MANY JAMAICANS, trying to eschew cynicism and clinging to the important virtue of hope, will have been disturbed by Mr. Richard Azan's outburst in Parliament against that section of the Emancipation Park Declaration calling on politicians to sign an undertaking to sever any links they may have with criminal elements in their constituencies. We see an unfortunate element of 'grandstanding' in Mr. Azan's rhetoric which, on the face of it, gets additional validation from the fact that he is a cousin of Mr. Maurice Azan, the May Pen businessman who was gunned down in his store and whose death helped trigger the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica's (PSOJ's) call for businesses to close as a mass demonstration against crime and violence.
We note also that parliamentarians on both sides of the House appeared enthusiastically to support Mr. Richard Azan's position, an unfortunate response in our view, since it rekindles the blame game and promotes a continuing rift between politicians and the business sector. We think Jamaicans are endowed with sufficient common sense to understand that by asking politicians to disassociate themselves from criminals this is not ipso facto absolving all businessmen from some similar connections. As has often been said, there is more than enough blame to go around but the process of correction must start somewhere without provoking an overly defensive response.
We have reservations also about the logic of Mr. Azan's position. He seems to be saying that he will not sign the proposed letter of undertaking because he has never given out guns or associated with criminals. But the proposed letter is merely a public statement of intent in trying to build a common alliance against any future behaviour that may contribute to crime and violence either directly or indirectly.
In his grandstanding mode, Mr. Azan also accuses the private sector of hypocrisy for calling on business to close on a Wednesday afternoon, a time when they would in any case be closed. This is nonsense. The gravamen of the PSOJ initiative was to mount a mass protest, not masochistically to injure its members by asking them to lose sales and in the process hurt the economy. We think the timing and intent of Mr. Azan's comments were unfortunate and we are even more concerned that the support they received may indeed indicate that the PSOJ initiative is already unravelling, putting the country back to square one.
The politicians need to lend their collective weight to the campaign against crime by doing whatever they can to eliminate the scourge. The political leaders must themselves lead the charge and be prepared to impose sanctions against those who do not sign the declaration.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
