A plane full of elated and relieved Australian tourists who had been trapped in New Caledonia during a week of rioting and looting touched down in Brisbane late Tuesday.
Their Royal Australian Air Force C130 Hercules was the first evacuation flight to leave the French Pacific territory since unrest began on May 13.
“When we landed, it was just like ‘Oh, thank God we’re here!'” said Mary Hatten, who had spent the last week holed up in a Noumea hotel as opponents of French rule took to the streets.
New Caledonia’s main international airport remains closed to commercial aircraft, stranding thousands of tourists like Hatten who flocked to the South Pacific isle looking for a slice of paradise.
They instead found themselves barricaded inside hotels with dwindling food supplies, as forces sent from Paris tried to quell protests, riots and looting fuelled by opposition to French rule.
Hatten said about 50-60 passengers were onboard the first flight including many children and pregnant women fleeing violence that has killed six and injured hundreds.
The Pacific territory of 270,000 people has been in turmoil since last week when violence erupted over French plans to impose new voting rules that would give tens of thousands of non-indigenous residents voting rights.
Hatten and her partner Phil arrived at Noumea Airport the day the unrest began. From the get-go, she told AFP, it was clear all was not well.
On the drive to the city “it looked very sketchy” she said. Scores of Indigenous Kanak protestors “lined the road, waving flags, burning tyres. It felt very uncomfortable”.
She spent the week watching the smoke rise over Noumea as successive commercial flights home were cancelled and police began staying at the hotel.
“It’s a holiday that we didn’t expect,” she said. “We just decided that, you know, if we could get a repatriation flight with the Royal Australian Air Force, we would take it.”
Finally, she got a call from Australian consular staff early Tuesday morning and was told to pack her bags and be ready to leave on 30 minutes’ notice.
A group of would-be travellers assembled in the hotel lobby before being loaded into half a dozen coaches and taken under police and military escort to the city’s Magenta airport, which usually serves domestic routes.
On the route out she saw the same plumes of “thick black smoke” coming from burning tyres.
Passengers waited in an airport hangar and were fed before taking themselves, their beach bags and their families onto the military transporter.
– ‘Most pressing needs’ –
For days, the Australian and New Zealand militaries have been on standby waiting for French authorities to give the all-clear for relief flights to begin.
French troops said they had cleared dozens of make-shift separatist roadblocks from the international airport to the city, but militants and protestors remain lined along some of the route.
Finally on Tuesday two Australian military planes and one from New Zealand dashed across the Coral and Tasman Seas to collect passengers from Noumea’s more domestic accessible airport.
More than 3,000 travellers are estimated to have been stranded by the unrest.
It is not known how many of those are tourists on holiday in New Caledonia and how many are Caledonians stuck overseas.
Australian authorities say about 300 citizens have registered for possible evacuation. It was not immediately clear how many would be on Tuesday’s flights in total.
The New Zealand Defence Force plane was expected to carry about “50 passengers with the most pressing needs”, according to Foreign Minister Winston Peters.
“In cooperation with France and Australia, we are working on subsequent flights in coming days,” he said.
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