RUDOLPH BROWN/CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER
Residents of Tivoli Gardens shout at soldiers during a major police-military operation in the community on October 4.
Colin Steer, Associate Editor
THE SCRIPT is worn and some of the props have changed, but substitute actors are saying the same lines, using the same plot while the scenarios remain unchanged.
I was a student in primary school when the People's National Party (PNP) swept to power in 1972. In the wake of the elections, friends and colleagues who lived in Tivoli Gardens or near Denham Town in west Kingston, would come to school relating stories of the almost daily police raids on the area. The frequency and manner of those raids then, led people to conclude that they were being harassed because of their political allegiance.
Some of the incidents related were quite amusing like the time when women would hang old, torn panties above their doorways or on mop sticks as the policemen approached and then taunted them, daring them to enter. In the folk culture, no self-respecting man was going to pass his head under any 'old drawers'. The cops kept a respectful distance. Those were more innocent times and before Reneto Adams.
In the succeeding years, Tivoli Gardens has become to the People's National Party, what Israel is to the Arab world defiant, well-armed enclave, fighting, from the perspective of its residents, for its survival amid intense aggression. While, from the perspective of the PNP, they are the criminal aggressors who brook no sympathy for their victims.
Sporadic interventions, raids, cordons and searches ostensibly in search of criminals or weapons throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, have made mutual enemies of the security forces and the residents from the area. Some of these raids were clearly legitimate, others transparently provocative.
Between the late 1970s and mid 1990s, most of my contact with the area was with an elderly family friend. She lived for most of her 80 years at various times on the outskirts of Tivoli, but still in the heart of west Kingston on Rose Lane, then West Street, then back to Rose Lane. After she was threatened with physical harm in the run-up to the 1980 elections having been targeted as a 'dutty Labourite' by the boys from down the lane, she moved further west, a block away, to an upstairs building at the corner of Oxford and Beeston streets.
This was across the road from the site where journalist John Maxwell directed his campaign as a PNP candidate against Edward Seaga in the 1972 elections. That site for many years remained an open lot where street gamins played with marbles, and people dumped garbage.
My visits to this elderly woman were to maintain contact, sometimes to write letters for her to her son in England, and occasionally to do some financial transaction on her behalf. She would sometimes reprimand me for coming down there despite hearing of the sporadic shootings.
BULLET HOLES
Sometimes I was overwhelmed by sadness. The many bullet holes in the walls of her house told a tale of crossfire from the PNP-allied side of Matthews Lane and lower Princess Street and from the JLP-allied section west of Oxford Street. That woman often resorted to sleeping on the floor or on the veranda of her house rather than in her bed. It was too dangerous to do otherwise. As her hypertension worsened, she found solace through worship at the New Testament Church of God on Beeston Street.
Still, she refused to go when offered an opportunity to move into the safer confines of 'Garden'. People who live there are targeted, she said. She preferred to take her chances on the outskirts. By September 1998, she did not have that worry on her mind, her body having finally succumbed to the illnesses that accompany old age.
As I listened to the radio last week and read the reports of yet another raid in search of wanted men inside Tivoli, a thousand memories flashed through my mind. How often have we had these forays? What has been the result of these many raids? How much blood has been spilled? How many young lives have been snuffed out and maimed in the name of politics, by political activists and/or by members of the security forces? The frequency of these raids is superseded only by their spectacular failure in capturing criminals.
True, within the confines of west Kingston/Tivoli Gardens are some of the most brutal criminals Jamaica has ever seen and perhaps will ever see. They are also among the best-organised and sophisticated of gangs.
But they have no monopoly on this. 'Dog-hearted' criminals have long been ensconced in the PNP-controlled pockets of the Corporate Area.
MOST VILIFIED OF JAMAICANS
They are not, by any measure, well-behaved Sunday School children. Yet, somehow, the security forces' 'intelligence' rarely seems to point them in the direction of these other areas with the regularity with which they do Tivoli. The reality is that the people of west Kingston, unapologetically loyal to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), have easily been among the most-demonised and vilified of Jamaicans.
Yet, among the people of the area, are some of Jamaica's most creative and talented minds, including brilliant students who continue to defy the odds, passing their exams, making it to high school and then going on to tertiary institutions here and abroad.
West Kingston is, of course, more than Tivoli Gardens it is home to skills-training institutions run by the United Church of Jamaica and Grand Cayman, the Methodists, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, New Testament Church of God, and City Mission denominations.
It is home to small enterprises from bakeries to small retail establishments, whose owners try to eke out a living, despite the urban decay around them. But many places which once housed small groceries, tinsmith shops and other enterprises have become overgrown with lots of weeds and oil nut trees.
Ironically, the area is also home to perhaps the largest concentration of funeral parlours in any geographic locale in Jamaica. One principal reason is that the country's main public hospital and morgue are nearby.
So over the years, Madden's, Brown's and Roman's funeral homes have done thriving business in the area and others have since set up shop investing in taking care of the dead is good business.
Edward Seaga as Member of Parliament and one-time Minister of Development and Welfare and later Prime Minister and Finance Minister, managed to channel significant portions of state funds to build the Tivoli enclave and present it as an example of a well-organised self-contained lower-income community.
But even at the best of times, west Kingston's social infra-structure provides the ultimate example of urban social decay. Broken sewer mains, poor sanitary facilities and dilapidated inadequate housing continue to make life miserable for many of the people there the best examples of the wretched of the earth.
EXACERBATED CONDITIONS
These conditions are exacerbated by the long-standing antagonism between the citizens and security forces. There often is an instinctive denunciation of the security forces by people from the area who can recount, with validity, many instances of brutality and harassment.
Clearly not all who cry foul are decent, law-abiding citizens. But as long as the people of west Kingston in general and Tivoli Gardens in particular continue to be seen and treated by the wider society as pariah, so long will the siege mentality and defiance which feeds upon itself remain.
There remains a challenge to the wider society not only for Bruce Golding or anyone who replaces him as MP, and that is how to engage with a group of fellow Jamaicans who demand respect, and who should be brought under the canopy of the rule of law.
Tivoli's challenge is Jamaica's.
Justice and fair play cannot be served by the clumsy interventions by the security forces, in which the claim for success is that there were no fatalities. The claim by DCP Mark Shields of an early warning system thwarting the efforts of the raid does not cut it.
The security forces have been at this thing too long not to be able to provide a more plausible explanation. Last week the mountain roared and brought forth a ganja spliff.
Stay tuned for Act V, Scene 8
