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PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Errant government has cost us 'dyearly'
Published: Sunday | July 4, 2010
Andrew Gallimore
CLARKE
The bullet-riddled house and vehicle at the Kirkland Heights home of Keith Clarke. - Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer
Keith Clarke
Claude Clarke, Contributor
The prime minister has skilfully (and so far, it appears, successfully) segued from being faithful protector of a don to becoming a passionate persecutor of dons. This would be laughable were the consequences of this flip not so tragic. Mr Golding has managed to convince much of the country that by unleashing a wave of violence on its citizens he is launching a sincere and meaningful effort to rid the country of dons and gangs. Never mind that we have been there and done that many times before under different administrations, albeit never with so much death and destruction, only to return to the same don-controlled environment fostered by government's failure to create and sustain an adequate social, economic and legal infrastructure. But the country is so desperate for peace and security that it keeps getting caught by the same old trick.
Having spent nine months making Christopher Coke the poster child of constitutional rights and the most protected man in the land, the prime minister within a matter of hours, motivated by his own political self-preservation, abruptly switched Coke's status from that of 'most protected citizen' to 'most wanted man': So wanted that it required a state of emergency in the Corporate Area to ensure his arrest. One month after its declaration, Coke is arrested; but outside the area affected by the state of emergency, before it was extended to St Catherine.
Clearly, there was nothing to prevent the Jamaican Government from assenting to the extradition request and apprehending Mr Coke during the nine long months following the extradition request. But for nine months Bruce Golding's Government dithered and dodged, engaging in an unseemly dance of deception, designed solely to protect the prime minister's political base, no matter the cost.
Fear of local authorities
Mr Coke had long made it known that while he did not want to be extradited, his greater fear was falling into the custody of the local authorities as part of that process. Had our government acted responsibly, intelligently and honourably it could have organised speedy passage of Mr Coke through our courts. He could have been in the United States for trial within days of the extradition request and we might have been spared the chaos and bloodletting we have endured since then.
The extradition of 'Dudus' Coke might have been a relatively simple and uneventful exercise. Instead, we saw the playing out of contorted political manoeuvres which, to borrow a word from our erstwhile, colourful senior superintendent of police, have cost our country "dyearly, dyearly".
When the extradition request was received in August last year it would have been politically unthinkable for the prime minister to give up his party's principal political street enforcer. It was far more important to the JLP's political success to leave Dudus 'large and in charge' of his inner-city enclave, than to have the party's street strength left in doubt. So the Government opted for a process of obfuscation and deception which not only corrupted the purpose of government, it dragged the country's international reputation through the mud, hobbled our domestic and international commerce and elevated the profile and status of the don and garrisons to levels never seen under any other government of either party in our country's history.
So vacuous and absurd were the prime minister's arguments about protecting Mr Coke's rights and the nation's sovereignty that the scam was easily exposed. The public overwhelmingly demanded the prime minister's resignation. He retreated to the bunker of his party's Central Executive which, through the charade of rejecting an offer to resign and accepting an apology, gave him a political lifeline. And how politically adroitly, if callously, he has used it!
Conditions which frightened the public into welcoming a state of emergency were created (we are not sure by whom; no one has yet been arrested). This most heavy-handed of all law-enforcement measures, a state of emergency, was imposed on the entire population of the Corporate Area; their human rights suspended and they became exposed to the full force of the military, to be abused as if they were hostile aliens.
The state of emergency of the 1970s, so heavily criticised by the party of the present government, used the detention of citizens as its principal tool. But today's state of emergency seems to have begun with the killing of citizens as its main feature. Within two days it left over 70 people dead in Tivoli Gardens and surrounding areas. It adopted a strategy of break-ins and slaughter.
As everyone now knows, my brother, Keith Clarke, became a victim of this wave of slaughter in the most bizarre of circumstances. In an event that could not be more symptomatic of life in a police state or of the absence of the rule of law, his home, in which he has lived for 32 years, was attacked and shot up by several platoons of the military and he was brutally shot from behind in the sanctuary of his bedroom by masked men in military dress, in front of his wife and teenage daughter.
No sensible explanation has yet been advanced for this manifestly unwarranted and tragic act. But caught in the midst of the law and order hysteria whipped up by the Government to divert attention from its disastrous mishandling of the Coke extradition/Manatt, Phelps matter, cover has been provided for official silence.
The Government has retreated behind the usual, well-rehearsed statements by the security forces: some so preposterous that they would have us believe that this 64-year-old senior citizen woke from his sleep at 2:30 in the morning and from his bedroom, using his simple licensed hand-gun, launched an attack on well over 50 heavily armed soldiers supported by helicopter, floodlight and flares.
