Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin visits the 101st French department on Saturday and Sunday. The opportunity to take stock of the fight against unsanitary housing given the difficulties of re-housing families from slums.

On the edge of the national road that goes around Mayotte, Adidja, 33, is trying to sell some bananas to residents of the Majicavo district in the north of the island. Behind her, a mound appears to have been scalped, revealing red earth that looks like an open wound. One of Mayotte’s largest slums, Talus 2, has been here for decades. “I’ve lived there for eleven years,” says the mother of three. There they wanted to destroy our houses. I was devastated.”

On May 22, the excavators demolished the 162 tin shacks in the district, effectively launching the Wuambushu operation wanted by Gérald Darmanin to combat unsanitary housing, illegal immigration and insecurity in Mayotte. A month later, the Interior Minister returns to the 101st French department on Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 June.

Adidja, a former resident of Talus 2, in Koungou (Mayotte), June 17, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

Adidja looks at the scarred hill and looks away. “I’m tired,” breathes the thirty-year-old. In addition to his banga Family – the name of the tin houses in Mayotte – she and her husband lost a small grocery store they ran in the neighborhood that day. For several months they had known that their lives depended on time. The order to demolish the slum was issued in December 2022 after an on-site social inquiry. The judiciary finally gave the green light in mid-May, after ensuring that offers of relocation had actually been made.

“They came to offer us accommodation for three or six months without being able to bring our belongings and far from our children’s schools, it’s unworthy. We still prefer to make ends meet,” sweeps Adidja. His family now lives “scattered” with acquaintances. “There is no future here, no hope,” she says.

Almost half of the resettled families

Adidja and her family are not alone. Of the 96 families expelled 70 living in the Talus 2 slum received a relocation proposal reserved for those legally residing in the area. Only 44 accepted the prefecture’s offer. “We have relocated around 250 people, that’s huge,” says Psylvia Dewas, who is responsible for reducing unhygienic accommodation at the prefect. In previous demolitions, the removal rate was often significantly lower.

Housing for families in the Talus 2 slum in Koungou (Mayotte), June 20, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

A few kilometers from the old Talus 2 slum, some of these resettled families live in modular prefabricated buildings surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. Among them, Toianti and two of her children were the first to arrive. Flip flops and flip flops are kept outside the door of the only room of their accommodation. “It’s stable here, I’m calm with my children, while it was complicated with Talus 2,” breathes the forty-year-old, wrapped in a flowered scarf.

Her son sits on the blue plastic floor, nods, and looks up from his cell phone. “It hurt my heart when they destroyed my neighborhood, but I’d rather live here, at least there’s no danger,” says Nastaoui. Even with the revision of his patent, which will take place in a few days, things are quieter in his new home.

Nastaoui, a former resident of Talus 2, has moved, in Koungou (Mayotte), June 20, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

Not everyone agrees. At the next door, Chamsia regrets her life before. They live with their husband and three children in the sweltering heat of the only private room they rent for a hundred euros a month. “We were put in a room without being able to take our things with us, it’s not family-friendly here at all,” complains the 44-year-old mother. Because of her foot pain, she finds it difficult to carry her metal saucepan from the communal kitchen from the ground floor to her room upstairs.

“We are doomed here. I can’t imagine my life tomorrow.”

Chamsia, former resident of Talus 2

at franceinfo

To separate the children’s sleeping area from the parents’ sleeping area, floral curtains were hung. But for reasons of space, the mattresses are laid on top of each other during the day and then spread out in the evening. Next to it is a closet full of clothes in all colors. “We’re just asking for chairs, a table and maybe a sofa,” slips Chamsia. We were promised a washing machine…”

Chamsia, a former resident of Talus 2, moved to Koungou (Mayotte) on June 19, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

“My heart was torn apart”

Some relocated families will not even have time to properly settle into their new home. Some of them could only get emergency or integration accommodation for a renewable period of three or six months. This is the case for about fifty people who are now living for free about ten kilometers from their old neighborhood, at Tsoundzou 2. A distance that without a car or public transport on the island can quickly become an insurmountable obstacle.

