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World's most coup-prone state faces return to instability after nearly two decades of calm in Comoros
The world’s most coup-prone state risks renewed turmoil this week as a contentious referendum threatens to destabilise the Comoro Islands and draw France deeper into a migrant crisis that has bolstered its nationalist right.
The archipelago of Indian Ocean islands off south-east coast of Africa had seemed to have shaken off an era of chronic instability that saw 20 coups and coup attempts after independence from France in 1975.
But after 17 years of relative calm, a power-sharing agreement that restored peace between the state’s three bickering islands is facing deep strain after Azali Assoumani, the Comoran president, called a vote that could extend his hold on power by a decade.
For the opposition, Monday’s referendum to amend the Comoran constitution is the type of power grab witnessed with increasing frequency elsewhere in Africa.
But more is at stake than just the risk of renewed dictatorship. Until 2001, the future of Comoros was in question. Angered by the perceived dominance of Grande Comore, the main island, Anjouan and Moheli, its two smaller islands, had broken away.
Only by agreeing a new constitution that rotated the presidency among the three islands did the union survive — a provision that the referendum will end, raising fears that the only way to remove Mr Azali would be through another coup.
"There is going to be a pushback from Moheli and Anjouan, I'm sure of that," said Simon Massey, a Comoros analyst at Coventry University.
"This is definitely a calculated risk on Azali's part. Has he got sufficient control of the armed forces? Does he have the military strength? That is the key question.”
Comoros has festered under decades of misrule. Its 800,000 inhabitants are some of the world’s poorest. Nearly half the population is jobless. Healthcare, sanitation and basic infrastructure are severely lacking.
Perversely, the new constitution — although it brought stability — has been been blamed for deepening economic stagnation, because rotating power every five years gives little time for governments to pass reforms.
Prolonged penury has triggered a mass exodus of Comorans, often with fatal consequences. In the past two decades, at least 10,000 are estimated to have drowned trying to reach the European Union.
For desperate Comorans, Europe is only a short, 65-mile hop across the Gulf of Mozambique to the island of Mayotte, the fourth Comoran island, which voted to remain French when the rest of the country declared independence in 1975.
For ordinary Comorans, Mayotte — now officially part of the European Union after it voted to become a French department in 2009 — has been a magnet, promising the kind of prosperity impossible to achieve at home. Every night, scores of Comorans board rickety fishing vessels, trying to reach Mayotte.
But for the Comoran government, Mayotte’s status has been an open sore: an affront to its sovereignty, a breach, it claims, of international law and a source of resentment against France, the country’s biggest donor.
More gallingly, Mayotte’s comparative wealth — its people are 14 times richer — is seen as an indictment of the independent state’s failure to thrive as much as the island that refused to cast off its colonial shackles.
To the fury of Grand Comore, Anjouan and Moheli even requested recolonisation in 1997. France refused.
As they arrive in ever greater numbers, Comorans have found themselves increasingly unwelcome in Mayotte, though they share the same ethnicity, language and religion,.
Richer than Comoros, though poorer than mainland France, Mahorans — as the people of Mayotte are known — say the migrants have put an intolerable strain on public services and are responsible for a surge in crime.
It is a cry familiar in Europe, although the statistics here are starker. Perhaps 40 percent of Mayotte’s 214,000 people are undocumented migrants. More than half the mothers giving birth at the island’s main hospital are foreign and Mahoran children are often in a minority at schools.
But France’s response is still too timid for many Mahorans. Anti-migrant protests in March paralysed the island, while anger has also mounted in France because migrant children born in Mayotte are automatically granted French citizenship - an entitlement France's parliament is trying to end.
Heightening tensions, the Azali government, engaging in some pre-referendum populism, in March refused to take back migrants deported from Mayotte, triggering a diplomatic crisis with France. Two months later, France retaliated by suspending visas for all Comoran nationals.
But the visa ban will do nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration, which will only worsen if Comoros slips back into turmoil as a result of the referendum.
Already, tensions are mounting. President Azali’s government has detained leading critics, including a former president, suspended the constitutional court and outlawed protests in the run up to the vote. Last week, one of the country’s vice presidents escaped an assassination attempt.
The days when white mercenaries charged up Grande Comore’s beaches armed with automatic weapons and copies of Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War are gone. But long suffering Comorans, and an alarmed French government, worry that the use of coups to settle political scores may be about to make a return.