There is a supposedly elite French police unit, the "CRS 8", which, on the first day of its recent deployment to Mayotte, reported that it had fired 650 teargas grenades, 85 blast balls and 60 rubber bullets, and also used live ammunition on 12 occasions when bullets were fired at the ground to push back civilians who were resisting the officers.
There is also Salime Mdéré, a vice-president of the Mayotte département council, who is close to the conservatives but who supports President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and who, on a local public TV channel, called for murder. “These delinquents, these louts, these terrorists – at a given time perhaps they should be killed,” he said. “I weigh my words. If there is not one who is killed there will always be others who will dare to kill police officers.”
Then there are the court magistrates in Mamoudzou, the capital town of Mayotte, whose independence stood up firmly to the abuses of the executive powers by ordering the immediate suspension of a planned “irregular” clearance by police of a nearby shanty town whose inhabitants’ safety, they ruled, was “imperilled”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It is an understatement to say that, contrary to the bragging of French interior minister Gérald Darmanin, operation “Wuambushu”, which he put in place (and on stage) from Paris, 8,000 kilometres away, in the name of the fight against “illegal immigration”, is very distant from what he on Tuesday called “the restoration of republican peace” as he backed the appeal by Mayotte prefect (the government’s representative) against the suspension of the shanty town evictions.
On the contrary, it is a war that is intended by this operation of destruction of habitations and expulsion of inhabitants. It was given in Paris the codename “Wuambushu”, which in the Maore Comoran indigenous language on Mayotte means “recapture”. It is a word that echoes all the xenophobic and racist talk about migrants, refugees and the exiled, who are accused of dispossessing the proclaimed legitimate inhabitants of their land, culture and identity. These must therefore be “recaptured”, as if they had been stolen by others, the illegitimate occupants.
Once again brandished about in a political diversion, this time as yet another piece of draft legislation that Emmanuel Macron wants to impose “before the summer” (according to his latest interview with French daily Le Parisien), the issue of migration has always been the laboratory of a state of exception, where sifting, detaining, expelling goes on, where men, women and children are brutalised for their only wrong of travelling, by necessity or desire, in the wish of a better life or with the dream of other horizons.
There is nothing more logical to this spiral, given that, in this so hackneyed quest for the foreign scapegoat, it spreads and installs the notion of a natural inequality of rights. Turning the back on true matters of urgency – those about democracy, social and environmental issues, and so on –, the obsession with the hounding of “illegal immigration” serves to accustom people to the idea of a hierarchy among humanities, between those with rights and those without rights. It thus rejects the natural equality which is the principle of democracies, not only at the forefront of their constitutional values but also at the origin of their historic existence, founded on a refusal to grant an individual privilege as a birthright.
But in the present case in Mayotte, to this denial of humanity is added a colonial context, as witnessed by the above-mentioned practices of the police (use of live ammunition) and the tone of political speech (a call for murder). Because colonization is founded on the violation of human rights, through conquest, occupation and domination, it spontaneously generates excesses and abuses by the colonising power. One authorises oneself, one lets oneself go, one stigmatises and dehumanises, in the style of Emmanuel Macron who, commenting in June 2017 on the small boats used by people from the Comoros to reach Mayotte, said the “kwassa-kwassa” – fishing boats with outboard motors – “fished little” but “brought in the Comoran”.
Having become a French département (an administrative region equivalent to a county) in 2009, Mayotte is the fruit of an abduction. Violating international regulations concerning the respect of borders, France took it from the archipelago of the Comoros islands, when the latter became independent, to which Mayotte belonged. That annexation is illegal under international law, whether with regard to the resolutions of the United Nations (UN) or those of the African Union. It is this same international law that is quite rightly invoked to denounce Russian annexations before its full-on invasion of Ukraine. France, which votes for UN resolutions condemning Russia, happily violates such principles.
Those who champion French sovereignty over Mayotte argue against the suggestion that this runs counter to international law by saying the annexation was voted for by a majority of the population of Mayotte in a referendum. In truth, as illustrated over a long period by the operations in this archipelago of mercenaries like Bob Denard, it was never for France a question of acting in the interests of the local populations, but rather in the interests of itself, in the logic of an imperial power, given the strategic interest in Mayotte’s location in the Mozambique Channel.
The best proof of this is the lamentable condition in which France has maintained the population of Mayotte, and which was exhaustively detailed in a 2022 report drawn up by six French ministers and revealed by Mediapart. A département in form only, Mayotte is relegated to the lowest depths of the French republic. It is the poorest département, where 8 people in every ten live below the poverty line, where one in every three of the population of working age is unemployed, where life expectancy is 75, and, above all, where public spending per inhabitant is three or four times less than on mainland France.
It is therefore a war against the poor that interior minister Gérald Darmanin has launched, and not only concerning migrants. Because the populations that are targeted in the spectacular operation are the same as those that it pretends to be protecting. In Mayotte, the Comorans who France intends expelling from the island, firstly destroying their homes and then placing them in camps, are not foreigners. They are part of the same people, the same culture, language and religion. The French government, as ethnologist Sophie Blanchy points out, “faces the one and same population”. The only distinction is that some have French nationality and others do not.
From there, one can recognise how much what is playing out over there concerns us over here on the mainland. This great roundup in Mayotte promotes the worst of far-right ideology, the “Great Replacement”. It shows that one can sift and select individuals from among the same people, having established the monstrous idea of a foreign occupation that legitimises the expulsion of supposed undesirables. In face of the world, the France of “the rights of man and the citizen” disregards the notion of equality of rights, giving the green light to every authoritarian regime (and there are many, in Africa also, as demonstrated by the autocratic Tunisian president) to hunt down humanities in movement in order to avoid being brought to account by their peoples.
In the same geographical zone, another imperial power took possession of an archipelago in order to protect its own interests and those of its allies. This is the case of the Chagos Islands, Britain’s last colony in the Indian Ocean, and where it handed the United States a military base, on the largest of the islands, Diego Garcia. The native Chagossians, who had lived there since the 18th century, were brutally removed from their islands and forced into exile. The French-British lawyer Philippe Sands has campaigned for that injustice to be condemned by international law and prosecuted as a crime against humanity.
He has written a book about his combat, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain's Colonial Legacy, published last year by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. As an epilogue, he quoted the Martinican (Martiniquais) poet and politician Aimé Césaire who, in his book Discours sur le colonialisme, wrote: “A civilisation which employs trickery with its principles is a moribund civilisation.”
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.