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Security operations continued in Mayotte as part of its ongoing operation to expel illegal migrants. The police clashed with young people overnight. Mayotte is the French Indian Ocean island, which is 70 km away from Comoros.
Security operations continued in Mayotte as part of its ongoing operation to expel illegal migrants. The police clashed with young people overnight. Mayotte is the French Indian Ocean island, which is 70 km away from Comoros.
France deployed some 1,800 members of the security forces to remove illegal migrants who have settled in slums on the island. The migrants are mostly from neighboring Comoros. According to French sources, crimes are rampant on the island, where there are delinquent gangs of young people. People are living in poor sanitary conditions.
According to French sources, only half of the estimated 350,000 people living on the island are French nationals, while the rest are illegal migrants from the neighbouring Republic of Comoros. Grande Comore, Mohéli, and Anjouan islands, sought independence from France in a 1974 referendum.
People whom the French police are targeting said that although they are born to families from the Comoros, being born in France, they have the nationality, and are French. Recently, a ruling by a French court halted the controversial expulsion of migrants from at least one neighborhood near the capital at the last minute. The court said that the action had no legal foundation and threatened public liberties.
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The local administration said it would appeal against the ruling. A good number of the illegal migrants have lived all of their lives on the French island. They resist the move tooth and nail to send them back to Comoros, where they claim the culture is unknown to them. France says it plans to expel the illegal migrants to Anjouan, the closest Comorian island to Mayotte. In the meantime, Comoros maintains that it would not accept people expelled under the plan that has triggered tensions between the two countries.
