The continued violence in east Kingston, which has claimed nearly a dozen lives in recent weeks, should be a matter of deep concern as much for the ruling People's National Party (PNP) as it is for security forces and the wider community.

It is clearly significant that a number of political activists identified with the ruling party have been taken into custody and that party supporters in the area have been demanding their release. The police must not be intimidated and must do their job without fear or favour.

We know the PNP will claim that it cannot do anything about the gangs and members may align themselves with the party and are intent on fighting it out. But if the PNP's president and Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller is minded to, she can start the process of turning its face hard against the questionable characters who are assumed to be the purveyors of crime and violence.

Indeed, no self-respecting political party, and certainly not one in government, would wish to have in its highest councils people accused of corruption against the state and many other infractions against the law.

Rising above PW Botha

The peaceful death in his sleep - in all likelihood from old age - of P.W. Botha is perhaps the greatest irony given what he was, and what he stood for in life.

Mr. Botha was a racist bigot, a leader of apartheid South Africa who believed that black people were inferior beings. He ruled in a manner that affirmed his conviction.

So during Mr. Botha's presidency, he snubbed the world when it demanded the dismantling of South Africa's ideology of white supremacy. When black people rejected their corralling into separate ghettos of deprivation, he jailed them by the thousands and many hundreds were tortured and killed.

Mr. Botha refused to free Nelson Mandela, invaded and destabilised neighbouring black states and in the end never regretted his deeds. Indeed, when democracy ultimately prevailed in South Africa, he declined to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Mr. Mandela sought to use as one route to national healing.

It is significant, in the circumstance, that in more than a decade and a half of democracy, which has translated so far into rule by the black majority, Mr. Botha was able to live, and now die, peacefully in South Africa. Moreover, the South African government, led by the African National Congress, which was an outlaw organisation when Mr. Botha ruled, has offered condolences to the former president's family.

Moreover, Mr. Mandela, being characteristically charitable, has chosen to remember Mr. Botha's small efforts at reform, rather than his shame on humanity and as a relic of South Africa's apartheid past.

The pity of all this, assuming that death is final, is that Mr. Botha could not see and comprehend it - this assertion of humanity by a black state. And that is the ultimate renunciation of what Mr. Botha stood for.

It is also an important declaration about the possibilities for South Africa. For if, unshamed, and unscathed, except, perhaps in the deep recesses of his conscience, Mr. Botha could live and die in South Africa, it suggests a country coming to terms with its past and with itself and that democracy is taking root.