“Everything we were offered was too far from my siblings’ school,” explains Soihibou, the eldest of nine siblings who has spent his entire life with his parents in Talus 2’s tin shacks. So after twenty-five years, the family lived in a shared flat and, despite the promiscuity, preferred to move in with a cousin in the neighborhood. “He left us the living room where my parents and the little ones sleep,” explains the young man in yellow flip-flops and a blue T-shirt. I sleep with my cousins, whereas we used to have several houses for the whole family”. According to the prefecture, all children and young people from Talus 2 continue to be taught in their facility, despite sometimes longer transport times.

Soihibou, a former resident of Talus 2 in Koungou (Mayotte), June 17, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

Some residents have found refuge in the neighborhood’s white-and-green mosque, just across the freshly paved national road. Anicha’s family traveled a few hundred meters towards the rainforest to find a new home. But the wound is still intact. “I was on holiday here and the destruction started,” explains the French woman who now lives in France. It broke my heart when I saw my little brother cry.” The mother of two would like to bring the rest of her family back to Orléans (Loiret), but her parents, who only have a residence permit, have to stay in Mayotte.

“The work is gigantic”

All residents of Talus 2 know it: whether they are temporarily housed by the state or not, everyone must find a new home in the near future. But where ? In the 101st French department there is a dire lack of healthy and affordable housing. According to INSEE, half of the population lives on less than 300 euros a month here, and according to the prefecture, a third lives in tin boxes. “We are looking for a place to settle, but you have to save a lot to build a brick house,” says Soihibou.

“I want us to buy a property to settle down properly, with a solid house, not a tin house.”

Soihibou, former resident of Talus 2

at franceinfo

This dream could be realizable in the neighborhood for the less precarious families. A few days after the bangas were cleared from Talus 2, a new construction site has already settled on the hill. “After stabilizing the area, we want to build 50 houses and shops,” says the city’s mayor, Assani Saindou Bamcolo.

The mayor of Koungou, Assani Saindou Bamcolo, in his town in Mayotte, on June 19, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

A mayor’s will welcomed by the prefecture. “The sanitation measures make it possible to control the country. Then the town halls must have the will to build housing and find qualified people for the construction,” lists Psylvia Dewas. An encouraging start, according to the housing expert, who was deployed to the island in February 2022, although she acknowledges that “not all of Talus 2’s families will find a home” in this new neighborhood under construction. “The work is gigantic.”

New demolitions coming soon

The corrugated metal sheets of the slums are still nibbling on the vegetation along the national road. A month after the first demolitions of Operation Wuambushu, there is still a long way to go to reach the prefect’s target of 1,000 substandard housing units to be destroyed. There is no question of giving up, especially since the end date of the operation was never announced.

A destroyed slum in Koungou (Mayotte), June 19, 2023. (ROBIN PRUDENT / FRANCEINFO)

On Monday June 19, a few days before Gérald Darmanin’s visit to the island, a new demolition of Bangas began, a few kilometers from Talus 2. “It takes four to six months to carry out a full operation,” explains the prefect, Thierry Suquet, wearing a polo shirt and sneakers. The pace could pick up in July. “This week we are signing our tenth demolition order and we have at least five more in the pipeline,” says the state representative between the excavators on duty. Away from the group, the mayor of Koungou discreetly throws a word at the forefront of the prefecture’s fight against unsanitary housing. Another slum in the community could soon be on the demolition list.

ROME

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former Kremlin chef, for nine years lord and master of the Wagner militia, Putinin’s armed wing in Africa and the Middle East, the dirty work man accused of war crimes in several theaters of operations, felt cornered. And he reacted angrily like a cornered animal: by attacking. Do it or slow it down.

Cornered by his nemesis, the powerful Minister of Defense Shoigu, who wanted to take his “toy” away from him by placing Wagner under the control of the General Staff, Prigozhin responded by raising the bar. Raised in the university on the streets, as soon as he comes of age, Prigozhin ends up before a judge and is convicted of theft, the sentence is tolerated, but two years later he is tried again, accused of robbery, fraud and managing a minor prostitution network .

