Corsican independence activist Yvan Colonna, who was being held in Arles prison in Provence, died on Monday after being attacked by another inmate in early March. The attack had left Colonna in very serious condition and led to violent clashes between hundreds of proindependence protesters and the police in various towns in Corsica.
Colonna was 61 and was being held under special surveillance in Arles because she was part of the commando that killed French Prefect Claude Erignac in 1998. After four years on the run and becoming one of France’s most wanted men, he was arrested on July 5, 2003 and sentenced to three life sentences. He has always pleaded innocence.
“Yvan is the most Breton of my children,” said Cécile Riou, Yvan Colonna’s mother in Le Monde, when her son went underground in the late 1990s, recalling that before fleeing his library, Comment peuton être Breton?, a pamphlet with great editorial success, published in 1970 by Morvan Lebesque, an activist close to the nationalist movements of the Breton left.
Both Yvan Colonna’s mother and father, JeanHugues Colonna, a former AlpesMaritimes MP, Socialist, Freemason and Republican, were gymnastics teachers. Together they decided to raise their three children (Christine, Yvan and Stéphane) in Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica. Yvan Colonna was fifteen when he spotted the first action on television, which is considered the birth certificate of the Corsican independence movement.
The Corsican nationalist movement is very diverse, but gained strength in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the end of World War II and after the Algerian War of 19541962, fought between the French and Algerian separatists, many Corsicans in exile moved to the island along with other French from Algeria (the socalled “piedsnoirs”). , “Black Feet”): The government launched specific programs for the region such as SOMIVAC (Corsican Development Society) to promote agriculture and tourism. However, these subsidies disadvantaged the local population in favor of the “black feet” and other “nonCorsican” who have since become the owners of most of the newly formed companies on the island.
In the mid1960s, amid widespread social discontent, the first attacks began on SOMIVACfunded facilities, which were accused of exclusively supporting and favoring those returning from Algeria. On August 21, 1975, Edmond Simeoni, cofounder with his brother of the CRA (Regional Action of Corsica) autonomous movement, occupied the wine cellar of an important Pieds Noirs entrepreneur in Aléria to protest a scam that was ruining hundreds of small bars threatened winemaker.
Autonomist group led by Edmond Simeoni with six hostages at a ‘piedsnoir’ estate, August 21, 1975 (STF/AFP/Getty Images)
Two days after the occupation, the gendarmerie intervened with 1,200 men, supported by some light armored vehicles: the French Prime Minister at the time was Jacques Chirac. Two police officers died in the attack and a nationalist was seriously injured.
Every Friday during the summer months, the Colonnas left Ajaccio to return to Cargèse in southern Corsica.
Founded in the 18th century by the Greeks fleeing Turkish rule, Cargèse was already a kind of state within a state: it had become the center of one of the most important antinationalist organizations and at the same time also the center of the Corsican nationalist movement. Here political conflicts were fought in the kitchens of houses, Libération wrote: and perhaps it is for this concrete, daily and radical confrontation that the Cargèse section of the Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC), the clandestine movement, launched With the events of Aleria in May 1976, he became one of the most radical.
In Cargèse, the Colonna family owned land that increased in value in the 1970s, mainly thanks to the growth in tourism. One of the first Club Méditerranée was founded here, and when the tourist village was plastered in the summer of 1977, Yvan Colonna signed his first act as a combatant on these walls. “It was our first attack,” said his childhood friend JeanToussaint Plasenzotti: “We had written everywhere: ‘The French people must support the Corsican people in their fight for national liberation'”. At that time Colonna was eighteen and no longer lived in Corsica.
In 1975 he followed his parents to Nice without ever being able to integrate. He and his older sister visited their Corsican schoolmates and law students at the University of Nice, which in those years became the main place for the political elaboration of Corsican nationalism. It was here that the Cunsulta of Corsican students was born, an association from which almost all the important figures of nationalism on the island emerged. And here the first pages of the weekly newspaper “U Ribombu” were written and the group “Canta u populu corsu”, both independent, were invited to sing.
