Elected officials, residents, nationalist activists… In Cargèse, Corsica, hundreds of people came to say goodbye, Friday March 25, to Yvan Colonna, the child of the country, fatally attacked by a fellow prisoner in the prison where he was serving his sentence for the assassination of the prefect Claude Érignac.

The independence activist, who died Monday evening as a result of his violent attack on March 2 at the prison of Arles, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, was buried in the family vault at the end of the afternoon, in this village of 1,300 inhabitants, cradle of the Colonna family.

Several hundred people accompanied the coffin, carried by six men, over the four kilometers leading to the "Family Joseph Colonna 1905" vault, in the middle of nature.

Just before the burial, the crowd gathered on the access road to the vault, a few meters from the family, sang the "Dio vi salvi Regina", the Corsican anthem, then independence songs.

And if a man, bouquet of violets in his hand, regretted, with a sonorous "vergogna" ("Shame on you"), that "war songs [are uttered] in front of a dead man", most on the other hand have applauded, responding with waves of "Viva Yvan!"

The missing blue-white-red flag  

Arrived shortly after 2 p.m. in Cargèse, from Ajaccio, the coffin first passed in front of the Colonna family home, then "in front of the field of olive trees [qu'Yvan] had to abandon one day in May 1999", before his four years on the run, as announced in the death notice, in the Corsican language, in the daily Corse-Matin.

It was then a long religious ceremony that followed, in the presence of several personalities from the island: Gilles Simeoni, the separatist president of the Executive Council, Jean-Guy Talamoni, the former separatist president of the assembly of Corsica, or Charles Pieri, presumed former leader of the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC), a movement which recently threatened to resume armed struggle. 

Among the 2,000 to 3,000 people gathered at the height of the day, massed in front of the church and in the alleys of the village, many brandished "banderas", the Corsican flag struck with the head of a Moor.

A Breton flag and some Basque flags were also invited.

But the blue-white-red was invisible: "The French flag, you are not going to see it today", launches a man with a shaved head to a journalist, "it is persona non grata".

An "insult to the French state", according to Gérald Darmanin

On a wooden plaque, next to the church door, a stenciled face gazed out at the crowd: that of Yvan Colonna.

Here, he is the child of the country, dead at 61 years old.

Not the man sentenced three times to life for the execution by bullet of the prefect Érignac, in February 1998 in Ajaccio.

A crime he has always denied and of which many believe him innocent.

In testimony of "solidarity", the autonomist party Femu a Corsica, of Gilles Simeoni, had called for all flags to be lowered.

The half-masting on Tuesday by the Corsica community of the three flags - Corsican, French and European - adorning its facade had however been denounced as "a fault" by President Emmanuel Macron. 

Thursday, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin had even seen it "a kind of insult for the Érignac family, for the French State, for the representatives of the State".

The assault on Yvan Colonna, by an inmate convicted of "terrorist criminal association", while he had been asking for years to serve his sentence in Corsica, had raised a wave of anger on the island.

This tragedy also brought up the question of autonomy for this island-region of 340,000 inhabitants. 

With AFP and Reuters

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