Cecil GutzmoreWE IN Jamaica are much better at bawling out for peace and safety than for justice. Peter Tosh and our present Chief Justice are amongst those who have recognised the impossibility of peace without social justice.
Then there are those who would have us believe that justice for the victims of crime is incompatible with justice for the alleged criminal.
This alleged criminal, rapidly and frequently fatally becomes a known criminal on the basis of justice and law-defying illogical leaps. The goodly ladies currently stressing the failure of parental control here need to remember this: No matter how complete such a failure in parenting, it is no justification for shooting down youthful alleged criminals in cold blood. Indeed, some who utter the call for justice neither mean nor understand it. We certainly don't always mean the same thing when we cry for justice. I, personally, want all the posthumous justice that is possible for the 'Braeton Seven'. For those seven young men killed in that house in Braeton Phase III that is now at once appallingly squalid and horribly frightening.
The last time I saw comparable effects of bullets on concrete was at the site of the Bloody Sunday slayings of Irish people by British paratroopers in Derry, Northern Ireland. I am glad I don't have to see the bodies. Justice for the 'Braeton Seven' can mean no more nor less than an authoritative account of what transpired at Braeton arrived at independently of all agencies of the Jamaican state. On this I concur with Families Against State Terrorism and with Amnesty International.
Did members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, led by Senior Superintendent Reneto D.V. Adams, turn themselves into a death-squad and eradicate those seven young Jamaicans on March 14 with neither the slightest suggestion of due process nor even situational necessity? And if so, can Jamaica's people, Opposition and Government, allow them to get away with it? How can justice for that murdered policeman and another citizen in Above Rocks and for the murdered domino-playing schoolmaster, in whose death some of the youths are alleged to have been implicated, be secured by what looks like the summary execution of the never-accused and their companions in Braeton? Can extra-legal revenge ever be equated with, let alone serve, the cause of justice?
Does such revenge not lie behind the scourge that has pushed this island into the valley of the shadow of the death: the creeping death of justice itself and of almost 1,200 citizens now annually wiped out by civilians, police and army our fellow citizens all. Manifestly, this cannot go on.
Jamaica is stuck electorally with the JLP-PNP duopoly and, apparently, also with the catastrophic consequences of the deepening crisis occasioned by their alternating and continuous mis-management. I very much hope that I am not in a minority in strongly believing that a Jamaican people's programme for national reconstruction must have as a first, and absolutely essential, plank the establishment of a Jamaican state in which all agencies are committed to justice as an inviolable principle. The majority of Jamaicans must demand such a commitment from the JLP-PNP duopoly in the lead-up to the next general election. It should be the framework for all else they jointly implement thereafter.
Obstructing the pathway to that outcome is a giant contradiction. Jamaicans recognise that our society cannot again progress, indeed is in danger of disintegrating into chaos unless justice is given its rightful place in the dealings of the state and the thinking of society. We combine this insight with an astonishingly widespread acceptance of outrageous acts of state injustice. Decades of the JLP-PNP duopoly have brought us to our present menacing situation of self-destruction and injustice.
Under the banner of the Cold War ideology, an incipient violence, long associated with early trade union and party competition, was wantonly turned into tribal murder and mayhem. Populations were forced to flee areas as political garrisons were created. Guns were supplied to party gunmen who were embraced (hugged up) by PMs and MPs. Our politicians still facilitate the supplanting of the authority of the state and the police by dons in area after area. The parties and the police allow the dons to run protection and extortion rackets and to supervise ongoing crime in these areas. The dons have been allowed to gain kudos and social legitimacy as they, in place of the state, dispense the crudest justice and the proceeds of crime to the grateful needy.
As the victims of the Braeton killing lie still unburied, the level of apparent acceptance by the political directorate of the way they were wiped out at the hands of agents of the state could not be more disturbing. And, yet, it is simply par for the course. That is how our political directorate now seems to routinely run things. None of the good individuals within has yet shouted "No" for a now long-overdue resignation.
The official response to the prison beatings also left me in no doubt that the objective of state and government was to protect the perpetrators of that monstrous crime. Did not mercy alone demand that the prison officers and soldiers be moved from at least the parts of the prison where the beatings occurred? Was the official inquiry ever any more than the most costly plank in the edifice of state protection for wrong-doers? Did the JLP not fail utterly to rise to the challenge represented by these PNP-facilitated outrages?
On the justice front, therefore, the urgent demands of a programme for national reconstruction must include:
1) Government's never again orchestrating cover-ups for lawless state servants (JDF, JCF members and prison officers particularly) but rather seeing it as their first duty to prevent by every means such lawlessness.
2) A Director of Public Prosecution required by law to prosecute rather than protect such lawlessness by non- or weak prosecution.
3) A completely reformed Coroners Court system before which all deaths at the hands of the security forces automatically come and with Coroners seeing it as their duty to get to the bottom of each of these slayings.
4) The scene of these slayings must be regarded as crime-scenes and must be held inviolable for forensic investigative purposes.
It was in the United Kingdom that I learned how old and traditionally pro-state is the functioning of the office of Coroner. There also that I learn the perfidy of claims regarding police training and community policing neither of which are instruments for curbing police lawlessness.
Cecil Gutzmore is a research student and lecturer at the University of the West Indies. Email:gutzmorecr@hotmail.com
