THE COUNTRY'S image can be expected to suffer more tarnishing with the disclosure that a Jamaican juvenile was involved in the sniper shootings that have terrorised sections of Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia in the United States.
The boy, John Lee Malvo, was born in Jamaica and from information, attended high school here before emigrating to the United States with his mother at age 13. The principal suspect in the US sniper shootings, John Allen Muhammad, an American, is said to have had a relationship with the boy's mother.
Ten persons, including another Jamaican, fell victim to the random shootings over a three-week period. Coming a little over a year after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. the killings left the Washington, D.C. area paralysed with fear, closing schools and leaving many persons afraid to go about their normal business.
The media coverage has been extensive and now that one of the alleged perpetrators has been found to have Jamaican origins we can expect some of the focus to be on our country and on us as a people.
It could not have come at a worse time. The country's tourism industry is still reeling from the effects of September 11 and what some consider to be inadequate efforts to counter that fall-out.
At one level the country cannot be blamed for what its nationals do when they migrate to other countries. However, when we promote ourselves as a major tourist destination any negative publicity hurts.
We share the concern of Josef Fortsmayr, president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, that the mere mention of Jamaica in the sniper killings could adversely affect the country's tourism fortunes. As he put it, "Each time our name is projected in a negative way, it hurts us...our image, what we stand for as a nation...it all takes a battering."
To compound the issue, some news reports have suggested that the two suspects in the Washington killings have in the past expressed sympathy for al-Qaida, the terrorist organisation behind the September 11 attacks.
Perhaps the only mitigating factor in the sorry affair is that a Jamaican, Conrad Johnson, also fell victim to the sniper attacks, so that in a very real sense we can share in the grief.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
