This is the second meeting of the week. More than a thousand people gathered on the morning of Saturday April 29 in Mamoudzou to renew their support for the “Wuambushu” security operation carried out by the authorities on the island of Mayotte and to demand a halt to the crime and illegal immigration.
“Citizen mobilization is important, it supports the action of elected officials who called for this operation to claim our security and our freedom,” Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of the capital of Paris, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). the archipelago. “Mamoudzou has the largest slum in France [Kawéni] and we are not proud of this record. A slum is first of all health and ecological insecurity, it is the indignity of the nation,” he added.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, launched a series of operations, grouped under the name of “Wuanbushu” (“recovery”, in Mahoran), aimed at dislodging irregular migrants from the insanitary slums of Mayotte, to most from neighboring Comoros. Of the estimated 350,000 inhabitants of Mayotte, half do not have French nationality.
Operation considered brutal and directed against the poor
The operation also aims to fight against the crime that is rampant in the archipelago, widely attributed to the explosive social and economic situation of its slums. “Wuambushu” is judged by many associations as “brutal”, “anti-poor” and violating the rights of migrants, but supported by elected officials and many inhabitants of the island.
Saturday’s rally was organized at the call of groups of Mahoran citizens. Many demonstrators, mostly women, wore T-shirts printed with slogans such as “Marshall plan for Mayotte”, “support for law enforcement”, “Azali [Azali Assoumani, president of the Comoros] occupies from your people.”
“We have to go to the mainland to live a normal life, to have our right to go out safely at night. We were robbed of our youth and yet we are the future of Mayotte which has a lot of assets,” said one of them, Moulaika Antoy, 18, a BTS tourism student.
In the crowd, Chafion Abdou, the activist of the Collective of Citizens of Mayotte from which the deputy Estelle Youssouffa (Liot) comes, supported the denunciation of illegal migrants. “We have to stop with the mentality of ‘he’s my brother, I’m not denouncing him'”, he defended. “There is an accountability issue in Mayotte with citizens having to stop providing proof of address to these people and help our mayors to take the census. »
The “Wuambushu” operation is taking place in a certain confusion: justice has suspended the demolition of a slum and evictions are hampered by the suspension “until further notice” of the crossings of the company SGTM between Mayotte and the island Comorian from Anjouan, despite the reopening of the ports of the Comoros.