between mourning and fear of tension

« NWe went to the heart of the disaster. » It is with these words that Bruno Retailleau, in a shirt collar and a tired expression, addressed the press from Reunion this Monday, December 16 in the evening, upon returning from his trip to Mayotte. From the heart of the “devastated” island, he returned without being able to count all the victims of Cyclone Chido. “Don’t ask me for an assessment,” he soberly replied to the journalists present. At this stage, the authorities deplore the deaths of 21 people in hospital. 45 absolutely urgently injured were treated and 1,373 relatively urgently injured.

But the real toll will inevitably be heavier, particularly because the island's many precarious habitats have been literally swept away by the force of the elements. In these slums, a large number of “administrative ghosts” live, explains a security source: foreigners in an irregular situation, who are often not registered as residents of Mayotte. Added to this is the religious rite. In the Muslim religion, widely practiced on the island, the bodies of the deceased must be buried within 24 hours and are, in recent hours, not necessarily declared to the administration.

Looting ruled out for the moment

Beyond the mourning and astonishment, the authorities must also face the security risk that such a natural disaster could cause. While the Minister of the Interior (resigned) had mentioned this weekend the beginning of looting, he explained today that the term was not appropriate, since it was more precisely a gutted container on the public highway which had been emptied of its contents by residents of Mayotte.

Indeed, according to several security sources contacted by the Pointuntil then, cases of theft remain isolated: “These are acts of opportunity. People were able to seize what was accessible in the gutted or damaged sites,” a source close to the rescue told us, when another interlocutor mentioned “small thefts of necessity here and there”.

“The security situation is currently under control,” says Place Beauvau. “The social atmosphere is calm for the moment but could deteriorate with the lack of food and water,” the same source continues. An expert on security on the island agrees: “If the supply of food or drinking water were not sufficient to meet the needs of the population, that's where things could get complicated. »

The 1,600 police officers and gendarmes usually present in Mayotte therefore have the particular mission of preventing looting and reacting if necessary to possible disturbances of public order. These personnel include in particular six mobile gendarmerie squadrons, specialized in maintaining law and order, already present on the island. Two more will reinforce them in the coming days. And if tensions were to arise, if he deemed it necessary, the Prefect could impose a curfew, the Minister of the Interior clarified Monday evening.

Race against time for supplies

Bruno Retailleau detailed during this speech the different means of supply mobilized to provide water and food, in sufficient time and quantities. Among them, daily air rotations from Reunion Island of an A400 M military plane, loaded with twenty tons of food per trip. Several vessels will also be made available, each capable of carrying 100 to 200 cargo containers of this type.

As for drinking water, its supply in Mayotte is already complicated in normal times. Within 48 hours, according to the authorities, the island's six processing plants will be able to operate at 50% of their capacity. A water treatment unit will also arrive by plane on Thursday and will produce 200 to 250 m³ of drinking water per day from polluted water. Emmanuel Macron announced Monday evening that he would go there “in the coming days” and would declare “national mourning”.