We may yet learn an important thing or two from the Manatt-Dudus enquiry about the kind of political governance we lived under in the period leading up to Christopher Coke’s extradition. Still, from the look of things, as the Emil George-led Commission of Enquiry drifts into the realm of the arcane, and sometimes farcical, it’s getting clearer that what we will certainly not learn is an answer to the burning, key question: how did so many Jamaican citizens over the course three days of hell lose their lives in west Kingston?

Mr George has indicated that we shouldn’t look to him for answers, because that’s not his commission’s remit. That then being the case, we should not expect anything by way of healing, and simply being able to move on, after Mr George has closed the books on his enquiry and the lawyers have walked away.

Someone important to me was shot and killed in the Tivoli Armageddon. I’d certainly like to know how 32-year-old Carl (“Kette”) George Henry died. Carl belonged to the fraternity of deported migrants that I’ve been leading and mentoring through a series of workshops on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. Carl was only months before the May 2010 high noon in Tivoli Gardens deported from the United States. He had in April enlisted in a year-long European Union-United Nations-funded resettlement/reintegration initiative I direct on the campus: 75 deported men and women filled with hope, optimism and desire to lift themselves above the miserable existence that comes with being a deportee in Jamaica.

Carl found a measure of meaning to his tortured life in caring for his disabled grandmother (with whom he lived) in Tivoli Gardens. On the morning of May 24, 2010, hours into the siege of Tivoli Gardens, Carl told his grandmother he’d be “right back”; he needed to pick up for the two of them some essential items. The grandmother recalls fussing with Carl over the shirt he was wearing; and that she begged him not venture out into the likely crosshairs of all that gunfire. But to no avail. Carl never made it back to his grandmother’s. He was shot and killed apparently within metres of her apartment building.

A decade before Carl Henry’s life began, Tivoli Gardens’ founding father and chief architect, Edward Seaga, had envisioned in Tivoli a total, planned community, where residents could live out the pieces of their lives, from birth (at nearby Jubilee Hospital) through death, burial and resurrection, all in the same (Tivoli) community. So on a hot, sad afternoon in July, 2010, at the Faith and Hope Deliverance Ministry on Bustamante Highway, family members gathered to pay tribute to Carl Henry’s “unfinished” life. We’d bury with him, around the corner in the May Pen Cemetery, his hopes and aspirations for a fresh new start on “the rock”. His chair remains empty in our workshop sessions.

Carl’s bereft grandmother and those of us who had become his extended family need to know – for accountability and healing – how and why he died. Was he shot and killed because, unknown to his grandmother, he was an armed combatant, a terrorist, a down-on-his-luck deportee who was lured into mercenary action by ill-gotten millions? This is pretty much the kind of thing we’ve been hearing from the security forces about victims like Carl Henry. Should this be the fearful, terrible truth, Carl’s grandmother, the 74 remaining workshop participants and I would be shocked.

But…how about the prominent, well-thought-of businessman from up town, Mr Keith Clarke? Was he also shot and killed because he too was a combatant, an armed, take-no-prisoners Dudus defender? What of still-missing and unaccounted for men and boys?

Until we have truthful answers to these and other pressing questions, which Mr George tells us are outside his commission’s Terms of Reference (in other words, none of his business), nothing that his commission reveals will avail much. We will certainly hear that our political leaders lie and deceive. Well… duh, did we need a ton of lawyers and an expensive commission to tell us just that?

Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology and Director of the EU-UNDP Reintegrating Deported Migrants Project, Institute for Sustainable Development, UWI, Mona.

bernard.headley@uwimona.edu.jm