In the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, France is getting tough on illegal immigrants. Authorities launched Operation Wuambushu (Take Back) on Monday, with police sent into the shanty towns to remove those there illegally and demolish their settlements. Around half of Mayotte’s population are foreign, mostly illegal immigrants from Comoros, 45 miles to the north-west. But it wasn’t long before the crackdown came unstuck.

Mayotte is the same size in land mass as the Isle of Wight – 147 square miles – but whereas the latter has a population of 142,000, Mayotte’s is somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. No one knows the precise figure because of the high rate of illegal immigration. The arrivals live in shanty towns, and crime and disease have risen as a result.

France governed Mayotte and the three islands of the present-day Comoros – Grande Comore, Mohéli and Anjouan – as ‘territories’ until 1974. That year Comoros voted in a referendum for independence but Mayotte opted to remain French. In 2009, the people of Mayotte, 95 per cent of whom are Sunni Muslims, voted by a huge majority to become the 101st department of the French Republic.

Since last summer, there have been a series of bloody clashes

Twelve years later, Mayotte is France’s poorest department – an estimated 80 per cent of the population live below the poverty line – but it is still better off than the Comoros, benefiting from the welfare support of the French State. Consequently, a great many Comorans have decided to relocate.

When Mayotte voted to remain a French territory in 1974, the population of the island was around 45,000; at the time of the 2009 referendum, it was 186,000. In fourteen years, the number of people on the island has doubled.

Many come to Mayotte to have children. The hospitals are better and, more importantly, babies born in French territory have the ‘droit du sol’ (birthright), which makes it possible to obtain French nationality. In the main Comoran district in Mayotte, the average woman has between five and seven children.

Social tensions between Mayotte’s indigenous population and Comorans first came to prominence in 2015. The then socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, visited and declared there were two ‘plagues’ on the island: a ‘worrying level of crime’ and ‘illegal immigration’. If something was not done, he conceded, then the ‘cohesion’ of Mayotte was at peril. Nothing was done, and the problems have intensified.

Since last summer, there have been a series of bloody clashes between gangs of Comorans and locals, with one killed and scores injured. Motorists have been attacked by men on motorbikes and school buses ambushed by mobs throwing rocks. On several occasions, buses have been boarded by young men with machetes, who slash and hack at those on board.

One of Mayotte’s two MPs, the independent centrist Estelle Youssouffa, appeared on French television, relaying the gravity of the situation: ‘Our children are being attacked with machetes on school buses,’ she said. ‘What more is needed for the state to react?’

She also issued a warning to the Republic: ‘We are facing a demographic bomb. And it’s not pretty promises in Paris that will change our daily lives.’

Emmanuel Macron’s response was to authorise Operation Wuambushu. More than 500 police and gendarmes were drafted in to Mayotte, reinforcing the existing force of 1,300, and on Monday they went to work. They met immediate resistance, from projectile-throwing youths, who they were able to overcome, and lawyers, who they were not.

On Monday evening, a court suspended the operation, citing concerns the police were ‘endangering the safety’ of the illegal immigrants. According to Le Figaro, the case was instigated by a handful of shanty town residents, ‘represented by a group of around ten lawyers’.

The government has launched an appeal and is confident that the operation – expected to take two months – will soon continue. ‘What endangers the population is insalubrity, insecurity and the non-recognition of property rights,’ said Gerald Darmanin, the interior minister.

Lawyers aren’t the only people trying to derail Operation Wuambushu. The illegal immigrants detained by the police on Monday were put on a ship and sent back to the Comoros. But the vessel was turned away from the islands.

‘As long as the French side decides to do things unilaterally, we will take our decisions,’ announced Comoran interior minister Fakridine Mahamoud. In 2019, the Comoros government agreed a deal with France: in return for €150 million (£120 million) in aid they pledged to crack down on human trafficking and facilitate the repatriation of Comorans from Mayotte.

The suspension of the operation has angered and exasperated locals, who are overwhelmingly supportive of the eviction. In a TV interview on Monday evening, the island’s departmental vice-president, Salime Mdéré, said that if they couldn’t deport the violent gangs then perhaps the only solution was ‘to kill them’. He subsequently apologised for the remark but also expressed his resentment ‘at the bleeding hearts who are lecturing us from Paris without ever having set foot in Mayotte’.

This was a reference to a collective of Paris-based lawyers and human rights organisations who supplied the legal muscle necessary to suspend Operation Wuambushu. They were delighted with the court order, gloating in a statement that ‘defending the rights of the most vulnerable is an obligation in the face of barbarity’.

What about the rights of locals, most of whom are mired in the sort of poverty and insecurity that is unimaginable to affluent lawyers in Paris? Bourgeois self-righteousness should not be allowed to trump the rights of the poor people of Mayotte.