Dawn Ritch, Contributor
FRANCIS FORBES, police commissioner, has described the recent siege of security forces along Mountain View as an "extended attack by armed criminals". This it seems to me is a gross euphemism for the threat of armed take-over of Jamaica by cocaine interests.
When Mountain View was being sealed off, the police said that the gunfire was caused by a feud between two rival gangs in the area. But as the body count mounted, only two out of about 12 dead had anything to do with gangs or past criminal behaviour. The majority of those killed were citizens, as well as police and armed personnel. This suggests not a feud between gangs, but rather one highly organised gang that had put both the community and our security forces to the gun. And the end came not with its unequivocal defeat, but only a temporary ceasefire.
The most critical element in the manufacturer of cocaine is the fuel ethanol which Jamaica has in abundance. Some time ago I telephoned the ethanol plant, which is located in Rockfort, and was told that all the fuel they manufacture is exported. The Registrar of Companies provided inadequate information about its ownership but suggested that it was British, so I called the British High Commission to trace it further. The next day the High Commission provided the names of the investors which, perhaps coincidentally, were of a Spanish derivation, and vouched for the company saying that its manager was personally known to them.
Dead-end?
On the face of it my enquiries had reached a dead-end. My investigation, however, also revealed the presence of cocaine factories in the Kingston 2 area, which can move location at the drop of a hat. And more recently an upsurge in violence in that area which was clearly not of a gang feud origin, regardless of what the police said. An entire community was put to the gun, and a main arterial road into the capital city shut down for days.
K.D. Knight, Minister of National Security and Justice, is fond of saying that the violence in Jamaica is largely domestic, and a man and woman thing. Mountain View does not fit that characterisation. The more recent description of it however, as "an extended attack by armed criminals" raises more questions than it answers. Attack by which criminals and to what end, and with what objective? It certainly wasn't robbery.
In the ghetto, people's doors are being kicked down at night and they are being shot dead in their beds. And again the motive often isn't robbery, and it isn't a man and woman thing either. The police repeatedly report that they cannot establish the motive.
At a time when the economy is shattered, the only ragged Jamaicans are either mad or homeless. Everybody else is in bright new clothes and gold chains, but at the price it seems to me of summary execution.
If the criminals are better armed than they, as the police now claim, it is stretching the imagination a bit to believe that high powered weaponry is being bought by remittance money.
Recently the police revealed that they had been tracing a huge shipment of cocaine from Colombia in a sting operation. When they closed in on the house in Hope Bay, however, the cocaine had been removed. The leak can only have come, it seems to me, from some person or persons very high up in the police.
Indeed Commissioner Forbes has revealed that a number of officers above the rank of superintendent are being investigated for ties to the cocaine trade. He will say nothing more, he said, for fear of prejudicing that investigation. Despite that on-going investigation, however, things in the country are getting worse, not better.
It used to be that our fishermen would take oil drums full of gasolene out to sea to re-fuel the Colombian boats en route to the Bahamas and Miami. But we've taken to robbing them at sea, and are thought unreliable. So now the Colombians themselves are coming ashore brimming with cell phones, and setting up night clubs and bars from Rocky Point to Negril. If they were Haitians, they'd have been deported long ago.
Jamaica has the third highest rate of murder in the world. When civic groups and private sector leaders express profound alarm, however, the Prime Minister, the Minister of National Security and the police commission have one stock answer. They pass the responsibility from themselves to the community. Doubtless they will continue to do so.
Wrong tree
As long as the authorities continue to see crime only as something we are doing to ourselves, they will never have a solution. As long as they treat Jamaica as just a transhipment port for cocaine and not a place where it is manufactured, they will forever be barking up the wrong tree.
For the last decade, our Minister of National Security has comforted himself by enacting more legislation to fight crime than any predecessor. It is all to no avail. This administration won't enforce the laws already on the books much less the ones just dreamt up.
Flogging is still on the books, as well as hanging, but criminals murder with impunity. The few who are convicted get a key to the jail and an outside caterer, while human rights groups complain about their treatment and the imposition of a death sentence indefinitely postponed.
George W. Bush, governor of Texas, is running for President of the United States, and is widely expected to win. As governor he presides over the state which carries out the most death sentences in that country. I haven't noticed the human rights groups directing their attentions to him, and can't understand why we feel ourselves so greatly constrained from carrying out the law.
Lacking responsibility
It seems to me, therefore, that what the country faces is a crisis of political will. The Prime Minister may wish to govern, but doesn't really want to. He may wish to make a decision, but will never take one. Nothing will happen until the Government is willing to take responsibility, and so the buck will only go round and round as usual.
As a consequence the country will be subjected to a new round of consultations and discussions about crime, but no crackdown. Perhaps because any crackdown on crime might too dramatically reduce the number of officers in the police force, and lead to fall-out in the political ranks.
That no good will come of the Prime Minister's discussions with the private sector leaders had already been presaged by events at the airport last Wednesday. Prime Minister Patterson was met by scores of his supporters waving orange flags. The same people from communities whose doors are being kicked down at nights.
All that matters to them is political power, and their conviction that the PNP will never lose it by the ballot. If the situation in eastern Kingston continues to brew, however, and the Government continues to show no backbone, the time cannot be far off when they lose it by the gun.
