WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL - Tribune, No to Operation Wuambushu in Mayotte (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The unity of our camp is essential, at a time when, despite the court decision to

suspend an evacuation deemed too dangerous, the French State is appealing to
bring an inhuman operation to an end. The following text is a collective forum of
personalities and organizations, including the Libertarian Communist Union, who
believe that the police operation which should resume in Mayotte testifies to an
"authoritarian hardening of the government" which uses the department overseas as
a "laboratory" for its next immigration law. ---- On April 24, the Minister of
the Interior and Overseas, Gérald Darmanin, and the French government decided to
launch a violent operation against residents of Mayotte coming from other islands
of the Comoros. Named "Wuambushu", it was discreetly validated by Emmanuel Macron
in the defense council in the name of the fight against "delinquency" and
"informal housing".

On the program, 400 daily evictions for a total of 24,000 evictions over two
months, destruction of 10% of the island's informal housing per day. The state is
thus seeking to throw into the streets and expel thousands of people. For the
occasion, 510 additional police officers were sent as reinforcements, including
police officers from CRS 8 or ERIS to support the RAID and the GIGN already on site.

This Tuesday, the operation was temporarily slowed down in Kongou, in the Talus 2
slum, by the decision of the Mayotte court which suspended the destruction of the
neighborhood for reasons, among other things, of the absence of guarantees of
rehousing presented by the state. A decision that does not stop the operation,
however, the State having reaffirmed its desire to carry it out. In reality, he
is counting on the almost total and systematic impossibility of seizing a judge
to be able to act in defiance of any legal framework.

With the launch of "Wuambushu", we must be prepared for an onslaught of violence,
within the framework of a military-police operation which is part of the
continuation of the authoritarian hardening of the government and its violent
repression of strangers. The police interventions also began on Sunday April 23
with a deployment of the CRS 8 around Tsoundzou, during which the police unit
used nearly 650 tear gas canisters and fired live ammunition with automatic pistols.

The scale of the offensive is also justified by a far-right discourse, making
Comorians and foreigners the culprits of the social situation on the island and
of all the evils that affect its inhabitants. Anti-Comorian xenophobic remarks
from deputies and local elected officials are unleashed and have taken a step
forward in horror with the recent outing of the 1st vice-president of the
department of Mayotte who called for the murder of young immigrants. A rhetoric
whose violence masks the reality of a territory where 77% of the inhabitants live
below the poverty line and where the unemployment rate reaches 30%, but above
all, the origin of this misery.

France is however historically responsible for a schizophrenic situation since it
tore Mayotte from the Comoros archipelago in the mid-1970s to maintain positions
in the Indian Ocean. Since 1976, 20 resolutions of the United Nations General
Assembly have affirmed the sovereignty of the Comoros over the island of Mayotte,
which officially remained under French domination. The new amputated independent
Comorian state found itself struggling with a caricatural neocolonial policy,
which left this country bloodless, while the permanent policy of community
division, consubstantial with colonialism, increasingly anchored Mahoran society
to the France, making the island an overseas territory and then a department.

At the same time, the State has continuously tightened its migration policy and
the reception conditions for foreigners and in particular for Comorians from
other islands: introduction of the "Balladur visa" by Charles Pasqua in 1995,
reduction of asylum application deadlines to 7 days, hardening of the law of the
ground... Exceptional laws which gave rise to a hunt for undocumented migrants,
who come and return on makeshift boats, taking disproportionate risks and
creating a veritable marine cemetery between Mayotte and the neighboring island
of Anjouan. According to a Senate report, between 1995 and 2012, between 7,000
and 10,000 people died trying to reach Mayotte. This data is not updated due to a
deliberate policy of hiding the dead.

We strongly denounce "Wuambushu". This demonstration of security force will only
worsen an already dramatic situation and only offer the State a laboratory for
its migration policy which will be further tightened with the next immigration law.
The fight against the operation is inseparable from the fight to roll back the
authoritarian offensive in progress. It is therefore essential that all the
organizations of the social movement take it up and also mobilize on April 29,
the next date of demonstration against the government's future immigration bill.

This column was originally published in Liberation. Find all the signatories of
this forum initiated by the Collective Stop Wambushu in Mayotte (CSUM), the
organization Révolution Permanente and the association Survie by clicking on this
link.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Non-a-l-operation-Wuambushu-a-Mayotte
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