A chocolate factory and a soda bottling plant set on fire. As protests against French control boiled over this week in New Caledonia, the South Pacific archipelago experienced some of its most intense violence since a civil war decades ago. “I’m in a state of shock, I can’t move,” Lizzie Carboni, a writer who lives in Noumea, the capital, said by phone as the fourth night of protests began on Thursday. It built a penal colony and over time shipped in more foreigners to mine New Caledonia’s vast nickel reserves. That eventually made the Indigenous Kanaks a minority in their own land.

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Persons: Molotov, “, Lizzie Carboni, Carboni Organizations: Pacific, ” Locations: New Caledonia, Noumea, ” France, Australia