COMORO ISLANDS: Tightening the Noose Around Maverick Island

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 5 1997 (IPS) - Comorian President Mohamed Taki has tightened the noose around the breakaway island of Anjouan in a bid to force the leaders there to come back on their decision to secede from the Islamic Republic of the Comoros.

Taki this week stopped all transport links between the renegade isle and Grande Comore, the main island of the Indian Ocean archipelago. He also ordered the semi-official Development Bank of Comoro to pull out of Anjouan. The bank, crucial to Anjouan’s economic development, provides loans, guarantees and equity participation for small and medium-scale projects.

Islanders said Taki’s “blackmail” had “paralysed” economic and transport activities in Anjouan, according to radio reports monitored here.

Taki’s decisions came on the hills of an economic embargo that his government imposed on the renegade island when Anjouanese leaders unilaterally declared independence from the Comoro Islands on Aug. 13. The embargo has resulted in acute shortages of fuel and other basic goods.

The Comoros, an archipelago of four small islands (Grande- Comore — where the capital Moroni is situated — Anjouan, Moheli and Mayotte) lies between East Africa and the north-western coast of Madagascar.

Three of the four, with a combined population of some 540,000, won independence from France in 1975. The fourth, Mayotte, opted in a 1974 referendum to remain under French administration.

Twenty-two years on, some of the residents of Anjouan and Moheli, who account for half the federation’s population, have changed their minds about independence which, they say, has brought only poverty, civil strife and numerous coups.

Apparently attracted by the higher standard of living, elaborate social security system and regular payment of civil servants in Mayotte, they want to return to French rule. However, Paris has rejected this, with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yves Doutriaux repeatedly stating that France would only back Organisation of African Unity (OAU) efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in the Comoros.

In August, OAU secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim had warned that the secessionist movement in Anjouan and Moheli represented a dangerous precedent for the Indian Ocean archipelago’s neighbours.

The OAU had insisted on face-to-face talks between Comoro’s belligerents, proposing the holding of an all-party conference on its future in Addis Ababa in early November.

It had also agreed to send a small force of about 25 troops to Anjouan as observers, following claims by Anjouan leader Abdalla Ibrahim that Taki was planning to invade the island again.

Taki suffered a setback when 300 soldiers he had despatched to crush the secession bid were beaten back by the Anjouanese separatists on Sep. 3. Less than two months later, on Oct. 26, the island’s 150,000 inhabitants voted overwhelmingly for independence in a referendum organised by their leaders.

The OAU and the Arab League had urged Ibrahim not to hold the referendum, warning that the exercise would complicate a mediation effort which the OAU started in July after Anjouan and Moheli broke away from the federation.

Reports say Anjouanese leaders have remained defiant, despite the steps taken by Taki’s government to bring the island back to the fold.