They give him 12 years in prison, he serves nine years and gets out in 1990 when the social union collapses. These are times without rules. He becomes an entrepreneur, starting first a chain selling hot dogs and a casino, and then a restaurant business. He meets Putin in his VIP restaurant. And the sparks fly over. Prigozin organizes receptions in the Kremlin and receives state contracts worth millions, but the definition of “Putin’s cook” is close to his heart. And so he has started two new companies since 2014; the Wagner mercenary company and a troll company in the service of the Kremlin. For years he kept a low profile for this business until he finally claimed Wagner’s departure as part of the “Sonderaktion”. Armed with Putin’s protection, Prigozhin aspires and decides to wage a war against Shoigu with the aim of gaining his post. But Shoigu is no less tough than him and convinces Putin to restrict Wagner, which also provides him with cannon fodder and in Ukraine, as in Bakhmut, produces results, albeit at the cost of over ten thousand dead, mostly convicts fighting for pardon battle.

Prigozhin’s dream is power, but he knows he will never be able to run for president to challenge Putin, who would crush him. So he sets his sights on Shoigu and when he sees that he’s losing, he attempts a coup. Let’s take Russia. A dream culminating in a last-minute deal that looks more like a fragile truce than peace.

To. Farr.

Russian aviation launched a group attack against Ukrainian electronic reconnaissance centers and aircraft based at Kanatovo and Dnipro airfields, Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov reported today.

The military spokesman added that the aim of the coup had been achieved. In addition, Russian forces destroyed an Assault Shadow cruise missile depot in Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region in response to an attack by Ukrainian troops on the bridge over the Chongar Strait.

Konashenkov further reported that Russian units successfully repelled nine attacks by Ukrainian forces on the Donetsk sector of the front in the past 24 hours.

“In the Donetsk region, the Southern Group of Troops successfully repelled nine enemy raids on the Vesioloye, Artiomovsk, Avdeyevka, Pervomaiskoye and Marinka Oblasts of the Donetsk People’s Republic with their active actions over the last day,” he said.

The spokesman said more than 245 Ukrainian soldiers, an infantry fighting vehicle, seven vans and D-20 and D-30 howitzers were killed in the fighting.

In the Artiomovsk tactical zone, air and artillery strikes hit groups of personnel and military equipment of the 35th and 36th Naval Brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Two ammunition depots of the 45th Artillery Brigade and the 109th Territorial Defense Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were destroyed near the settlements of Seversk and Sukhaya Balka of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Konashenkov added.

In the area south of Donetsk and in the Zaporozhye region, the Ukrainian army lost more than 170 soldiers, three tanks, three infantry vehicles, twelve armored fighting vehicles and three vehicles, the representative of the military unit said.

A Grad multiple rocket launcher, a French-made Caesar artillery unit, a US-made M777 artillery system, two Msta-B howitzers and a D-20 were also destroyed, sources said.

While in the Krasny Liman region, Russian troops repelled four attacks by Ukrainian forces, killing more than 100 soldiers and destroying an infantry fighting vehicle, two armored vehicles, three pickup trucks, an “Akatsiya” self-propelled artillery unit and a D- Howitzer. 30, he specified.

He added that Russian forces suppressed the activities of three Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups in Yampolovka and Tórskoye oblasts in Donetsk and Chervonaya Dibrova in Lugansk.

In the Kherson region “during the day up to 45 Ukrainian soldiers, two vehicles, one Grad multiple rocket launcher, two self-propelled artillery units of the Akatsiya type and two self-propelled howitzers of the Gvozdika type were eliminated,” said the representative of the military unit.

Since February 24, 2022, Russia has been conducting a special military operation in eastern Ukraine which, according to President Vladimir Putin, aims to demilitarize and denazify the neighboring country and prevent attacks by the Kiev government on the republics’ civilian populations. People of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Residents show their support for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary troops as they leave the southern Russian city overnight.

Overnight, the power struggle between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin ended with a deal: the mercenary boss called off his troops’ advance on Moscow. He and Wagner’s mercenaries are not to be prosecuted, and Prigozhin is apparently allowed into exile in Belarus. Both parties emphasized that they wanted to avoid bloodshed with the deal.

Early Sunday morning (local time), Wagner’s troops gave up their positions in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. To applause from the civilian population, the first vehicles with mercenaries first left the Russian Southern Military Command headquarters – which they had occupied only hours before – before tanks and combat vehicles later left the city center. Reports on social media and photos in news agencies show townspeople thanking Wagner’s leader, Prigozhin. They bid farewell to their troops with shouts of “Wagner”. (red.)