The Opposition, too, has been silent: succumbing, I would imagine, to the political calculation that to express concern in the case of one 'uptown' killing, when they supported the actions of the security forces which led to the deaths of over 70 poor people from the ghetto, would be bad politics.
However, many politicians, on both sides of the political fence, have privately expressed sympathy and support to Keith's family; for which the family is grateful. But only one was prepared to break the apparent pact of public silence. Keith's Member of Parliament Andrew Gallimore, to his everlasting credit, seemed to have shunned political cravenness and publicly expressed his outrage at the vicious assault carried out by the State on one of his constituents; a constituent he knew did not support him or his party.
People in Jamaica will gladly accept the violence of the State if they can believe it will be directed at someone else. They believe that geographic or social remoteness will protect them. But they should quickly get a dose of reality. Keith Clarke, the managing partner of an audit firm, unconnected to Coke, had reason to believe that too; but social distance did not protect him, and it can protect none of us from a government that remains unaccountable to its citizens for its illegal actions.
The slaughter stopped
Yet, the shock and horror of the killing of Keith Clarke, this quiet, peaceful, law-abiding family man, may well have saved countless other lives. Remarkably, after the horror and injustice of his killing was exposed to the public, the slaughter stopped. Suddenly the security forces seemed to have been embarrassed into adopting a more civil and professional approach to their task. The use of irrational force was replaced by a greater use of intelligence: cordoning and searching instead of shooting up; apprehending and detaining rather than killing and maiming. There has been no similar brutal attack, uptown or downtown, since the savagery of Keith's slaughter was exposed.
And what has been the result of this new approach? No further extrajudicial killings: Dudus has been captured using intelligence, not killed.
The advocates of brutality and abuse will, of course, learn nothing from this and will continue to urge the escalation of violence and the continued descent of our country into a killing field. But no society can advance on a platform of internecine violence and conflict. Violence cannot eliminate violence. Justice should be our goal; respect for our citizen's rights our method. With this will come the peace and security we seek and the prosperity for which we yearn.
Continuing the approach of state-sponsored brutality and disregard for the rights of 'We the People', who appoint governments to protect those rights, will only worsen the mounting bloodshed in our country, which has seen murders increase from 200 when the state of emergency was called in the 1970s to 1,700 today.
Claude Clarke is a former trade minister and manufacturer. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com
Published: Sunday | July 4, 2010
Andrew Gallimore
CLARKE
The bullet-riddled house and vehicle at the Kirkland Heights home of Keith Clarke. - Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer
Keith Clarke
Claude Clarke, Contributor
The prime minister has skilfully (and so far, it appears, successfully) segued from being faithful protector of a don to becoming a passionate persecutor of dons. This would be laughable were the consequences of this flip not so tragic. Mr Golding has managed to convince much of the country that by unleashing a wave of violence on its citizens he is launching a sincere and meaningful effort to rid the country of dons and gangs. Never mind that we have been there and done that many times before under different administrations, albeit never with so much death and destruction, only to return to the same don-controlled environment fostered by government's failure to create and sustain an adequate social, economic and legal infrastructure. But the country is so desperate for peace and security that it keeps getting caught by the same old trick.
Having spent nine months making Christopher Coke the poster child of constitutional rights and the most protected man in the land, the prime minister within a matter of hours, motivated by his own political self-preservation, abruptly switched Coke's status from that of 'most protected citizen' to 'most wanted man': So wanted that it required a state of emergency in the Corporate Area to ensure his arrest. One month after its declaration, Coke is arrested; but outside the area affected by the state of emergency, before it was extended to St Catherine.
Clearly, there was nothing to prevent the Jamaican Government from assenting to the extradition request and apprehending Mr Coke during the nine long months following the extradition request. But for nine months Bruce Golding's Government dithered and dodged, engaging in an unseemly dance of deception, designed solely to protect the prime minister's political base, no matter the cost.
Fear of local authorities
Mr Coke had long made it known that while he did not want to be extradited, his greater fear was falling into the custody of the local authorities as part of that process. Had our government acted responsibly, intelligently and honourably it could have organised speedy passage of Mr Coke through our courts. He could have been in the United States for trial within days of the extradition request and we might have been spared the chaos and bloodletting we have endured since then.
The extradition of 'Dudus' Coke might have been a relatively simple and uneventful exercise. Instead, we saw the playing out of contorted political manoeuvres which, to borrow a word from our erstwhile, colourful senior superintendent of police, have cost our country "dyearly, dyearly".
