Medellin and Cali in Colombia during the time of Pablo Escobar and the rest are perhaps more apt comparisons than the Balkans, or with Northern Ireland and the 'Troubles'.

In Medellin and Cali, sheer criminality held sway. Drug bosses and racketeers saw opportunities to make big money and ruthlessly muscled their way into control, getting the upper hand of a state that was, initially, slow to respond.

In the Balkan region, a more than 800-year dispute between ethnic groups triggered a world war, a series of regional wars and brought into the modern lexicon the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'. The Irish question is similarly historic and complex, enveloped in matters of conquest, religion, civil war and independence.

Different contexts, textures

It is hardly practical, disingenuous in fact, to equate these cases directly, and the strategies used in their settlement, to accords among the warlords and extortionists in communities such as August Town and elsewhere in Jamaica.

In the Balkans and in Ulster, formal and quasi-states and distinct ethnic and religious groups were direct participants in states of war. The context and texture of those conflicts were substantively different from the criminality that underpinned Medellin, Cali, the narco-controlled towns of Mexico and the community bases of the Jamaican dons.

It is instructive, for instance, that the Colombian state engaged in a long period of appeasement and accommodation of the narco-Mafia with little success in tamping down their violence. Success, in the end, came when the state asserted its authority in these cities, putting the Pablo Escobars of the world to flight.

Participants in ceremonies

The larger point is that peace treaties between gangs and community warlords - who get to keep their M16s, Bushmasters, Glocks and assortment of other weapons once they don't frighten us too much by slinging them openly and not offering gun salutes to their comrades - is downright dangerous and is, in all possibility, the thin end of the proverbial wedge. There is not even the suggestion for the decommissioning of weapons.

The danger deepens, however, when senior security officials of the state are guests at, if not participants in, the signing ceremonies, and when quasi-state officials are just short of being official guarantors of the pacts.

The obvious potential here is for the accretion of power to gang leaders and warlords; a devolution of political authority of sorts. For having become legitimised, their next move, perhaps, is to being formal state actors. Maybe, the next round of negotiation might be about a confederation between the diminished Jamaican state and the 'devolved' communities. Great achievement, indeed. But then, as myopic as we are, as dark as we are, we clearly miss this positive achievement that stares Jamaica in the face.