There were those famous photographs in the immediate aftermath of the West Kingston violence of July 2001 — of two young men, naked to the waist, lying on a hot asphalt road and being watched over by soldiers.

Their names were David Hardy and Markeno Gonzalez.

They were offered $200,000 each by the Jamaican Government as it sought to settle cases alleging public humiliation and the breach of the civil rights by the state.

They accepted. So, too, apparently, had Joy Lothian. Her son Marvin Minott, 12 at the time, was killed by the security forces during another bout of violence in Tivoli Gardens in 1997. Lothian was scheduled to get $950,000.

Tamara Campbell was a teenage university student in 1994, reading accounting, and doing well. However, Campbell gave up her ambitions of being an accountant. She forgets things quickly, her short-term memory impaired.

But that, the experts said, was quite understandable for Campbell had fragments of a bullet lodged in her brain. Ten years after the 1994 incident, Campbell couldn’t recall much about how it all happened. “All I know I was sitting at my gate and ended up at the Kingston Public Hospital with a bullet,” she said.

The Government had offered her compensation of $1.5 million. The likelihood was that she would accept. Hardy, Gonzalez, Campbell and Lothian may have resolved their claims against the Government, but there were several others to be unravelled. At the time, Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the victims’ lawyers were optimistic that more settlements were imminent.

“I think we are finally getting somewhere now,” said Dorothy Lightbourne, at the time an Opposition senator and lawyer who was among a team of lawyers who brought cases on behalf of the families of 20 of the 25 civilians who were shot dead in a weekend of violence in West Kingston in July 2001.

For more than 40 years, Seaga was the parliamentary representative for West Kingston, a mostly decayed section of the capital that has a reputation for street toughs and violence, much of it, in the past, related to politics.

Tivoli Gardens, whose development he oversaw in the 1960s, is a West Kingston enclave that was fiercely loyal to Seaga.

But West Kingston has had an enigmatic relationship with the rest of Jamaica — and its neighbouring communities, which often look at it with a mixture of envy, respect and fear.

Its achievement in sports, especially football, and popular culture, wins the community great respect, but the area has a reputation for violence with many of its ‘community leaders’ considered to be major street generals.

The result is that Tivoli Gardens, especially, in the past, was often at odds with the police and other nearby so-called garrison communities that support the People’s National Party (PNP).

It was this volatile concoction that erupted in 1997, and again on Saturday, July 7, 2001.

There had been tension in the area for months since the killing of Arnett Gardens ‘community leader’ William ‘Willie Haggart’ Moore. There were rumours that he was killed by men from Tivoli Gardens, leading, apparently, to skirmishes between gangs from the two communities.

Arnett Gardens, or ‘Jungle’, is a PNP “garrison”.

For more than two decades, there had been no mixing between the two communities, but things had begun to ease with the advent of Omar Davies, the then finance minister, as parliamentarian for South St Andrew and his expanded efforts with Seaga to ease tensions. Football teams from the communities had begun to play at each other’s grounds.

The Haggart rumour and the violence had undermined the peace efforts and the problem was compounded by tensions between men from Tivioli Gardens and Rema — a community adjacent to Tivoli that used to vote JLP but had switched to the PNP. There, young men aligned themselves to Arnett Gardens.

As the violence raged for weeks, Seaga and the JLP claimed that it was being orchestrated by the PNP to paint Tivoli Gardens, and by extension Seaga, with violence.

It was against that backdrop that then Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams’ controversial Crime Management Unit went to West Kingston that Saturday, acting, the police said, on intelligence reports about the movement of guns. They established a cordon and search.

But the police said they came under intense fire from an organised group of gunmen engaged in guerrilla-type tactics. In a siege that lasted three days, 27 people were killed, including a policeman and a soldier.

However, the JLP and Tivoli Gardens residents dismissed the claims of a gunfight, saying that the police came to attack their community. Many women, old people and children were killed and injured, they said. The police claimed that in some cases women used themselves as shields to protect gunmen.

A commission of inquiry, headed by the Grenadian-born former head of Canada’s Federal Court, Julius Isaac, exonerated the police, saying had it not been for their restraint the situation would have been worse. The JLP, however, had ridiculed the Commission, withdrew from its proceedings and declared it biased.