Politics
The Comoro Archipelago is divided between:
- The Union of the Comoros, a sovereign nation formed by the three islands of Grande Comore, Anjouan and Mohéli.
- Mayotte became an Overseas Department of the French Republic (département d'outre-mer) in 2011. This island is claimed by the Union of the Comoros (which considers it to form part of its territory according to Article 1 of its Constitution), but it has chosen to remain French in numerous referenda that France has held to decide its position.
The United Nations General Assembly continued to condemn the French presence in Mayotte until 1994. France, however, used its power of veto in the UN to prevent the Security Council from passing a resolution condemning France.
The African Union judged the French presence on Mayotte to be illegal.
Mayotte forms a part of the Overseas Countries and Territories of the European Union. It should become a Special Member State Territory at the moment that it is made a French Department.
The Comoros underwent a political crisis that started off in 1997 with the separatism on Anjouan. The political authorities on the island had turned the population of the island against the central government, advocating at first reunification with France, and later a greater autonomy bordering on independence.
Since 2006, the Ex-President of the Union of the Comoros Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, originally from the island of Anjouan has been in open conflict with the authorities of Anjouan, a conflict which ended in a military landing of the National Army of Development in order to re-establish the authority of the Union on the island.
Read more about this topic: Comoros Islands
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)