Edward Seaga
Hold them accountable
JULY 4-7, 2001:
ON JULY 4, 2001, about 4:00 a.m., a contingent of police invaded west Kingston, firing dozens of rounds of ammunition into the air and some buildings.
On my way to Tivoli Gardens, I overheard on the police radio Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams calling for back-up as he was under fire. I drove to where he was on Spanish Town Road. He was sitting on the pavement, his back against a wall. There was no firing. I scanned the wall visually. There was not a single bullet mark in the cement to indicate that he and his men were under fire.
Adams moved from that position to the Command Centre which was set up in the three-storey building in the Coronation Market. TV cameras filmed him firing an automatic weapon without aiming, using one hand hanging outside one of the many portholes arranged in windows of the building. Both the police and soldiers were there. The claim was they were being fired on. If that was so, the large broadside of the three-storey building, painted white, would have been splattered with bullet holes. There were six pockmarks on the building at the end of the four-day siege in west Kingston, four of which were there from before. But across Darling Street and Spanish Town Road, directly opposite to the Command Centre, there were countless bullet holes in the commercial buildings, indicating that there was massive firing from the Command Centre.
FOUR-DAY SIEGE
The four-day siege cost 27 lives, 25 of them helpless, innocent civilians. Sixty were wounded, perhaps more, as the Kingston Public Hospital issued a public statement that it would accept no more wounded. The records show those who were fatally shot to include:
A handcart man;
A market vendor;
A security guard on his way to work;
A 16-year-old schoolboy;
A 19-year-old girl who was making plans to bury her baby which had died two days before;
Four men of unsound mind;
Two men over 80 years. One was a pauper the other a retiree who was walking to the home of a family member to watch a sporting event on TV;
A farmer who was married four months earlier. His wife was nine months pregnant. Two weeks later, the grief-stricken wife lost her baby;
A man known as 'Rum Head' who had just helped a wounded person to safety and was returning when he was shot dead.
Of the 60 injured, three deserve particular mention:
Latoya Brown, 20 years old, whose optic nerve was severed by a soldier's bullet, leaving her totally blind;
Jermaine Nelson, a young schoolboy whose right leg was blasted with a shot from a nearby military jeep;
Kadian Bourne, 12 years old. One of her legs was shattered by a bullet from a high-powered weapon previously brandished by Adams as capable of penetrating concrete walls. It had never before been used in Jamaica. Indeed, it was designed for fire at armoured vehicles. The bullet pierced the eight-inch thick concrete wall in her room and shattered her leg. She has since become a psychiatric case, abandoning her family, getting pregnant at 13, and refusing all attention.
BODIES LYING IN THE STREETS
Much more could be said about the ordeal of the residents who could not venture out of their homes for four days: dead bodies lying in the streets for days, riddled by maggots, some being eaten by dogs.
The security forces did not conduct any search in any of the west Kingston communities in that period. Nor did they capture any gunman, recover any guns or bullets or find any spent shells. But they fired thousands of rounds of ammunition and, as in 1997, gained a lot of political mileage for the Government.
The Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), in particular, stands condemned for these atrocities because they did by far the most damage.
The JDF instructions by the chief of staff for opening fire on operations, clearly states in paragraph 2 (3):
Fire only aimed shots;
Do not fire more rounds than are absolutely necessary to achieve your aim.
In many of the killings of innocent and helpless civilians in 1997 and 2001, the bullets came from specific identifiable areas where only a small number of soldiers, sometimes two, were located. Were the identification of the soldiers present ascertained? Were any court martials held? Any findings made? Any sanctions imposed? Any changes of procedures prescribed? We do not know. Indeed, we may never know.
It is dangerous in the extreme for any organisation with power over life and death to be totally unaccountable to the people under the guise that it would be dangerous to its security to advise the country on the steps taken, even those to prevent reoccurrence. That is why we have had reoccurrences, not once, but twice, and perhaps there will be more to come.
No democratic state can licence its military force to kill defenseless people without being held accountable. The army in any country holds enormous power and with that power it must carry enormous responsibility to account for its own wrongdoings as any professional organisation would do. The JDF does not. So, is it a professional body or one with a corrupt licence to kill extra-constitutionally without sanction?
It appears that new procedural rules are needed for the operations of the JDF. It cannot be that we have set up a structure based on a model of integrity and allow it to operate on a model of corruption.
Edward Seaga is a former Prime Minister. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at the University of the West Indies. E-mail: odf@uwimona.edu.jm
