The French government has been sitting on an alarming report since January 2022 about the situation in the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte. The report, which has not been made public, shows that Mayotte – the poorest of France's départements or counties - faces a host of tragic issues in the domains of security, health, the legal system and education.
This explosive document, seen by Mediapart, was written by a special task force made up of staff from inspectorates in six ministries (interior, justice, social affairs, finance, education and foreign affairs). Over a period of several weeks, the group interviewed more than 300 people from within the overseas département's administration and from across society.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The assessment that it makes, in terms of the plight of minors on the archipelago, is a devastating one for the French state. Everything in the Indian Ocean département seems out of control: spiralling poverty, a counter-productive migration policy, an alarming health situation and significant violence everywhere. And the response from the public authorities to all this has largely been inadequate.
In its conclusions the report notes that “the predominant feeling inside state services is a form of powerlessness faced with the scale of the challenges”. Bemoaning an “absence of consultation on public policies dealing with young people” it notes that “state spending is proportionately lower in Mayotte than in the other overseas départements and regions (DROM)”.
Throughout this report a picture emerges of a general collapse that interior minister Gérald Darmanin's security measures - he has stepped up both his visits to and his pronouncements about the overseas département in recent months – will clearly struggle to resolve on their own. According to Mediapart's information, the Ministry of the Interior has brought all its influence to bear to stop the report being made public.
When approached, the Ministry of the Interior declined to comment.
Massive poverty which does not deter migration from the Comoros
Mayotte, a small group of islands in the Indian Ocean, is one twentieth the size of the French Mediterranean island of Corsica with a population in 2020 of 279,000 – which was four times larger than in 1985. With 10,000 births a year is has today become the largest maternity ward in France. Poor housing is a scourge that has led to shanty towns sprouting up across Mayotte's islands, including the one at Kawéni in the capital Mamoudzou on the largest island Grande-Terre, which has been dubbed the “largest shanty town in France”. In 2017 France's official statistical agency INSEE estimated that 40% of Mayotte's homes were unofficial, with some of them erected in at-risk zones.
Despite the massive poverty there – eight people out of ten live below the poverty threshold, one person in three of working age is out of work and life expectancy is stuck at 75 – Mayotte remains eight times wealthier than neighbouring Comoros. That independent archipelago state, which has been independent since 1975, has a national poverty rate that was up to 42.4% in 2014, when around a quarter of its population lived in conditions of extreme poverty.
Such problems drive many Comorians to attempt to cross the stretch of water separating the Comoran island of Anjouan from Mayotte. It is just under 45 miles wide and takes between three to four hours aboard a kwassa-kwassa, a type of small fishing boat. Such vessels became infamous in June 2017 when the recently-elected President Emmanuel Macron was caught on camera saying that the “kwassa-kwassa doesn't do much fishing, it's carrying Comorians”. According to a report by the French Senate in 2012, between 7,000 and 12,000 people had perished or disappeared along this migration route since 1995; and many sinkings are regularly recorded.
“One imagines that it's a lot more today, especially since it became a département [editor's note, Mayotte became a département in 2011 following a referendum, making it administratively identical to the rest of France],” noted one source based in Mayotte, who preferred to remain anonymous. “The people whom you see arriving here come from all backgrounds and have different profiles: women, the seriously ill and handicapped, children travelling alone, migrants who had come to Mayotte before and who are attempting the crossing again after being expelled...” All of them come with the same objective, to have a “better life”.
But the instructions given by Mayotte's prefect or state official, which are in line with a tougher policy towards arrivals on the island, have led to tragic outcomes, the source said, referring to a sinking that occurred at the end of December. “The border police [editor's note, known as the PAF] are tasked with intercepting the boats at sea whatever the cost, with the agreement of Mayotte society,” said the source. “When the person steering this kwassa-kwassa refused to stop it ended up hitting the PAF boat, and the kwassa-kwassa capsized. It was in fact the intervention by the forces of law and order which led to this sinking.”
The report itself states: “The fight against irregular immigration is not succeeding in stopping the entry and settlement of a great number of undocumented immigrants on Mayotte.” It suggests increasing the resources that the PAF needs in order to reduce the number of arrivals.
According to INSEE's most alarming scenario, the level of Comorian immigration could lead to a population on Mayotte of around 760,000 by 2050. “Under a hypothesis in which the migration flow remains at the current level, the situation would become explosive,” says the report that the government would prefer to keep quiet about. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin is thus counting on a repressive approach to try to stem the number of departures from Comoros. And also to remove the migrants who are already on Mayotte using bulldozers to demolish the bangas – the local name for shacks made from corrugated iron – where many Comorians live.
