THIS country is on the way to becoming an international pariah spoken of with the scorn and derision usually reserved for Pol Pot's Cambodia, Apartheid South Africa, and other countries infamous for their killing fields. The circumstances point this way whether or not Amnesty International does what it threatens to do.Their report on Jamaica is a damning indictment of a country which helped to lead the fight against Apartheid and which, under PNP leadership, was a strong supporter of Amnesty. We cannot espouse one ideal there and fail to promote it here at home. As the Secretary General Pierre Sane puts it, the country now has "a human rights emergency" created by the continued controversial police shootings. This has earned us the dubious distinction of having one of the highest per capita incidences of lethal police killings in the world.
So what are we going to do about it? The killing of the seven young men in Braeton and the circumstances under which they were killed have created deep divisions in the country. In a society reeling under the pressure of criminality and the depredations of criminal gunmen, it is not unexpected that there will be ambivalence about the killings of alleged gunmen by the police. Letters to the newspapers and callers on radio programmes attest to the divisions in the society. But the findings of the overseas forensic pathologist, who was commissioned by Amnesty International to observe the autopsies, raise serious doubts about the police account of the killings.
The Amnesty findings claim that six of the men died from gunshot wounds to the head, some had as many as four bullet wounds. Four were shot from behind and the bodies had signs of blunt trauma consistent with fist punches. All of which explodes the version that the men fired on the police from inside the house and were killed in the exchange of gunfire.
And yet Minister K.D. Knight, the police commissioner, and the attorney-general, all atop the hierarchy of national security, cast aspersions on the Amnesty Report, even before proper investigation of the killings.
It is noteworthy that Mr. Knight, backed up by the Prime Minister himself, has declared that the legal process to be pursued is that leading up to a coroner's inquest as stipulated by law.
It is, however, a notorious fact that few such inquests into police shootings have been held over the years. This is so not only because of the heavy caseloads of resident magistrates (who act as coroners), but also due to the scandalous delinquency of police witnesses in failing to attend court.
Against that background we propose that an official inquiry should be held into the killings. We go further to demand that such an inquiry be conducted by personnel drawn from the Commonwealth. We must restore Jamaica's good name.
