Cecil GutzmoreEVIDENCE MOUNTS that the Braeton represents the blooding of Jamaica into the public acceptance of unspeakable state brutality. Post-Braeton Jamaica will thus be a more ungentle and unkind place. Let me, then, for the first time in my life, praise the Rt. Hon. Edward Seaga. He is the only major member of Jamaica's ruling bloc who has called the at-close-range, multiple-shot in-the-head police shootings of seven young Jamaican citizens at Braeton Phase III by its name, a terrible act of state terrorism.
Other politicians, media barons and business moguls have accepted Braeton's normality and necessity. They have praised Reneto Adams for doing a good job. They have cleverly transformed Braeton into a nationalist issue: little, problem-plagued, but recovering, Jamaica versus wicked Amnesty Inter-national headed by an allegedly job-preserving foreign fellow. In all this our rulers are casually adding the slaughter of the rule of law to that of the seven young men.
Minister of Information, Mrs Maxine Henry-Wilson's argument that Mr Seaga is using Braeton to gain power and mash up Jamaica is out for a first ball duck.
Since when has the forthright condemnation of the evil of state injustice even in the quest for power been morally and politically inferior to supporting state injustice precisely as a way of retaining state power. Nor can the Government for which Minister Henry-Wilson speaks, use economic success as justification for its sacrifice of human rights, as has Singapore or as, earlier, did Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
In taking up the issue of injustice in Jamaica with a certain passion, Mr Seaga has made an enormous opening for himself. Has he the political and moral élan to press home the advantage? Hug up justice, Maas Eddie! Dat a di lick. A further early national broadcast giving clear, detailed and unambiguous undertakings about how an administration led by Edward Seaga would put an end the state terrorism you now correctly denounce, and telling us how you would drag our justice system back out of the darkness would alone entitle you to win the next election. It would put needed moral daylight between yourself and the PNP Government and party that now, all too clearly, represent the forces of darkness in our land. Mr Seaga would thus entitle himself to lead the grand (JLP-PNP) coalition for national reconstruction that I regard as a national necessity.
It is on the problems and apparent (im-)possibilities of the justice plank within a programme for national reconstruction that I have recently been concentrating in this column. My column Justice For the Braeton 7 (Gleaner) produced a more than one strongly negative e-mail: Two from ex-security force personnel. One of these is a gentleman who identified himself as a Jamaican employed by the United Nations. His condemnation was strong: placing me amongst those fighting for the rights of the criminals. He added, "When I was a young trainee intelligence officer at Special Branch I was told in one course that the greatest threat to peace and stability in any country are not the criminals who try to subvert it, but people like you who stand by and cheer them on."
My response is always reasoned. This resulted in remarkable personal testimony from a gentleman formerly within the system.
He speaks tellingly of how Jamaica's ruling bloc plunged this society onto its present death-dealing course, from which politicians claim to be rescuing us by sanctioning extra-judicial murder on a grand, and now sharply rising, scale. The gentleman writes: "Now let us travel back in time to the late 1970s and the early 1980s when the guns were arriving in droves to Jamaica by politicians on both sides ... We, the police officers warned both Governments of the threats but we were ignored, and told to mind our own business. You people from the media and the educational fraternity (especially UWI) were caught up in the frenzy of the politics of the day and failed to see the birth of the little kitten called lawlessness.
"The business community simply took sides and tried to jump on the band-wagon that they thought would win the election whilst clutching in one hand a visa for the United States. We the policemen stood alone facing the most sophisticated weaponry with the most outdated weapons I remember when I personally wrote a report on the 'extortion problem' which had started to raise its head in downtown Kingston and the need to crush it in its infancy. I was told that the perpetrators were just "young men trying to make a living in a capitalist society". And so the band played on and the people danced and fiddled whilst the fire was being lit.
"Mr. Gutzmore, have you ever seen a one-year-old baby shot through the forehead with an M-16 rifle along with his brothers and sister and their parents all lying dead on the same bed. Well I did in Olympic Gardens. What about a pregnant woman which a 12-gauge shotgun was inserted in her vagina and the trigger pulled (several times) in Bull Bay: or the old couple coming from church in lower Maxfield Ave and blasted to bits by automatic weapons at close range simply because they were thought to belong to a another political party... Now the kitten (lawlessness) has now become a full grown lion (terrorism) roaring and rampaging across the island. I have experienced wars in Beirut, South Lebanon, Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia and Mozambique and I have never seen once where a hospital has been attacked and shot-up. Yet in Jamaica it's a normal occurrence. The fact is that Jamaica is facing desperate times therefore desperate solutions are needed."
Brute force can't do it. A ruling bloc implicated at source in the horrors long besetting Jamaica is now seeking an impossible and wrong solution in day-to-day brute force. I for one firmly believe that the collective intelligence of Jamaican civil society manifested in a non-electorally oriented movement for national reconstruction can solve all the problems we face including gun-crime, the fear of which is coarsening the citizenry and letting through state terrorism.
Cecil Gutzmore is a research student and lecturer at the University of the West Indies. E-mail: gutzmorecr@hotmail.com
