BERTRAND ROSENTHAL, Mutsamudu | Sunday 6.00pm.
AN uneasy truce prevailed on Sunday in Mutsamudu, the chief town of secessionist Anjouan in the Comoros, after a week’s fighting between rival militias that has claimed at least 60 lives.
Gunfire had broken out on Saturday night, killing at least one person, whose body was found in the morning, witnesses said. One resident of Mutsamudu, which has been abandoned by about a third of its inhabitants, described Sunday’s situation as a kind of truce and noted that the radio station of Anjouan’s self-proclaimed president Abdallah Ibrahim is back on the air.
The abandoned part of the town has created a no-man’s-land between Mutsamudu and the village of Mirotsy, which is a stronghold of militia forces backing Abdallah’s ex-prime minister, Said Omar Chamasse. Taking advantage of Sunday’s calm, residents ventured back into the deserted section of the town to collect mattresses and other belongings, while activity was normal in the rest of Mutsamudu, close to its port and mosque. Some shops were open and people chatted in the streets. Some of the ’embargo forces’ — the name given to adolescent militiamen — were seen patrolling with rifles or machine-guns slung over their shoulders.
The “capital” of Anjouan, where secessionists formally declared independence from the rest of the federal Islamic republic in the Indian Ocean in August 1997, was almost totally isolated from the rest of the world, with telecommunications and electricity cut, the airport closed and boats the only means of contact. A first tranche of emergency relief aid sent by France, which retained control of Mayotte when the three other Comoro Islands chose independence in 1975, arrived in Anjouan on Sunday and was due to be distributed among the two hospitals.