2023-06-24 18:31:00
For Gérald Darmanin, “the results are there”. During a two-day visit to Mayotte, which began on Saturday June 24, the Minister of the Interior defended Wuambushu, his disputed operation to fight crime, illegal immigration and unsanitary housing in the French archipelago of ‘Indian Ocean.
The minister arrived in the morning in the 101st French department, the poorest in the country, with an explosive social and security situation. The authorities have deployed hundreds of additional police and gendarmes there since April to carry out a series of interventions grouped under the name of Wuambushu (“recovery” in Mayotte).
“It’s an operation that gives good results, we have to continue, probably a little differently,” said Gérald Darmanin to the press in Combani, in the center of Grande Terre.
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Wuambushu prolonged, before a second operation
Visiting a regiment, the Beauvau tenant specified that Wuambushu would be extended for “more than a month” then that a “second type of operation” would begin in September, targeting agriculture and fishing via legal proceedings. illegal, as well as sleep dealers.
A necklace of Mayotte flowers around his neck, Gérald Darmanin gave a speech a little earlier in the center of Mamoudzou in front of groups of citizens who had installed banners proclaiming “Mayotte says thank you to the police” or “Darmanin l ‘man of the job’.
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Gérald Darmanin awaited on several fronts
“Now that we have regained control of security, we have to take care of everything else”, continued the minister, calling for the development of tourism and agriculture and to solve the water problems, the cuts of which are almost daily.
“He has the support of the population, but he must not let us go […]. There is not a single public service on the island that is not impacted by illegal immigration, ”said Safina Soula, president of the collective of citizens of Mayotte 2018, to AFP.
Officially launched on April 24, the Wuambushu operation had announced ambitious objectives, but its results are so far modest, in the eyes of the collectives. “There needs to be a lot more decasing (destruction of slums, editor’s note), sanctions for slum merchants and more border controls,” says Safina Soula.
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A nuanced assessment
In an interview at Figaro put online on Friday, Gérald Darmanin assured that the government would maintain “more than a thousand” security forces on the island. Defending the results of the operation, he said that in two months, “violence against people has been reduced by 22%” and burglaries, thefts and damage to property “by 28%”, also claiming to have “divided by three the incoming flow of illegal immigrants”.
However, the objective of destroying 1,000 bangas, these unhealthy sheet metal huts, before the end of June has been postponed until the end of the year. Since the start of the operation, denounced by associations as “brutal” and “anti-poor”, only two slums, Talus 2 and Barakani, have been dismantled, which corresponds to approximately 250 dwellings.
The expulsions, with a target of 150 to 400 daily removals against 70 per day on average in 2022, were disrupted by the cessation of maritime links with the Comoros for almost a month, Moroni refusing to dock on the island from Anjouan of boats carrying migrants.
“We will have many more evictions than in 2022”
The crossings resumed on May 17, Gérald Darmanin assuring that Moroni now accepted “100% of irregular people”. In 2023, “we will have many more expulsions” than in 2022, when 25,000 people were expelled from Mayotte, all destinations combined, he also promised.
The Minister announced that he would go “after the summer holidays to Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Mozambique, no doubt to negotiate readmission agreements” with these countries from which some of the migrants come. He also said he was in favor of moving certain refugees who had been granted asylum to metropolitan France.
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New construction projects
Finally, the last objective of Wuambushu, the fight against crime, poses problems of prison overcrowding, to the point that the only prison on the island was blocked at the beginning of June by prison guards, the occupancy rate increased to 230%.
Gérald Darmanin said he was in favor of the construction of a second administrative detention center (CRA), where migrants awaiting deportation are locked up, and of a new prison, but that no land was for the hour identified to build them.
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