The presidency of the Comoros asked Paris on Monday to abandon a forthcoming expulsion operation planned in Mayotte.
The Comorian government on Monday asked France to abandon a forthcoming operation of evictions, destruction of illegal housing and arrests planned in principle in Mayotte, a French department in the Indian Ocean facing rampant crime, against a backdrop of migration crisis.
The operation, called “Wuambushu” (“recovery”, in Mayotte) and designed by the Minister of the Interior and Overseas Gérald Darmanin, was validated in February by French President Emmanuel Macron, according to a source close to the case.
It should start on April 20, the date of the end of Ramadan. The migrants living in the targeted slums are all or almost all from the Comoros.
“The Comorian government learned with astonishment the news of the maintenance of the French government project (…) aimed at proceeding, in the Comorian island of Mayotte, with the destruction of slums, followed by the expulsion of all their occupants without- papers, to the island of Anjouan”, indicates a press release from the Comorian presidency published on Monday.
The Comorian authorities are asking the French authorities “to give it up”. Despite numerous calls from civil society and Comorian political parties, President Azali Assoumani had so far not spoken on the issue.
“Coming Massacre”
On April 5, Comorian civil society organizations held a press conference to warn of a “massacre to come”.
“We intend to seize the international organizations to inform them of the massacre that France wants to perpetrate on the Comorian island of Mayotte” had reacted, Youssouf Attick Ismael, the president of the Maore Committee (Maore means Mayotte in national language).
Intense diplomatic negotiations have taken place in recent weeks between the Moroni and the French authorities on this subject.
In Mayotte, voices were raised to express the fears aroused by such an operation. The island’s health personnel thus recalled, in a press release, “the dramatic consequences” of previous large-scale interventions in the fight against immigration.
The president of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, Jean-Marie Burguburu, wrote to Gérald Darmanin to urge him to “give up” this project, considering the risk of “aggravation of fractures and social tensions in an already very fragile context (…) and the violation of respect for the fundamental rights of foreigners in the context of mass expulsions”.
