The mayor of Mamoudzou, the largest city in Mayotte, addresses “a message of solidarity” to the family of Lola, the 12-year-old schoolgirl assaulted in Paris, whose death arouses great emotion in the capital. Why ? “Because in Mamoudzou it has almost become my daily life to offer condolences to families who are victims of violence”sympathizes Ambdilwahedou Soumaila.
Eleven of the seventeen mayors of Mayotte, accompanied by parliamentarians and departmental advisers, came to Paris on Tuesday, October 18, to demand more significant measures from the government in the face of the dangerous deterioration of the security situation on their island. They are due to meet, on Wednesday, the presidents of the two assemblies, as well as the overseas minister, Gérald Darmanin, and his deputy minister, Jean-François Carenco.
The French department of the Indian Ocean is overwhelmed by violence and by illegal immigration from neighboring Comoros, to the point, according to Mr. Soumaila, of now finding itself “on the brink of civil war”. On September 14 and 15, a “dead island” day was decided in the public services to alert on the conditions of the start of the school year, school buses being regularly stoned, and many schoolchildren, threatened.
“France must protect its citizens”
Welcomed by David Lisnard, the president (Les Républicains) of the Association of Mayors of France, the Mahorais described, on Tuesday, an insecurity which has risen a notch in recent months. “More than one out of two Mahorais feels insecureunderlines Madi Madi Souf, president of the Association of Mayors of Mayotte, and elected official of Pamandzi. We demand that indifference and contempt cease. France must protect its citizens. »
Violence in the department is the subject of a “structural undervaluation” in official data, the Senate pointed out in a 2021 report. The rate of intentional blows and injuries is estimated to be twice that of France. And four times as many households say they are victims of burglary, according to an Insee victimization survey, which spoke, at the end of 2021, of“attacks on non-standard property”.
Gérald Darmanin, who visited the island in August, promised to return there in the coming months. The government has already announced four additional gendarmerie brigades (fifty men), but apart from the fact that it will take twelve to eighteen months to recruit them, there is no barracks to house them.
Mr. Madi Souf asks that another promise be made more quickly, that of a second penitentiary centre. He also hopes for the creation of a court of appeal, means of border control (drones, police reinforcements, military ships), and the end of “territorialized” residence permits issued by the prefecture. these “means that a population of several tens of thousands of regularized foreigners is maintained in our small territory of 374 km2 »he notes, while Mayotte already lacks everything: schools, roads, water.
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