As the daily newspaper Les Nouvelles de Mayotte revealed on February 2nd this year, from April the minister is planning to send no fewer than five extra mobile gendarme units to Mayotte, some 400 gendarmes in all, to “restore order”. According to the investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaîné the idea was approved by President Emmanuel Macron himself at a meeting of the country's defence committee. The plan is for a vast operation to tear down houses and clear the shanty towns of their occupants - who are often undocumented migrants - to arrest the heads of criminal networks and to send back the maximum number of people to the Comoros.
Horrific situation facing children
Many children and youths thus risk being uprooted and sent back to a country where a far worse situation awaits them. Going back to the Comoros, whether they are forced to or go back voluntarily, these unaccompanied minors (any minor who has attempted migration alone is known in the jargon as a 'mineur non accompagné' or 'MNA') will “not be welcome”, says the French government report. It explains that the “best thing for them is to go back to where they've come from”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
For those youngsters remaining in Mayotte, the reports notes they are in an “extraordinary ” situation and warns of the dangers they face. While 4,500 MNA were recorded on Mayotte in 2016, that figure can “only have grown in recent years because of the methods of tackling irregular immigration” which “automatically” causes “situations in which miners are left on their own”, the report's authors say.
“Comoran children have a lot of difficulty in getting schooling in Mayotte, because the local authorities block them on the pretext that they lack the infrastructure and places. So they knowingly throw a spanner in the works for undocumented parents who want their children to go to school, when education is a right for everyone,” said the source on Mayotte cited earlier. Some parents go as far as to hand over their children “on paper” to people with the correct documentation just so their children can go to school. This is a move seen as “ridiculous” said the source, given that these children's real parents are also on Mayotte.
Some of the stark figures in the report tell their own story about the general - and tragic – plight of children and young people on Mayotte. According to the document the number of “minors in major risk of being desocialised” is 6,600. Even worse is the fact that 9,200 children of primary school age did not have access to education in 2020. “The enrolment capacity of schools does not, at the moment, allow them to take in every child and young person from 3 to 16,” the report states.
Another striking figure in the report is that “5,400 minor children are being housed without their parents”. The authors judge that “child protection measures remain inadequate to a large extent”.
Mayotte has the highest number of students per middle school in France, and the worst educational outcomes in the country: 71.1% of young people have trouble reading against 9% in mainland France. That is why the report recommends “making the schooling of every child of primary school age, from the age of three, a short-term priority”. Another recommendation is likely to set off alarm bells, as it calls for “guaranteeing a quality diet”, and “putting the resources in place to provide food during school time, which is still insufficient”.
Indeed, the report's findings on the issue of health are also damning. Pointing out that the “provision of healthcare … still remains very insufficient”, it also warns about the “food poverty of young people”, which it considers “massive”, and says that there is “difficulty in putting in place measures to distribute meals in primary schools, middle schools and high schools”. The report also states: “At every age, the young people of Mayotte are in less good health that everywhere else in France.”
A 'structural' weakness in the legal system
On issues of law and order, the report speaks of “the policies of core state competencies being in difficulty and often thwarted”. A lack of law and order remains the “main concern” of inhabitants, faced with massive crime levels and sometimes extreme violence carried out by gangs. When it comes to robberies, 81% were carried out by minors, the report found, even if “many victims do not report it, particularly foreigners whose status is irregular”.
We tinker around the edges, trying to do our best.
When it comes to the legal system, the report says, the decayed nature of the institutions has led to “pressures than no jurisdiction in [mainland] France is experiencing”. On top of these “structural weakness”, the reports notes additional “aggravating factors”. These include judicial and court staff who are often inexperienced, the unappealing nature of the work and also the “disorganisation of the services and a lack of working collectively”.
According to the report, the result is “a downgraded response where the provision of rapid justice prevails over the resolution of fundamental issues”.
“We tinker around the edges, trying to do our best,” says one senior civil servant, who points to a genuine “structural problem” more than a lack of resources. “There's a lack of attractivity that prevents stability and leads to a significant turnover, but also a lack of training and of mid-level recruitment in the hierarchy, with magistrates straight out of [magistrates] school finding themselves next to a very experienced presiding judge,” says the civil servant. “We get language-related problems, too, because there aren't enough interpreters.”
According to this civil servant, the court clerks are poorly-trained and do not stay long enough, creating a “feeling of insecurity”, especially among younger magistrates. The clerks are also often hived off by the detention administration (which is seeking to lock up undocumented foreigners with a view to sending them back) to lend assistance to the judges who are in charge of deciding if someone should be detained or not. “That contributes to the disorganisation of the services,” says the official. “There's such a flow and such pressure from the prefect on this issue that everything revolves around that.”
The report says that in such a situation, the importance of the legal system's role in “social regulation” is even greater. And it criticises the fact that, because of the lack of a “strong commitment from the Mamoudzou prosecution department”, the fight against illegal working, document fraud, violence against women and corruption is somewhat neglected.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter
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