King Tomasi Kulimoetoke

Born: 26 July, 1918, in Mata-Utu.

Died: 7 May, 2007, in Mata-Utu, aged 88.

FOR almost half a century, Tomasi Kulimoetoke was the controversial king of Wallis, one of the Wallis and Futuna islands, France's most far-flung territory in the South Pacific. Since his monarchy is not hereditary, his death could pose a delicate foreign affairs problem for the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, albeit nearly 10,000 miles from Paris.

After the king flouted French republican law two years ago, some of his subjects rebelled. France at first supported the rebels, sending a squad of riot police from another of its unFrench-sounding Polynesian territories, New Caledonia, to support the islands' 30 gendarmes. Accusing the king of nepotism, reformist members of his clan called on him to abdicate and said they had chosen a new lavelua (king). A "coronation" was planned in defiance of the king.

France at first backed the reformers but, after the king's supporters blocked the riot police's arrival by strewing chopped palm trees and breeze blocks across the airport runway, Paris back-tracked to restore the peace. With one reformist dead, the French allowed the king to continue on the throne and the local gendarmes regained control.

The civil conflict of 2005 began after one of the king's grandsons, Tomasi Tuugahala, was found guilty, under French law, of killing a pedestrian while driving drunk. Rather than hand him over, the monarch initially gave him refuge in his palace, until French pressure, via the islands' supreme administrator (the French prefect) became too much. He was eventually sent to New Caledonia to serve an 18-month sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

Three years earlier, in 2002, the king riled many of his countrymen, as well as France, by shutting down the island's only newspaper. It had carried an editorial criticising him for giving refuge to a family friend, Make Pilioko, after she was sentenced to jail for embezzling public funds. Reformists also mocked the king's insistence that Wallisians dismount from their bicycles when passing his palace.

Like almost all the 14,000 inhabitants of Wallis and Futuna, mostly Catholics and descended from Tongans or Samoans, Tomasi Kulimoetoke was a subsistence farmer and pig-breeder until he was elected lavelua in 1959. His most crucial decision, in 1961, was to sign an agreement with Paris declaring the longtime French protectorate of Wallis and Futuna, measuring 100sq miles in total, an overseas territory.

With the islands dependent on French aid, topped up by significant remittances from around 20,000 Wallisian immigrants in New Caledonia, the next king is unlikely to oppose the colonial tie.

Wallis was traditionally known to the locals as Uvea but was renamed by Cornish navigator Samuel Wallis in 1767 and the English name stuck, even after the French took control in the 19th century. During the Second World War, it became an important air base in the Pacific war, with up to 6,000 US troops.

King Tomasi Kulimoetoke is survived by a wife and six children.