Guadeloupe: the police dismantle the CHU picket, a symbol of protest

“We implemented what had been asked of us by a large part of the population (…) the sanctuary of the CHU”, explained the prefect Alexandre Rochatte on RCI. The police dismantled on Monday the picket of demonstrators against the vaccination obligation, located for several months in front of the University Hospital Center (CHU) of Pointe-à-Pitre and symbol of the crisis which is shaking Guadeloupe.

“We have implemented a court decision which was to clear all accesses to the CHU so that all healthcare staff, but also patients can have access to it and that there is no more episode of violence like those we experienced last week” within the establishment, he continued on the local radio.

According to him, “four arrests for violence” against the police and two wounded gendarmes were identified, after clashes between demonstrators and the police at the end of the morning after the dismantling of the picket line.

The first arrest, which would have set fire to the powder, is that of “someone who tried to break through a roadblock”, said the prefect. It’s her “of a comrade who wanted to go home to go to the toilet”, said Elie Domota, leader of the LKP collective opposed to compulsory vaccination.

At 3 a.m. on Monday, “The police landed on the CHU picket and they crushed everything. When we arrived, we found that they were blocking the two entrances to the CHU and that they were forbidding any demonstrator to enter. We understood the maneuver is the deprivation of rights and freedoms”, declared Maïté Hubert M’Toumo, general secretary of the UGTG, a union involved in the collective organization against the vaccination obligation.

Furthermore, “three dams” were erected early Monday morning in the town of Basse-Terre. The police were targeted by “rock throws” and one of their vehicles “was burned”, reports a police source. Spikes 10 to 20 cm long were thrown on the road and motor oil was also dumped on the axes concerned, according to the same source.

Since November, Guadeloupe has been shaken by a violent social movement which started with the contestation of the obligation to vaccinate caregivers. If the fight against the vaccination obligation now only concerns certain demonstrators who maintain sporadic meetings and actions, the strike picket still in place in front of the CHU two months later had become its symbol.

A week ago, the director of the Guadeloupe University Hospital Gérard Cotellon and his two deputies had to be exfiltrated by the police from their offices besieged by anti-vax activists. For Widdy, a hooded protester who faced law enforcement on Monday, “what is happening there is the start of the clashes, it is preventing strikes and it is serious. Guadeloupe will explode for sure, it will burn unless the prefect takes the necessary measures to suspend the vaccination pass in Guadeloupe”, he indicated.

On Saturday, several hundred people took part in a citizen rally to say “stop” violence against hospital staff on the island. Caregivers came to testify to a climate “of terror” at the CHU and deplored the generalized climate of misinformation around the health crisis.

In December, a first Omicron case was detected on the island, where the fifth wave of Covid-19 killed more than 800 people, but where resistance to vaccination remains very strong. According to figures from the ARS, only 47% of people over 18 have received a first dose of vaccine in Guadeloupe, compared to 93% in France.