IT’S not that we didn’t know all along. However, the comments of some residents of Tivoli Gardens reported in this week’s Sunday Observer gave even greater confirmation of the life of bondage people in garrison constituencies suffer daily.

One man interviewed by our news team during the media tour of that community last Thursday informed us that in order to stay alive he does what he is told. He votes, he said, because he’s told he has to.

One lady gave an indication of the threat hanging over the heads of all the community’s residents, saying that the majority did not heed the police’s appeal for people to leave before the security forces’ operation simply because they couldn’t. Any such attempt, she said, would have been met with death. In fact, the houses of the few who were brave enough to leave were vandalised.

The message sent in those acts of arson was that people had no freedom, no choice; live by the rule of the rabble or die.

The sad fact is that what obtained in Tivoli Gardens before the security forces repelled the gangsters who had captured that community is the stark reality in many other neighbourhoods across the country.

Men who regard it as their right to determine how people should live; men who revel in their power to say who is beyond salvage and which little girl they should sexually assault while her parents dare not object, hold these communities hostage.

These men, who disingenuously claim poverty as the driving force for their criminal behaviour, are really terrorists and should be treated as such by law-abiding citizens and, more important, by the authorities.

Our disapproval of the way these parasites choose to live, plus the fact that they have brought so much sorrow to thousands of families and contributed significantly to the limited growth in our country have given us cause to support the present thrust by the security forces to rout gangs and crush their criminal enterprises.

The Government, we submit, should not allow the ongoing operation in West Kingston to be derailed by baseless public or political pressure. For we see in it an opportunity to start reclaiming our country from the terrorists who, for too long, have caused us too much pain and shame.

In that regard, we hope the operation will be extended, strategically of course, to other centres of violence, as now that the terrorists are still shell-shocked by the might of the military and the constabulary, they should not be allowed to recover.

We caution, though, that the security forces must, in the course of their duties, demonstrate respect for the human rights of the Jamaican people. For it will take only one act of abuse to diminish, or worse erase what we sense is a high level of public support for the current initiative.

The country has already started paying a high price for last week’s events. Lives have been lost, people are traumatised, businesses including the vital tourism industry on which hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans rely for a livelihood have suffered setbacks, and our image has taken a battering internationally.

Outside of the lives lost, if the damage done to businesses and our image will result in a greater good, we will have no quarrel. It is past time that this country be allowed to grow into a place where we all want to live.