WE ARE in danger of losing the fight against violent crime. Last week's events in Temple Hall and elsewhere make this clear. The Commissioner of Police confesses failure. The Minister of National Security makes speeches. The Opposition opposes. Civil society leaders express alarm. Useful proposals for combating extortion have been recently put forward and these must be implemented. But that is about it. The society and its leadership, battered and buffeted, seem to be losing the will to win.
We must recover our will to win. Other societies, faced with criminal threats on a similar scale, have won the fight. We are thinking of the successful fight against the Mafia in Sicily in the 1980s and 1990s. Crime there had gone much further in corrupting the society's institutions than it has in Jamaica, reaching to the very top of the Italian state and controlling the entire construction industry in Sicily. Yet, after an enormous effort, civil society succeeded in rolling back the stranglehold which the Mafia had on Sicilian society. And this was achieved without the militarisation of the state and the accompanying loss of human rights. So we know that civil society can win a desperate fight of this kind.
The key there, as it is here, was the successful development of a means of involving civil society in the mass in this fight. Unity of the police, the army, the government, the opposition and civil society leadership is vital but is not enough. The legal regime must become stiffer. International assistance must be enhanced.
What tips the balance, however, is the practical involvement of civil society in the mass in the fight for peace. One possibility is to substantially expand the peace operations and resources of already existing organisations. The point is to develop a powerful organ of civil society: a permanent voluntary peace organisation in which thousands of law-abiding Jamaicans can play an organised part.
For make no mistake: a fight on this scale is a fight of the whole society. It cannot and will not be won by relying only on the police, the army, the government, the opposition and civil society leadership. All must take responsibility. All must get involved.
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