Gérald Darmanin announced Friday evening the extension of the operation “Wuambushu” to fight against unsanitary housing, illegal immigration and delinquency, which was to end at the end of June. In an interview with Le Figaro broadcast a few hours before his trip to this Indian Ocean department on Saturday and Sunday, the Minister of the Interior said that the government would “continue to inject resources, leaving an imposing security force, of more than a thousand men and women” in Mayotte.
The minister claimed “results”, which he said were achieved in the disputed operation which began in April. In two months, he claimed, “violence against people was reduced by 22%; burglaries, thefts, property damage, in general, decreased by 28%. “Above all, he continued, of the 57 gang leaders identified at the start, 47 were arrested and brought to justice”.
While on May 22, the Ministry of the Interior announced 236 arrests, Gérald Darmanin affirmed that a month later, “no less than 662 arrests had been carried out”. But the objective set by Mr. Darmanin of destroying 1,000 bangas, these unsanitary sheet metal boxes, by the end of June has not been achieved and has been postponed.
Since April, he said, “we have already been able to carry out 264 destructions of bangas […]. Our goal is to achieve the destruction of a thousand substandard housing by the end of the year”. The Minister argued that these were “delicate operations” requiring “social treatment”. The destruction of informal settlements has been the subject of appeals each time they were announced. “Maintaining slums is the inhumane solution,” Mr. Darmanin pleaded.
He claimed to have “divided by three the incoming flow of illegal immigrants”, coming from the Comoros, “for the first time in thirty years”, thanks to the means deployed to intercept the “kwassas kwassas”, these makeshift boats used by illegal immigrants. He claimed that Comoros is now taking back “100% of the irregular people we present to them” and predicted that 2023 would be “a record year” in terms of people deported from Mayotte.
Again, he advocated a change in the law of the soil in Mayotte, already derogatory since 2018 compared to France, and suggested fighting “against abusive recognitions of paternity”, which facilitate “illegal immigration”. Regarding the problem of water, very significant in Mayotte, he announced a freeze on the price of bottled water from July 15.