We’ve borrowed from Charles Dickens for the title of this editorial, to make the point that in the midst of these terrible times, there is an unprecedented opportunity to turn the Tivoli debacle into our favour as a nation.

Most Jamaicans, we believe, agree that the capture of Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston by the security forces cannot be an end in itself. Otherwise, the severe trauma through which this nation has just gone, would have been all in vain.

If nothing else, the Tivoli uprising in support of Mr Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, should have reinforced the old but extremely wise saying: “Wha gawn bad a mawnin’, caan come good a evenin’!” What went wrong in Tivoli from its creation in the early 1960s as a political enclave could not have turn to good without a dramatic change in direction.

In the short term, the security forces have the criminal gunmen on the run. This must continue. A sustained surgical operation targetting all the known criminal enclaves from one end of Jamaica to the next, must be our unstinting resolve, the objective to get the illegal guns off the streets. As this operation would last beyond the one-month life of the limited State of Public Emergency, our national family will have to decide if there is need to extend it to other areas in St Catherine and beyond, where there are other major hot spots.

While we are pursuing the gunmen, it is critical that the avenues by which they have a free flow of guns and ammunitions into this country be cauterised. Our porous borders must be sealed. This is one area in which we need to seek the partnership of the United States from which most of these weapons come. It obviously makes no sense that as we take the guns off the streets, that they be replaced in short order.

But the short term measures alone will not bring lasting solution to the problem of wanton crime and violence. Once we have retaken our country from the criminals, the really hard work begins. It will demand the effort of the entire country to reconstruct the future.

Tivoli is a symptom, not the cause, of what is wrong with us. Corrupt men fighting to assure their own rise to power and aggrandisement organised the mostly poor in what we are calling garrisons to devote their lives to this cause — in exchange for a mess of potage. Many of these gunmen were assigned to keep guard over the ill-gotten gains stuffed into the pork barrels they amassed on both sides of the political fence. Generations have grown up to accept this as an inevitable way of life.

When politics could no longer sustain the pork barrels, the former political enforcers morphed into drug and later arms dealers, and linked with extra-national criminal branches. They claimed the garrisons as their own and forced the politicians into second fiddle status. Desperate to hang onto political power, they meekly accepted their reduced status, giving tacit support to the criminals.

Tivoli is only the most organised of them, its influence widened with the creation of the Shower Posse that operated branches in places like the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. It also spawned Jamaican franchises that are most likely responsible for the extortion and blood-letting in Spanish Town, St Catherine, Clarendon and St James.

While the clean-up is happening, the nation has to hasten, through the Partnership for Transformation, we suggest, to mobilise all resources possible to fill the vacuum that will be created.

The rebuilding of Jamaica has just begun.