Melville Cooke
Some news organisation or the other once said that they could connect any two persons in the world in five human connections. They proceeded to do just that by linking say a high school teacher in Barbados with a civil engineer in Armenia by finding people who knew people who went to the same school or took the same flight, person by person, until the connection was made between the two.
I found it fascinating, as it showed that no matter how much we live in the tight circles that we tend to, our lives revolve around and within the circles of others.
There has not been an attempt, as far as I know, to link the now dead former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and Jamaica's Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas in that way. I do know, though, that the man who died by hanging on Saturday morning and the man who said on Tuesday morning that "we seem to be going back to the politics of the 1980s. Everyone should prepare himself or herself for whatever holds" have a common ground.
They have to deal with the consequences of the link between crime and politics. The quote I heard on radio about that police event was not in yesterday's lead story in The Gleaner.
Unfortunately so, as it said in effect that when elections come around the criminal gangs go back to their political affiliation. Yet, no politician in the known trouble spots which have bequeathed on us anything from Clansman and One Order to Shower and Spoilers, with who knows how many bodies in between, has been called to account for the political links of known criminals in their area.
It amazes me that the political affiliation of the late Bulbie and Bun Man, the hastily stashed away and forgotten Zekes as well as Joel Andem, as well as the briefly incarcerated and released or held and interrogated dons from the east and west of the capital can be well known and yet the police have not taken anyone in the respective political organisations to task.
No congratulatory handshake for keeping the peace in riotous times, no name on the car papers a murdered don was driving, no mad dash from Parliament to be on the scene of a don's slaughter, no prominent position at a don's funeral has been enough to make the police even think of asking a few pertinent questions. And no intelligence at this pre-election warning point is enough to do anything but tell us to 'prepare himself or herself for whatever holds'.
Prepare ourselves
And just how do we do that, Mr. Thomas? Stop going to work for fear of stray bullets? Take a 'Sprint' flight out of here? Buy a bulletproof vest or get bulletproof glass on our vehicles? Buy lots of food and fill the car with gas every evening? Or simply prepare to read about more killings every day and prepare ourselves that each day might be our last as we head back to the bad old days of the 1980 undeclared civil war?
That conflict had the element of communism versus capitalism , as did the Iraq and Iran war from 1980 to 1988 in which Saddam Hussein was the good guy for the U.S.A. So the specific killings for which he was convicted, the 1982 killings of 148 persons, took place when he was 'our friend in the Middle East'. And while Hussein has had his neck cracked after being teased in an execution reminiscent of a lynching (but then, Georgie is a good ol' boy from Texas) for having 148 persons murdered, yet no-one knows how many civilians were murdered in Fallujah in November 2004.
No American necks have cracked for that. And with the Lancet medical journal estimating in 2004 that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the US invasion of that country, that figure hitting 655,000 in October of last year, what penalty is appropriate for Good old Georgie?
Still, give America some credit. At least it had one of its dons killed with some attempt at a legal cover-up.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