When the extradition request was received in August last year it would have been politically unthinkable for the prime minister to give up his party's principal political street enforcer. It was far more important to the JLP's political success to leave Dudus 'large and in charge' of his inner-city enclave, than to have the party's street strength left in doubt. So the Government opted for a process of obfuscation and deception which not only corrupted the purpose of government, it dragged the country's international reputation through the mud, hobbled our domestic and international commerce and elevated the profile and status of the don and garrisons to levels never seen under any other government of either party in our country's history.
So vacuous and absurd were the prime minister's arguments about protecting Mr Coke's rights and the nation's sovereignty that the scam was easily exposed. The public overwhelmingly demanded the prime minister's resignation. He retreated to the bunker of his party's Central Executive which, through the charade of rejecting an offer to resign and accepting an apology, gave him a political lifeline. And how politically adroitly, if callously, he has used it!
Conditions which frightened the public into welcoming a state of emergency were created (we are not sure by whom; no one has yet been arrested). This most heavy-handed of all law-enforcement measures, a state of emergency, was imposed on the entire population of the Corporate Area; their human rights suspended and they became exposed to the full force of the military, to be abused as if they were hostile aliens.
The state of emergency of the 1970s, so heavily criticised by the party of the present government, used the detention of citizens as its principal tool. But today's state of emergency seems to have begun with the killing of citizens as its main feature. Within two days it left over 70 people dead in Tivoli Gardens and surrounding areas. It adopted a strategy of break-ins and slaughter.
As everyone now knows, my brother, Keith Clarke, became a victim of this wave of slaughter in the most bizarre of circumstances. In an event that could not be more symptomatic of life in a police state or of the absence of the rule of law, his home, in which he has lived for 32 years, was attacked and shot up by several platoons of the military and he was brutally shot from behind in the sanctuary of his bedroom by masked men in military dress, in front of his wife and teenage daughter.
No sensible explanation has yet been advanced for this manifestly unwarranted and tragic act. But caught in the midst of the law and order hysteria whipped up by the Government to divert attention from its disastrous mishandling of the Coke extradition/Manatt, Phelps matter, cover has been provided for official silence.
The Government has retreated behind the usual, well-rehearsed statements by the security forces: some so preposterous that they would have us believe that this 64-year-old senior citizen woke from his sleep at 2:30 in the morning and from his bedroom, using his simple licensed hand-gun, launched an attack on well over 50 heavily armed soldiers supported by helicopter, floodlight and flares.
The Opposition, too, has been silent: succumbing, I would imagine, to the political calculation that to express concern in the case of one 'uptown' killing, when they supported the actions of the security forces which led to the deaths of over 70 poor people from the ghetto, would be bad politics.
However, many politicians, on both sides of the political fence, have privately expressed sympathy and support to Keith's family; for which the family is grateful. But only one was prepared to break the apparent pact of public silence. Keith's Member of Parliament Andrew Gallimore, to his everlasting credit, seemed to have shunned political cravenness and publicly expressed his outrage at the vicious assault carried out by the State on one of his constituents; a constituent he knew did not support him or his party.
People in Jamaica will gladly accept the violence of the State if they can believe it will be directed at someone else. They believe that geographic or social remoteness will protect them. But they should quickly get a dose of reality. Keith Clarke, the managing partner of an audit firm, unconnected to Coke, had reason to believe that too; but social distance did not protect him, and it can protect none of us from a government that remains unaccountable to its citizens for its illegal actions.
The slaughter stopped
Yet, the shock and horror of the killing of Keith Clarke, this quiet, peaceful, law-abiding family man, may well have saved countless other lives. Remarkably, after the horror and injustice of his killing was exposed to the public, the slaughter stopped. Suddenly the security forces seemed to have been embarrassed into adopting a more civil and professional approach to their task. The use of irrational force was replaced by a greater use of intelligence: cordoning and searching instead of shooting up; apprehending and detaining rather than killing and maiming. There has been no similar brutal attack, uptown or downtown, since the savagery of Keith's slaughter was exposed.
And what has been the result of this new approach? No further extrajudicial killings: Dudus has been captured using intelligence, not killed.
The advocates of brutality and abuse will, of course, learn nothing from this and will continue to urge the escalation of violence and the continued descent of our country into a killing field. But no society can advance on a platform of internecine violence and conflict. Violence cannot eliminate violence. Justice should be our goal; respect for our citizen's rights our method. With this will come the peace and security we seek and the prosperity for which we yearn.
Continuing the approach of state-sponsored brutality and disregard for the rights of 'We the People', who appoint governments to protect those rights, will only worsen the mounting bloodshed in our country, which has seen murders increase from 200 when the state of emergency was called in the 1970s to 1,700 today.
Claude Clarke is a former trade minister and manufacturer. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com
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