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 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, the Beauvau tenant clarified that Wuambushu would be extended for “more than a month” and then that a “second type of operation” would begin in September, targeting agriculture and fishing via legal proceedings. illegal, as well as sleep dealers.
Mayotte flower necklace 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’.
“Now that we regain control of security, we have to take care of everything else,” the minister continued, calling for the development of tourism and agriculture and to solve the water problems, whose cuts are almost daily.
“He has the support of the population, but he must not let us down […]. 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, Operation Wuambushu 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,” said Safina Soula.
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 influx 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 beginning 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 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 visit “after the summer holidays in 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 metropolitan France.
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 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 had not yet been identified to build them.