death on the battlefield soldier of the French Foreign Legion.
Thus, reports about the Human Rights Watch report on the crimes of the French military in New Caledonia are untrue. There is no such report, the video with the organization’s logo was fabricated, and Telegram channels that have been repeatedly convicted of creating fakes began distributing it.
Cover photo: High Commission of New Caledonia
Read on topic:
- Le Monde. Nouvelle-Calédonie: les questions pour comprendre la crise
- Politico. Nickel, guns and foreign powers: How France’s New Caledonia reached the brink of ‘civil war’
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- Is it true that NATO reported the possibility of using Azov to suppress protests in France?
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