Corsica: Rough beauty reflects rocky history

Corsica: Splendour of its towering peaks attracts thousands of tourists

In this story: 'Clandestine deals' Seven months of negotiations RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com writer

LONDON (CNN) -- "Corsica is France, but it is not French."

Travel travel writer Paul Theroux hit on Corsica's most enduring paradox when he wrote about the Mediterranean island whose towering peaks evoked "a mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera."

To its 256,000 inhabitants -- 40 percent of whom live in Corsica's two biggest cities, the capital Ajaccio and Bastia -- the rough-hewn splendour of the landscape is more than the stuff of colourful travel writing, however: it is a totem of a history fraught with adversity in the face of outside overlords.

Corsica's idyllic setting in the crystalline waters of the western Mediterranean has made it a favoured beachhead for waves of seafaring marauders over the centuries.

It is an invasion that continues today as two million tourists flock annually to the blue hills, beaches and forests of the island. The island's population doubles every August, the peak month for overseas visitors.

By contrast, more than 800,000 Corsican expatriates live on the French mainland or abroad, a testament to the local economy's inability to retain native talent. The island's per capita gross domestic product is the lowest in metropolitan France.

Since the time of the ancient Phoenicians, almost three millennia ago, the so-called "Island of Beauty" has known only 15 years of true independence. That was a fleeting period of sovereignty in the latter half of the 18th century that was bracketed by five centuries of Genoese rule on one side, and two centuries of French control on the other.

Corsica's image as a sort of challenging paradise has made its way into literary classics as well: Ulysses lost most of his men to cannibals in Bonifacio, a beach resort on the island's southeastern tip, in The Odyssey, and, as Theroux notes, Corsica's dramatic landscape also provided imagery for Dante's Inferno.

The French have governed Corsica since the annexation of the island in the Treaty of Versailles in 1768.

To Pascale Bizzari, 39, a native Corsican from Ajaccio who is active in local politics, this historical chronology is a matter of personal pride.

"Corsica had an independent government for 15 years in the 18th century," Bizzari said. "This government was created before the French Revolution. So Corsica had a democracy before France -- even if it was tragic, Corsica was able to have a revolution earlier."

Since 1982, Corsica has existed under a special administrative statute, granted by Paris, that has afforded its residents a measure of local autonomy along with its own assembly comprised of 61 members elected by universal suffrage.

But the arrangement, many Corsicans say, has devolved in recent years into little more than an excuse for a tightly knit clan of local politicians to broker clandestine deals with Paris.

The result, since the mid-1970s, has been sporadic outbreaks of violence by nationalist and separatist elements who resent what they see as the central government's heavy-handed approach to governance of their island territory.

The tensions boiled over in 1997 when Paris' envoy to the island, Claude Erignac, was shot dead in an attack attributed to separatists.

Clashes between rival factions claimed the lives of around 20 nationalists between 1995 and 1997.

The political impasse has spilled over into the economy, spawning a sub-culture of mafia-style killings among rival clans. In August, two prominent nationalists were shot dead in a bar in upper Corsica, with police unable to determine whether the killings were politically motivated or a private settling of accounts.

One of the fatalities, Jean-Michel Rossi, was a founder, in 1976, of a nationalist separatist group called the Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC). In recent years, however, Rossi had distanced himself from the group and had recently collaborated with a former colleague on a book that accused group activists of complicity in drugs and arm trafficking.

Whatever the case, the killings are not seen as likely to jeopardise the recent peace overtures by politicians in Paris and Corsica.

In a sign that history may be breaking its mold, Corsican lawmakers in August overwhelmingly approved a proposal from Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to grant the island more autonomy in shaping its own laws.

The 44 to two vote, with five abstentions, came after seven hours of debate in the island's assembly that capped seven months of rocky negotiations with Paris, begun in December 1999.

Under the proposal, Corsica would be able to adapt certain French laws during a trial period, subject to approval by the mainland. Eventually, if the trial goes smoothly, the Corsican lawmakers would be given a freer hand to adapt certain laws without approval from Paris, though this would require changing France's current constitution.

Bizzari, who has closely followed the vagaries of Corsican politics over the years, said Jospin's overture to Corsica was a watershed after the failure of successive French governments to resolve the Corsica problem.

"It's the opening towards modernity, and Corsica can't afford to remain in an impasse," she said. "They (the political class) realises it can no longer sustain its clan-like methods. They realise that they have reached a limit, and that they can't continue as they have in the past."

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