WITH a tidy $39.4-million budget, the Commission of Enquiry into the issues relating to the US government’s extradition request for former West Kingston “strongman” Christopher “Dudus” Coke has resumed. What should the nation – we who will be footing the enormous bill – expect? We anticipate that at the end of the day we will know from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice a lot more (though not likely the whole truth) about the sordid and deadly series of events that disgraced Jamaica internationally in the months leading up to Mr Coke’s scorched-earth expulsion last June.

I wonder, though, if we mightnt ask of the commission and its learned chair, Mr Emil George, that they extend their horizon (their terms of reference) to beyond “just the facts, ma’am”; that they lift their main purpose a notch or two. I ask this because mere fact-finding and the compilation of massive amounts of “evidence” did not, in the past, get us very far. Recent commissions of enquiry into dubious activities of the state and/or our political actors have not, in any memorable way, advanced our essential project of nation building and national-character formation, despite enormous and extravagantly produced findings.

The 2001 Enquiry

I doubt if anyone can recall any of the findings of the PJ Patterson-appointed Commission of Enquiry into the July 2001 Tivoli Gardens incursion, which left 27 people dead. I donated my copy of that copious report (to which, as an “expert” witness, I was entitled) to one of the postgraduate libraries on the UWI Mona Campus, where it sits mostly untroubled by human hands.

What we remember most about that 2001 Commission were its absurdities. We remember that a well-catered-to Justice Julius Isaac, the Grenadian-born retried Canadian jurist, whom Mr Patterson had invited from up North to chair the Commission, slept during presentation of critical testimony.

We remember Edward Seaga, then Leader of the Opposition JLP and MP for the West Kingston constituency (which includes his beloved Tivoli Gardens), briefly appearing before the commission – but it seemed that all he was doing was reading to Justice Isaac and the commission a prepared text stating his distaste for the proceedings. He then stepped down from the witness stand, before anyone could pose a question to him, and briskly walked out of the room, followed by a throng of clamouring reporters.

What did keep Mr Isaac keenly awake was the electrifying Senior Superintendent of Police, Reneto Adams. We remember Mr Adams giving the Commission and its packed house high theatre. He demonstrated how with stealth, dazzling acrobatics and amazing athleticism he ran, crouched and aimed, and was able to “lay down”, in a straight line, down “the Spanish Town Road” and inside “the Tivawli (sic) Gardens”, nothing but lead. A bow-tied, Armani-suited Mr Adams would return for at least another day of “testimony”. Led by urbane Queen’s Counsel Ian Ramsay, Mr Adams would dispassionately expound, to a dismayed audience, on his vision of a “final solution” for the nation’s crime problem.

We can rise above this

The challenge to Mr Emil George is that his commission should rise beyond theatre of the absurd. His commission should indeed get as close as possible to the truth, but that’s not all. No matter which way you look at it, 74 Jamaicans died in West Kingston – they were shot and killed – because of the corrupt and dastardly evil process for gaining and holding on to power that our political leadership class has fashioned in the years leading up to and since Independence. This is historical harm that’s been wilfully and woefully inflicted on the Jamaican people and nation.

If there was one useful thing to have come out of the 2001 Commission of Enquiry it was, in the end, Justice Isaac’s trying to make us understand that the project of nation building and national character development cannot move forward when underneath we’re hurting from unresolved harm. All of Jamaica in 2010, but especially investors and the business community, the diaspora and families of the wounded and the dead, suffered from Mr Golding’s and the JLP’s compounding of historical wrong — and its eventual unwinding in the conflagration in Tivoli Gardens.We need to put things right!

To their huge credit, Mr Golding and key members of his administration have been expressing for some time interest in the healing possibilities of restorative justice. This is the time and this is the occasion, beginning with the “man (and woman) in the mirror”. Restorative justice holds, Minister of Justice Dorothy Lightbourne has correctly observed, “offenders accountable for their crimes and offers them a way to take responsibility for their actions and (to) make restitution”. Physician, heal first thyself!

If Mr George hopes that the work of his commission will live not in libraries or on a CD-ROM, but in its transformative effect on the nation’s body politic, I urge that he and the others who comprise his team use their imagination to seek ways through which they can transform their proceedings into a restorative vehicle – a venue for admission of wrongdoing, but also into a circle for healing, forgiveness, change, reconciliation.

Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology, University of the West Indies, Mona.

bernard.headley@uwimona.edu.jm