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<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #CC0000"><span style="font-size: 17pt">Gravel Heights and rights</span></span></span>
Published: Sunday | December 14, 2008
Martin Henry, Contributor
God moves in a mysterious way; man moves in a mischievous way. The timing could hardly be better - or worse, depending on how you look at it. On the very day that minister of national security Number 2 saturated media with his maiden broadcast to the nation <span style="font-weight: bold">promising improved security, residents </span>of gritty Gravel Heights fled their homes after being labelled police 'informas' and threatened by gunmen.
The police were very kindly on hand to protect the exodus, to serve the fleeing citizens and to assure them that no harm would come to them if they obeyed the gangsters and lef' yah so, now.
On the same day, Sunday, December 7, the three-time winner of the Press Association of Jamaica's (PAJ) Morris Cargill Award for Opinion Journalism, including this year's, Ian Boyne, published a brilliant piece on 'Capital punishment and human rights', which seriously pre-empted a piece I was conceptualising on the philosophical foundations of human rights for publication today, the Sunday after the UN's International Human Rights Day on December 10.
Boyne asked the right questions: "Let's ask, fundamentally, what is the rational basis for asserting that each and every human life is sacrosanct? How do we ground the dignity and inviolability of every single human being?
Compensating for the loss
I have just finished teaching a course on the social and cultural History of Jamaica to North American students on an international service programme in Jamaica. It was certainly not the case that the life of the majority of Jamaicans throughout most of our history was held by the authorities to be sacrosanct, having any "inherent dignity", and inviolable. On International Human Rights Day itself, Hartley Neita noted in 'This Day in Our Past' for 1780 that <span style="font-weight: bold">the Jamaican Assembly voted to pay the owner the replacement cost of any slave killed in any attempt to capture the rebel Three Finger Jack. No different from pricing and compensating for the loss of a mule.</span>
Citing professor of law, Michael Perry, Boyne pressed home the questions: " 'If it is true, why is it true - in virtue of what is it true - that every human being has inherent dignity and that we should live our lives in accord with the fact that every human being has inherent dignity?"
The day after the minister of national security made his reassuring broadcast to a frightened and crime-saturated nation, this newspaper
, in an act of journalistic 'cruelty', albeit deadly accurate, juxtaposed its front-page report of MacMillan's broadcast with a picture of the fleeing residents of Gravel Heights.
Subsequently, several letter writers have decried the Gravel Heights incident as a new low for Jamaica and have expressed shock and shame. <span style="font-weight: bold">They either don't know, or have forgotten the history of political partisan-cleansing in Jamaica</span>. In nearby Central St Catherine, people's furniture was tossed from high rise, state-built, no-rent poor people's apartments and their persons chased away so that thugs from 'the other side' could take charge of scarce benefits.
The current prime minister can assist with the details of that story. <span style="font-weight: bold">Political evictions took place in Southern St Andrew, South Western St Andrew, Western Kingston, and generally, wherever garrisons have appeared, and continue to take place.</span>
And while the minister of national security is pleased to trot out the story of independent gangs, some 200 of them, driving crime and "directly connected to a global criminal network, which not only controls the trade in illicit drugs but the growing trade in human trafficking, his police, now free from securing the exodus from Gravel Heights, say they are in search of gangsters of the One Order gang and the Clansman gang, whom they believe can help them with their investigations.
The One Order gang is an affiliate of the Jamaica Labour Party. The Clansman gang is an affiliate of the People's National Party. MP Natalie Neita-Headley was at least honest enough to state that <span style="font-weight: bold">regardless of the political affiliation of the gangs, the police must do their work of bringing criminals in the area to justice</span>. The minister knows very well, as his pre-ministerial road map for the reduction of crime shouts, that <span style="font-weight: bold">the crime problem cannot be successfully dealt with without acknowledging and dealing with the historical crime-politics connection</span>.
Residents' rights
And what rights do the threatened citizens of Gravel Heights have who have been forced to abandon their properties and flee for their lives?
<span style="font-weight: bold">Their national Constitution mockingly advises: "Whereas every person in Jamaica is entitled to fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual ... whatever his race, place of origin, political opinions, colour, creed, or sex, but subject to the rights and freedoms of others and for the public interest, to each and all of the following, namely:
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<span style="font-weight: bold">(a) life, liberty, security of person, the enjoyment of property and the protection of the law ... the subsequent provision of this Chapter [Chapter III, Fundamental Rights and Freedoms] shall have effect for the purpose of affording protection to the aforesaid rights and freedoms."
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Their country is a signatory of the 60-year-old UN Declaration of Human Rights whose 30 articles are grounded in the recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family. Prime Minister Hugh Shearer made the Jamaican bid to the United Nations for 1968 to be declared International Year of Human Rights.
In his response, to the shame of Gravel Heights - a recurring shame - Dr Jephtah Ford made the call, <span style="font-weight: bold">"let us give all decent, law-abiding citizens the right to bear arms ... to be able to defend themselves,</span>" a view that the <span style="font-weight: bold">minister of national security himself held</span> in his pre-ministerial days in the security services of the country. We don't know if he still holds that view; what we do know is that he now holds the view that the <span style="font-weight: bold">Government should open negotiations with dons</span> as part of its anti-crime strategy. Gravel Heights would be a good place to start.
Right to defend themselves
<span style="font-weight: bold">Now, if one has a fundamental right to life, as the Constitution states, then it naturally follows that they have a right to defend their own lives. The authorities have not yet got around to removing from people their fists and teeth for self-defence, but there is a standing and widespread hostility to allowing the ownership of arms for self-defence.</span>
Human-rights groups are vowing to undertake a crusade to improve human rights in Jamaica. They and all of us cannot avoid the question: On what do human rights rest? If they rest only on the back of a giant turtle, philosophically speaking, they are bound to collapse. A serious government, urged on by a balanced and aggressive human-rights lobby, could make Gravel Heights a line in the gravel for both security and human rights.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to [email protected] or [email protected].
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