At the call of several collectives, almost 400 people demonstrated in the rain on Sunday January 21 at the Cavani stadium in Mayotte to demand the dismantling of a camp containing around 500 migrants. Separated from the demonstrators by the sports ground fence, migrants from the Great Lakes region and Somalia, half of whom enjoy international protection or are asylum seekers, responded with French flags and pieces of white fabric with the message: “We say no.” to xenophobia in Mayotte” or “Stop the harassment of African refugees in Mayotte”.
Read the decoding: Mayotte, the legal exceptions department
Since the end of December and the rejection of an emergency evacuation request by the administrative court, there has been great tension in this district south of Mamoudzou. Supported by several groups of Mahorese citizens, local residents are protesting against the impossibility of using sports infrastructure and naming foreigners as responsible for thefts, assaults and drug trafficking.
“There is a very strong stigma against them here and violence occurs almost every day,” observes Charline Ferrand-Pinet, director of Solidarité Mayotte, an association that helps asylum seekers in this French department. There were clashes, vehicles were set on fire, and there was violence against the police by gangs of criminals who wanted to fight with migrants.
“There is a question of insecurity, but this camp poses serious problems of public hygiene,” denounces Safina Soula, head of the Mayotte 2018 Citizens’ Collective. The people in the neighborhood can't take it anymore. Mayotte is a small island, we cannot bear the misery of the Indian Ocean [principalement des Comores et de Madagascar] and now that of continental Africa. »
A “quasi-insurgent” situation
Due to a lack of space in the island's emergency shelters, migrants began settling on a sloping plot of land overlooking the stadium's athletics track from mid-May 2023. The number of makeshift shelters made of wood, bamboo, covered with blue tarps, mats and loincloths held together by ropes has never stopped growing. Single men or families come from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi, Rwanda and, increasingly, Somalia, and wash in an open pipe that crosses the country and draws water from a nearby source.
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