At the end of the 1970s, and ten years late, the island’s young people were living their May ’68. Like her comrades, Colonna began to become actively involved in politics, challenging continental politics by directly challenging paternal ideals, raising the Moor’s Head flag, raising his fist at demonstrations, and marching through the streets, to demand independence for his island.
Independence protest in Ajaccio, February 3, 2018 (AP Photo / Raphael Poletti)
After graduating from high school, Colonna abandoned his studies and decided in the summer of 1981, together with his sister and brother, to stay in Cargèse, against the advice of his father, who had just been elected to the National Assembly. In the 1983 municipal elections, Colonna ran with his sister on Cargèse’s first Corsican nationalist list, and soon became the youngest of the “leaders” of the Nationalist Committees, the political arm of the FLNC.
When his first child was born in 1990, he and his partner did not call him by his grandparents’ name, as is very common in Corsica, but JeanBaptiste, in homage to his friend Acquaviva, a fighter for the nationalist cause who was killed there 1987 during an action by the FLNC and is considered a crime victim by the movement itself.
In Cargèse, Yvan Colonna tended a sheepfold during the day. He got up at 5 a.m. and returned home at 8 p.m. “An asceticism that corresponded to this soldiermonk’s vision of nationalism,” wrote Le Monde. And here, according to Libération, Colonna became an almost mythical figure: “That of a man who feeds goats by day and challenges Paris by night.”
Colonna never officially acknowledged his secret activities during those years, but he was stopped and arrested by the police many times: in 1983, then again in 1994, but each time he was released. “There have been 3,000 attacks in my region and I have never been captured,” he said himself during one of his trials for Erignac’s murder. The FLNC organized thousands of attacks over a period of forty years, attacking banks, civilian and military public buildings, and accused of armed robbery and extortion through the collection of socalled “revolutionary taxes.”
The first episode of Colonna’s active participation in one of these operations, of which we have news, took place on September 6, 1997, when he took part as a stake in the attack on the Pietrosella gendarmerie in the south of the island. This attack was crucial as the three bullets that later killed the Prefect Erignac were stolen by police officers who were briefly taken hostage during this operation.
Less than six months later, on February 6, 1998, Claude Erignac was killed with three shots at pointblank range in the head and neck in the center of Ajaccio, where the prefect was to attend a classical music concert. Three days later, a press release from a group called Les Anonymes claimed responsibility for the murder.
The search for those responsible began on the island, which led, among other things, to the confiscation of a telephone book with the contact details of numerous nationalists. This notebook served as a pretext for hundreds of arrests and interrogations. But it was not until May 1999, fifteen months after the attack, that most of those who would have been labeled as members of the “Erignac Commando” were arrested. And some of them named what they described as the perpetrator of the assassination attempt on the prefect: Yvan Colonna, who had since gone into hiding.
Colonna, whose tracks were followed from Marseille to Venezuela, was found after four years and arrested in July 2003 in Olmeto, about a hundred kilometers south of Cargèse. Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister who was preparing to run for the country’s president, announced the news with great force, declaring, among many criticisms, that he had overridden the principle of the presumption of innocence that French police had just accused Yvan arrested Colonna, “the murderer of the Prefect Erignac”.
Colonna was sentenced to life imprisonment at first instance in 2007, two years later on appeal, a judgment overturned by the Court of Cassation in June 2010 for failing to follow procedure when hearing a ballistics expert. After a new trial in which he was defended by Gilles Simeoni, former mayor of Bastia and current President of the Executive Council of Corsica, Yvan Colonna was again sentenced to life imprisonment. After the refusal of an appeal by the Court of Cassation, the verdict became final and Colonna was subjected to the socalled DPS (Détenu particulièrement signalé), a special regime of surveillance that always prevented him from being approached in a Corsican prison. requested several times from the French authorities.
In 2013, Colonna also appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that he was not entitled to a fair trial. However, in 2016 the court declared his application inadmissible.