Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced the extension of the disputed “Wuambushu” operation on Saturday June 24, during a trip to Mayotte to defend and establish an initial assessment of action against delinquency, the illegal immigration and unsanitary housing. Visiting a regiment in Combani, in the center of Grande-Terre, he specified that the intervention will be extended by “more than a month” then that a “second type of operation” would begin in September, targeting, through legal proceedings, illegal farming and fishing, and slum traders.
In Mayotte, the authorities have since April deployed hundreds of additional police and gendarmes 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,” Gérald Darmanin told the press.
A long-awaited visit
The Minister of the Interior 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 the man of the situation “. His visit was eagerly awaited in Mayotte. “We have done a lot of things for several weeks and several months and we will continue,” he said, according to images broadcast by Mayotte la 1re. “Now that we have taken control of security, we have to take care of everything else,” he continued, calling for the development of tourism and agriculture and to solve water problems, including cuts 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 Agence France-Presse Safina Soula, president of the collective of citizens of Mayotte 2018.
Officially launched on April 24, the “Wuambushu” operation had announced ambitious objectives, but its results have so far been modest, in the eyes of anti-migrant groups. “There needs to be a lot more decasing [slum destruction], sanctions for slum landlords and more border controls,” said Safina Soula.
The destruction of sheet metal boxes postponed
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 claimed 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 a thousand 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 dwellings. 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 Comorian island of 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, probably 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 the mainland.
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 in early June by prison guards, the occupancy rate having increased to 230%.
Gérald Darmanin said he was in favor of the construction of a second administrative detention center, where migrants awaiting deportation are locked up, and of a new prison, but that no land had yet been identified. to build them.
