Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THE KILLING of so many little children is a depravity of which no one could have dreamt us possible only a few short weeks ago.
This is a definite turn for the worse, and the Police Commissioner, that well-known whinger, ought to be ashamed of himself. All he did before the election was moan and groan about needing the community's help to solve crime. Now the guns of utterly depraved criminals are trained upon Jamaican children, and the police theorise that this might be accidental, or collateral damage in drug feuds and turf wars.
I have absolutely no interest in the cause of it, only the halting of it. Too many people in this country have to sleep under their beds at night, with only the sound of rapid gunfire from heavy weaponry as their constant companion. To shoot up a children's birthday party is to demonstrate the utmost contempt for human life and public authority.
A fourth term in a country not known for handing them out, is like a political landslide. Prime Minister P. J. Patterson has the unmistakable mandate therefore to ensure the safety and prosperity of all the Jamaican people, something he's so far failed miserably to provide.
Sue Cobb, United States Ambassa-dor, speaking at The Gleaner's Editors' Forum last week, said that her embassy has asked the State Department to provide funding for a joint US-Jamaican study into the controversial deportation of Jamaicans from that country over the last 12 years.
Last year alone 2,529 were deported, and many feel that this U.S. policy has everything to do with escalating violent crime in Jamaica. Doubtless the study when completed will show that the United States is not to blame for the local slaughter, and all the professionals will have been duly paid for their expert advice.
It is said that every road has a bend, but it is hard to see one in Jamaica. There is also a view in the Bush administration that the sale of drugs increasingly buys arms for terrorists, now that the U.S. is claiming some measure of success in choking off other means of financial support for al Queda. Yet even with that I think Jamaica is some years off from being seen as a security priority by the United States.
This is probably a good thing because overt U.S. interest in a Caribbean island has been the kiss of death. One need look no further than Cuba or Haiti.
A couple weeks ago over 200 Haitians, including many small children in their Sunday best, fled their country in a 50-foot wooden boat and eventually ran aground right beside an elevated concrete freeway in Miami. They immediately jumped into the shallow water and climbed unto anything they could, so avid were they for freedom. This has induced a state of near hysteria in the black Miami population over discriminatory U.S. refugee policies vis-a-vis Cubans and Haitians. The Haitians knew the score when they took the boat, and they still took it. It was still the bend in their river.
Jamaicans take a different approach. According to a recent issue of The Economist, 75 per cent of Jamaicans who have tertiary education reside outside Jamaica, a figure exceeded only by that of Mexico's nationals. This is to me a horrifying statistic, because it goes a long way into explaining our descent into barbarism. That magazine is shortly to do a survey on the benefits to the world of the global brain drain. I look forward to it.
During the time of the colonial British Empire a form of brain drain was employed using the braver and better-educated people from among the indigenous populations of the territories as a kind of rotating global constabulary force.
For the most part it worked quite well, until British officers in the Raj did nothing to counter the rumour that animal grease was being used in the breech-loading rifles, and it caused a terrible revolt among the Hindu and Muslim rank-and-file soldiers, who promptly massacred the officers, their wives and their children. It was a tragedy of colliding cultures, and marked the decline of empire.
Civilised people try to make a point today, of being sensitive to other people's superstitions, religions and cultures. Indeed, for the first time in its history the U.S. is to begin an advertising campaign promoting America and its values on television in Arab countries, in the hope of winning the hearts and minds of moderate Arabs there. No doubt this initiative is the product of a market survey, or simply replaces the traditional flyers dropped from aeroplanes before the United States, with or without Europe, bombs Iraq.
In any event Saddam Hussein will soon know who is in charge. Perhaps it might be possible, however, to take him before the Hague tribunal as an Arab Slobodan Milosevic, instead of destroying much of the archaeological information of the Mid-East.
Jamaica has no oil, and no national treasures except our people and our country which are being brutalised with each passing minute. Jamaican businessman Roy D'Cambre recently told a Gleaner's Editors' Forum that what we need is the 10 top people in the Jamaican police force replaced by 10 foreign white people. He also said that he owns a man on the dock. Instead of congratulating D'Cambre on his candour and wise counsel, an editorial of this newspaper came down on his head like a ton of bricks.
I think these 10 foreign white people in the top 10 positions of our police force should be from Britain only, on a few years' contract only, and replaced with 10 more foreign people when their tour of duty is up. The United Kingdom has a sincere interest in fighting the cocaine trade, and the best track record in the management of the administrative systems of overseas territories.
We should therefore farm out the management of our crime and customs to them and have less guns in the hands of criminals, more money in the public purse, and less smuggling so that Jamaican entrepreneurs have a level playing field and get to create more Jamaican jobs.
What's there to hate about that? It may not be politically correct, but it sure beats jumping on a boat to nowhere in your Sunday best.
FOOTNOTE: Mark Wignall must just face the fact that his poll was wrong, and get on with his life. The island had been under flood watch for about three days prior to the election, and flood alert for weeks before that, so he should have controlled for that factor in his polling. Furthermore the late Dr. Carl Stone never once said, as Mark did months ago in his column, that no poll, including his own, could be accurate until the date of election was announced. Dr. Stone's polls were always right, rain or shine.
