Madagascan police fired tear gas to break up an opposition rally and arrested six people on Tuesday as the party’s exiled leader vowed to return to the Indian Ocean island to run in upcoming elections.
Officials in the eastern city of Toamasina said security forces were compelled to act when members of the Arema party left a compound where they were holding their annual convention to attend an unauthorised demonstration.
”The police force launched two tear gas cannisters because the activists left their enclosure,” said Toamasina provincial chief Gilbain Pily, adding that one of the six detainees was an Arema senator, Pierre Fajy.
”Six people were arrested: four young activists, the senator from Mahajanga [in western Madagascar] and a journalist from Objectifs Malaza,” he told Agence France-Presse from Toamasina, about 370km east of the capital.
No one was injured in the altercation that came as Arema leader Pierrot Rajaonarivelo, who was blocked from returning to Madagascar when authorities closed the Toamasina airport on Saturday, vowed he would come back.
Meanwhile the government re-opened the airport to domestic flights on Tuesday but said the facility would remain closed to international flights until January.
Rajaonarivelo has called for a nationwide strike and a sit-in among his supporters to protest the government’s actions, which he maintains are aimed at keeping him from meeting an October 14 deadline to file candidacy papers for the polls.
The former deputy prime minister, who has lived in exile in France for five years and was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 15 years at hard labour in absentia in August, said he was not scared of arrest on his return.
”I will be there on Saturday,” Rajaonarivelo told AFP by telephone from the island of Mauritius from where he is planning a large march in Antananarivo on Saturday. ”I insist that the march is peaceful.”
”I am sensitising everybody so that I am not accused of being a troublemaker,” he said. ”I want to symbolise courage and break the fear sown by the action of this regime.”
Rajaonarivelo’s presence in Mauritius, which he refused to confirm or deny despite acknowledgement from officials in Port Louis, has strained ties between the two islands.
Madagascar has demanded information about his whereabouts but has not yet received a reply, officials said.
”We do not understand the silence by Mauritius,” an official with the Madagascan embassy in Mauritius told AFP.
A senior Mauritian official said Rajaonarivelo was not a subject of an international arrest warrant and was therefore free to move in Mauritius.
”We will act according to international law,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. ”As far as we are aware there is no arrest warrant against Pierrot
”He is not a threat to Mauritius or a friendly country,” he said. ”He can move about freely.”
Rajaonarivelo intends to be among the challengers to President Marc Ravalomanana in the December 3 presidential election and says the government wants to prevent him from standing.
He served in the government of former president Didier Ratsiraka, who fled into exile after widespread violence rocked the country during disputes over the last presidential election in 2001.
Those polls ended in political crisis when Ratsiraka refused to accept defeat. The impasse split the island in two, with two capitals (Antananarivo and Toamasina), two governments, and a divided army.
The unrest only ended when Ravalomanana was officially proclaimed President in May 2002. Ratsiraka and Rajaonarivelo fled to France. – Sapa-AFP