Over 1000
people massed in front of a police station in the Martissant
section of Port-au-Prince on the evening of Oct. 22 as police
encircled the car of outspoken lawyer André Michel, who was
stopped while driving nearby shortly after 6 p.m.
Just before 10 p.m., the police
removed Michel from his vehicle, smashing its windows, his
lawyer Newton St. Juste said. Mr. Michel was then taken into the
police station, as CIMO riot police fired teargas and shots in
the air to disperse the angry crowds outside.
At midnight, Mr. Michel was
still being held in the station with clusters of protestors
regathering on some street corners, despite the lingering
teargas.
Last year, Mr. Michel brought a
lawsuit against President Michel Martelly and his family for
corruption. Shortly thereafter, the government issued a warrant
for Mr. Michel’s arrest, accusing him of involvement in the 2010
killing of a student, Frantzy Duverseau. The victim’s father,
Ovil Duverseau, who was a witness to the incident, has publicly
said that Mr. Michel was not responsible in any way for his
son’s death. Instead, Mr. Duverseau blames Haitian police
for his son’s fatal beating following an altercation.
In radio interviews by
cellphone from his besieged car on different stations in the
capital, Mr. Michel said that Justice Minister Jean Renel Sanon
and Martelly’s hard-liner confidants, the brothers Gregory and
Thierry Mayard-Paul, were behind his arrest, which was carried
out by government commissioner Francisco René. On Radio Kiskeya,
Mr. Michel said of Mr. René that “I don’t consider him a
government commissioner or a judge, I consider him as a
shaved-head (tèt kale) militant,” the term used to describe
Martelly partisans.
“Unfortunately, we live in a
country where a group of people think that they have all the
rights, while other people have no rights because they are in
the opposition,” Mr. Michel said.
In addition to Mr. St. Juste,
several other lawyers arrived at the scene in solidarity,
charging the arrest was completely illegal. Under the Haitian
Constitution, the police cannot make an arrest between 6 p.m.
and 6 a.m., unless they catch someone in the act of committing a
crime.
Despite the warrant hanging
over his head, Mr. Michel has been circulating and speaking out
for months, aware that “the police have been following me.”
“For a long time, I have
resumed my professional and political activities, and I have
been fighting the good fight,” Mr. Michel said. “I said to
myself I would not hide, because when you hide, you facilitate
the task of the person who is trying to make you hide.”
“It is important to defend our
democratic gains in Haiti” since the fall of the Duvalier
dictatorship in 1986, Mr. Michel concluded in one of his radio
interviews. “We have to have the courage and determination for
that.”
As we go to press, several burning tire barricades
and small demonstrations are flaring throughout the capital,
radios report. |