Gérald Darmanin began a visit to Mayotte on Saturday to defend Wuambushu, his disputed operation to fight crime, illegal immigration and unsanitary housing, also promising to remedy the lack of water that hits this French archipelago in the ocean. Indian.
The Minister of the Interior is visiting until Sunday in the 101st French department, the poorest in the country, with an explosive social and security situation.
The government has 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 Mahoran).
“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.
Visiting a regiment, he said that Wuambushu would be extended for “more than a month” and then that a “second type of operation” would begin in September, targeting through legal proceedings illegal agriculture and fishing, as well as than sleep merchants.
Officially launched on April 24, Wuambushu had ambitious goals, but its results have so far been modest in the eyes of the groups that support it.
“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” , told AFP Safina Soula, president of the collective of citizens of Mayotte 2018.
In an interview with Le Figaro posted 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 unsanitary 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 around 250 homes.
Deportations, with a target of 150 to 400 daily removals compared to an average of 70 per day in 2022, were disrupted by the shutdown of maritime links with the Comoros for almost a month, Moroni refusing to dock on the island from Anjouan of boats carrying migrants.
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.
Wuambushu’s last objective, the fight against crime, poses problems of prison overcrowding, to the point that the only prison on the island was blocked in early June by prison guards, the occupancy rate having risen 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.
“Now that we have regained control of security, we have to take care of everything else,” continued Gérald Darmanin.
With his Minister Delegate in charge of Overseas Jean-François Carenco, they visited a water reservoir whose level is abnormally low for the season, and promised to speed up work to improve access to drinking water: increase the capacity of desalination plants, modernizing the distribution network…
Water cuts are almost daily in Mayotte, which is experiencing its worst drought since 1987.
“There will be no shortage of drinking water in Mayotte, there will be bottles of water for everyone at extremely reasonable prices,” promised Gérald Darmanin, who announced a price freeze from July 15.
24/06/2023 18:03:42 – Combani (France) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP