Dawn RitchOpposition Leader Mr. Edward Seaga has stirred up a hornet's nest with his crime proposal that narco-trafficking and terrorism should be added to the list of crimes in Jamaica attracting capital punishment.
Minister of National Security, Dr. Peter Phillips, in the Government's new plan for crime-fighting has said that the Commissioner of Police and the Chief of Staff of the Jamaica Defence Force will set up a joint operation.
"This response capability," he said, "will be in addition to the crime fighting functions of the Crime Management Unit."
In other words it is to be more of the same.
Mr. Seaga has come up with original thinking to solve the chronic murder rate in Jamaica.
What most pundits seem to forget, however, is Mr. Seaga is not the head of Government here or anywhere else. No state, therefore, is to have the benefit of his wisdom at this time.
Nor are the officers in his party under any obligation to go into any detail whatsoever on any radio programme nor to any reporter. Not unless instructed to do so by the Leader of the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party.
If Mrs. Antonnette Haughton-Cardenas wishes to kiss or hug the victims of violence, and pronounce public policy from a sidewalk, however sensible, it only serves to demonstrate that the country's real hope of change lies with Mr. Seaga.
Because she is head of the United People's Party, and he is not. But he's not head of the People's National Party either, nor Prime Minister of Jamaica.
Nor indeed in charge of public policy on crime and the antics of the security forces. So I believe it is quite pointless of media to ask desperate questions of what Mr. Seaga and the JLP's plans are to combat crime.
They are not the Government, nor has the date of the 2002 election been announced by the Prime Minister at whose discretion the date is being set.
The problem is that Mr. Seaga's plans sound a lot more interesting, and Dr. Phillips, who has said only that there would be more of the same, is being left to eat his dinner in peace.
Yet it is the latter who is responsible, before God and before the people of this country, not Mr. Seaga.
The virtually unanimous political viewpoint of media in this country has been that the two major political parties are "no better fish, no better barrel". Day after day for the last decade this has been the continuous refrain.
Why hasn't any reporter asked Dr. Phillips how he intends to seek international help for security purposes, and explain his attendance at the funeral of "Willie Haggart", an organized crime boss on the international level?
All along there's been denial from the Cabinet ministers who attended the funeral, citing police blotters as evidence.
Now an Assistant Commission-er of Police and the head of the police's Organized Crime Unit confirms who Haggart was, and has this read into the record before the Commission of Enquiry into the violence in West Kingston.
That's Dr. Phillips' hornet's nest, and, therefore, the country's.
Mr. Seaga's hornet's nest is that all he can do is give away his hand, and harm his party's chances for victory in the next General Elections.
In the normal scheme of things, he could have co-opted the UPP's support, but they are not the NDM, and I'm not sure that either has ever mattered politically anyway.
Definition
So if Jamaica wants a change, it had better not be no better fish, no better barrel.
The definitions are really quite simple. A narco-trafficker is not a mule, usually female, young and poor, who has ingested a kilo and a half of cocaine for US$5,000.
It's not the mule, who is invariably a victim in the end, but the man or woman who put her there, otherwise known as "Mr. Big", or the "Willie Haggart" types and his senior colleagues of all nationalities and statuses.
"Narco" means cocaine, because marijuana was long ago declassified as a narcotic internationally.
The meaning of narcotic is specific to cocaine, morphine, heroine, and international opinion is not quite sure what to do with "Ecstasy" since it is entirely man-made.
Jamaica does not produce coco leaves, although cocaine is transhipped through the country by Colombians and their Jamaican connections.
A terrorist is a participant in the organized slaughter of innocent people, or one who contrives to have people murdered in that way.
Mr. Seaga says that if convicted in a court of law of narcotic trafficking or terrorist activity, that person should be hung.
This is not the law of Jamaica, where capital punishment remains on the books but wasn't practised even before the law was amended.
Now that I've resolutely entered advanced age, I find myself softening considerably. When we in Jamaica see how policemen steal cocaine, profit from it and are not removed from duty, it would be a sin to put a single mortal before a court of law in this country on charges of narco-trafficking and terrorism.
I would be afraid to vote for the death penalty to be given to a single defendant, because of little confidence in the police, to say nothing of their evidence which is altogether too highly valued from a financial point of view by too many of the members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force themselves.
Moreover, this evidence seems to appear and disappear with alarming ease from lock-up rooms and station houses.
So, Mr. Seaga, it will just have to be life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
People don't hang people around here. They just hang themselves. It used to be one suicide a year, now it's scores of people doing it.
Mr. Seaga is right to say that it's the people who cause this in the society who should be hanged instead. Even in the USA, however, with better intelligence gathering techniques, though not better rules of evidence, innocent people have been executed by the state for crimes they did not commit.
So personally I am no longer in favour of the death penalty. Instead I'd like to see life imprisonment for narco-traffickers, no cell phones or computers allowed in the cells, and no day passes either.
This will result in less income to the trade, and more to the state. We will be able to afford our prisons. Terrorist big, small or medium-sized is the same terrorist and the crime is murder. They should be locked up forever too.
This is not the same thing as domestic violence, since so much of media is keen for definitions. It's not murder committed in the same household or by members of the same family, which the Government has been telling us until only very recently was the cause of most murders in Jamaica.
So I suppose some in the media can claim this as the cause of their confusion, because first it was a man and woman thing but overnight it's changed.
Although the murder rate has only gone up by a few hundred in a country where a thousand murders are committed every year, the nation was now told by Dr. Phillip that narco-trafficking was the cause of our high murder rate, and the primary characteristic of the murder statistics.
Frontal assault
Why doesn't somebody go and ask him about his Government's definitions?
The word "Contractor" in Jamaica these days can and does mean "narco-trafficker", "area don" and druggist".
And the meaning of "construction project" is one where even the sidemen on the haulage trucks must be the associates of outsiders.
This ensures that the benefits of so-called development never trickle down to the community, because it's really just a grand money-laundering scheme. Thus not even a plumber or a mason is to work again.
It seems to me that the Opposition Leader plans a frontal assault on that way of doing things. It will certainly help improve state and community finances, and remove much of the incentive to murder.
Lock them up Eddie, don't stretch them. There's a greater chance of them being locked up, than hung.
Something has to happen as and when you become Prime Minister. Maybe you'll catch them, because the other jokers haven't been able to do a thing in 13 years.
