2023-04-30 05:00:11
Sthere is one area where a government that claims to prevent the extreme right from coming to power must be rigorous, and that is immigration. No “denial of reality”as the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, says, but there is no question of rolling the mechanics in vain either, as Gérald Darmanin has just done with regard to Mayotte.
The Minister of the Interior could not remain inactive in the face of the chaos in which this small island in the Indian Ocean, between Mozambique and Madagascar, is plunged, which chose to remain French in 1974. In Mayotte, there is no doubt : poverty and insecurity are linked, among other things, to massive irregular immigration from Anjouan, an island attached to the Union of the Comoros, an independent state since 1975.
Mayotte is a French department with its social safety nets and its democracy, located 70 kilometers by sea from a country, the Comoros, which comes from the same history as it, but nine times less rich and under the control of an authoritarian regime. Nothing to do with the migratory context of France, as the far right would have us believe, for whom Mayotte, where ex-colonized people are fighting to remain French, has been a divine surprise for decades, crowned by the 59% collected by Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential election.
But the government, by letting Mr. Darmanin boast of “Restore Republican Peace” by the destruction of slums and the expulsion of undocumented migrants, suggests that the Mayotte equation boils down to a simple question of maintaining order. In reality, the crisis is the product of nearly half a century of postcolonial conflict that has never been resolved and is the result of multifaceted action including French diplomacy.
Principle of self-determination of peoples
It has been forgotten, but the political choices that led to this inextricable situation – a population multiplied by seven since 1974, two out of three births from mothers from the neighboring island – were by no means self-evident. With the approach of the referendum of December 22, 1974 on the independence of the French Comoros, of which Mayotte was one of the four islands, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had refused that the case of Mayotte – known to be pro-French – be treated separately. : “Is it reasonable to imagine, he said, that part of the archipelago becomes independent and that an island (…) retains a different status? »
When the results of the referendum are announced (95% in favor of independence throughout the archipelago), there is no question of taking into account the singular voice of the Mahorais (63% against independence ). But the right in power, like the socialists, then changed their position and decided to uphold the pro-French demand of the Mahorais. In the National Assembly in 1975, while former Prime Minister Pierre Messmer invoked “the right of peoples to self-determination” in support of this thesis, the Communists castigate the “neocolonialist politics” and the will to ” divide “ an old colony.
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