No Carnival, No Settlement

You can tell there's a serious problem when Carnival gets canceled in the Caribbean. Martinique and Guadeloupe called off the event that everyone looks forward to all year. This is like calling off the Superbowl or New Year's Eve. Maybe even bigger. We talkin' Carnival, mon
But 35 days of a general strike have brought the economies of both French territories to a grinding halt. The death of a labor union member during demonstrations last week pushed Martinique to join Guadeloupe in deciding that the situation was too serious to engage in four days of debauchery and revelry that would have ended on Ash Wednesday. Of course, the festivities went on in nearby Trinidad & Tobago, Haiti, and the dozen other island nations that make Carnival the singular event of the year.
Instead, Ségolène Royale, the Socialist leader who lost the last presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy, flew 3,500 miles to attend the somber funeral of slain demonstrator Jacques Bino Sunday. His death capped a week of escalation between strikers and French police units, some reinforced by units from Paris, as protesters set up barricades and the police tried to remove them.
The French speaking world's attention has been focused on the two Caribbean islands for weeks as the confrontation forced an uncomfortable scrutiny of France's relations with its overseas territories. In fact, the lush islands southeast of Puerto Rico, a favored destination of 750,000 mostly French tourists each year, are départements, theoretically as much a part of France as Bordeaux or Marseilles.
The demonstrations and the strike started as a protest against high prices and crystallized around a demand for a 200-euro ($250) monthly raise for the lowest paid workers. Because almost all food and manufactured goods are imported from France, the cost of living is higher in the islands than in France. Civil servants gets a 40 percent premium to help defray the cost of living in Caribbean splendor.
Some of the strikers blamed high prices on the dominant role in the economy of the békés, a small group of whites who trace their roots to the slave owners and plantation masters of colonial days. This caused alarm in Paris, where discussions of racial inequality are infrequent and rarely substantive. The situation wasn't helped when a patriarch of a béké family suggested in a TV documentary that there were "postive aspects" to slavery.
France's minister for overseas territories came to mediate but then left suddenly for Paris, leaving some negotiations feeling insulted and others concluding he was powerless.
Sarkozy's silence on the situation was read by many in Guadeloupe as a lack of interest. But he stepped in as the French media focused on the racial tensions and the violence escalated. Last Thursday, The President met with representatives of all sides. Afterward, President Sarkozy declared on national TV that he understood the islanders sense of injustice. He announced a $730-million package of development funds and called the 200-euro demand reasonable. However, as France's most "American" chief executive, he indicated employers and not the government should pay for the increase. However the government indicated it would support the raises through tax breaks to employers and reduced social security costs. Sarkozy promised to visit the islands in April and begin a dialog on altering their political and economic relationship with France.
As usual, details turned out to be the big snag in the talks that resumed Monday, then broke off again. Nicolas Desforges, France's highest representative on the islands, said employers should bear the burden. Local business leaders balked, saying they could not afford it.
Leaders of the Collective Against Exploitation, the group that has organized and led the broad-based strike, said they had negotiated with employers for half the increase but that the government needed to put up the rest. The strikers piled up their barricades again. Stores that had opened for the first time in more than month slammed their shutters closed again.
So far, no discussions have suggested opening the island's import markets to cheaper products from neighboring countries like Venezuela, Mexico and the U.S. Sarkozy may be a fan of capitalism, but he's still French.