IN the aftermath of the Dudus guilty plea some of our people, in the PNP and outside of it, have been calling on the prime minister and the JLP to apologise for what was seen as the deliberate delays in his extradition and in paying over US$50,000 to a US firm to intercede on his behalf to the US Government.

The PNP has not suddenly grown pure and altruistic. It has political objectives, that of winning state power next year. Its chances of doing so are more than fair, but in politics nothing should be taken for granted.

Towards the end of last week some damaging WikiLeaks revelations in which JLP bigwigs have been named in a most unfavourable light will make it most difficult for the JLP administration to mount a credible challenge in its efforts to fend off these damaging accusations.

The guilty plea of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke has opened a door for this nation. What we do as we walk through it will either lead to our salvation or the holding of a three-ring political circus.

A source in New York with links to personnel in the ‘right places’ sent me the following e-mail last Thursday, although he had caveats attached. “I enjoyed your Observer column and as usual you made very interesting points. The PNP needs to be careful. They have coveted, slept with and ‘hugged up’ gunmen and dons, also. Their house is not clean, either.

“As for Dudus, I have been told, though I cannot vouch for the source, and whether the information is credible, that Dudus may not have to ‘snitch’. Dudus will send word to Jamaica he did not snitch and may stand a chance when he is finally deported to Jamaica. As a courtesy to the Jamaican Government, the US authorities may not push him to talk. In return, the present Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) and extradition treaty stay in place, the present Government will not try to renounce the treaties or avoid them, the ‘secret’ MOUs signed by Minister Phillips will not be challenged any further in any court or otherwise by the present administration and in the future the present administration will be more co-operative.

“This, also, assumes the US Government is of the mind that the JLP will lose the next election and the PNP will win. Interesting, but again, I cannot confirm the veracity of this.”

Other members of the public have poured scorn on the journalistic community, accusing us of covering up during the times when Dudus was increasing his influence in Jamaica. According to them, journalists hopped the bandwagon only after the US authorities did our dirty work for us.

Said one reader in an e-mail to me. “Mark, I read both your Thursday and Sunday pieces religiously, but I am becoming more and more discouraged with all of you journalists. In my view you are all chickens, hypocrites and big-time cowards who are afraid to carry out your duties on behalf of the public. I read your piece today, as well as Ian Boyne’s on Sunday, and wonder how is it that since the Americans uproot Dudus from Jamaica and get a quick guilty plea out of him, all of a sudden all of you have so much to say about the murderous, drug and gun operation he was running…….. where were all these columns before, how come none of you never had the courage to expose these things and mention the man’s name, when you all knew for many years that this was happening?

“Worst, why are all you journalists allowing the PNP to get political mileage out of this without pressing them to call out their criminal supporters? Dudus is not the only one, and all of you know. Why don’t you tell the PNP to shut up and stop rejoicing, why don’t you ask them about the likes of xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxx et al, and the late Willie Haggart?

“You guys need to bring the PNP to shame too and stop letting them trick the public as if they have any moral authority. Remember, no fewer than three sitting vice presidents were in the front row at Haggart’s funeral, so why you all allowing Peter Bunting and Peter Phillips to behave like they are all angels?

“Stop asking who will name names and do it, you know their names, you journalists know all these criminals, both those in the garrisons, police force, Parliament and business community. Use your influence and serve your country.”

Readers will note that in an ironic twist I have Xed out the names he included in his transmittal. Readers of this type are quite correctly angry but, nine times out of 10, they live abroad and cannot appreciate the legal strictures of libel and, more importantly, the closed space in which we live in this small nation.

Excepting for the late Willie Haggart, all the names he called, including Dudus, were people I had known peripherally and spoken with. Even when I was being warned not to meet with these people because of their alleged association with criminality, where was the hard evidence that they were involved in criminality? Plus, even if they were involved, as far as I was concerned, I still needed to maintain contact with them because all other sorts of journalistic information could be had.

Outside of Roderick ‘Jimmy’ McGregor’s tapping of the phones of some of these individuals when then Police Commissioner Francis Forbes had appointed him to set up an entity known as the Special Intelligence Unit (SIU) in the late 1990s, I have seen no evidence which could stand up in a court of law or, indeed, which could pass through the legal desk attached to this newspaper, to present in a column. Many times in this country, the street lore coincides with the reality. In other words, ‘If something no go so, it nearly go so.’ But that cannot be used to pen a column.

McGregor had taped government ministers in conversation with dons. These tapes are in the possession of certain members of the police force and it is my understanding that select members of the PNP and the JLP have listened to these tapes. Why have they not seen the light of day?

Simple. The names cut across the political aisle!

It is my belief that we are unlikely to get an apology out of the prime minister or the JLP because that is just never done in this country. Is it justified that they should apologise?

Yes.

Journalists saying that there were/are guns in Tivoli Gardens was never enough. The politicians knew more than the journalists and I would find it incredible for a single politician in the JLP to say he or she did not know the status of Dudus or the rigid structure of Tivoli Gardens and its army.

No apology will come because this country is not yet ready to bare its soul.

What about the other tape?

A member of the JCF has told me that sometime in 2000 a ‘soldier’ from Tivoli Gardens sat down with the police from a certain police station and recorded 12 hours of questions and answers involving that gunman. The gunman gave detailed information about the structure of the criminal side of Tivoli Gardens.

“He was trembling when he spoke, especially when he related what was likely to happen to him should word reach back to Tivoli. He was deathly afraid of the don.”

Some years ago a young man decided to collect ‘taxes’ from a few vendors downtown under the pretext that he was representing the don. He was eventually ‘captured’, ‘tried’ and later he disappeared.

An indication as to how that man disappeared was presented to me by a fellow columnist who told me of a complaint that he had received from a resident of Tivoli Gardens.

According to the columnist, the complainant’s daughter was doing exceedingly well in high school under the most trying of circumstances. He said that his daughter would study until two, three in the morning but by that time she would hear the sound of the chainsaw.

According to a source in the JCF, after ‘court’ in the garrison and a man was found guilty and sentenced to death (robbing from the don, rape and crimes against the elderly were punishable by death), the chainsaw came into operation. After that, empty barrels, which once contained pickled meat, were used to stuff the body parts in and then select fishermen were given the kegs to take out to sea in the early morning. When that man’s body disappeared, it really did so with absolutely no trace.

Members of the public who were never prepared to support the police by giving information have always wanted journalists to act as if we are from Mars or Jupiter and not living in a closed-shop Jamaica where everyone knows everyone else. Those individuals want us to ‘talk up di tings dem’ when not even the police in many instances are prepared to give such information.

Would we be cowards when gunmen come hunting for us at four in the morning and we cried out to the public for assistance? Would one single member of the public lend any help? Absolutely not! They would all prefer that we die in a hail of bullets so that they could say, ‘It look like him did involve inna something.’

As much as I have been accused of bravery (and now cowardice), self-preservation must be a factor. In the past where I came close to death in the pursuit of stories involving guns and criminality, I was most foolhardy in chasing down those stories. Years later when it dawned on me that there was a political stripe to every judgement made by a member of the public, I began to pick my stories because, in a nation filled with too many parochial and petty political ‘thinkers’, it is just never worth it.

If the public refuses to support the journalist, some members of the JCF are in bed with big criminals, politicians only back journalists for a political benefit but still the public wants us to throw our lives on the line in a country that only wants blood-sport and a noisy circus, I say, wait and wait. And wait some more.

Rasta must support the Palestinian Cause

“Hear mi now bredrin. Is Rasta music tear down apartheid in South Africa. Is Bob do it. Is whey wi a do now?” said the heavily locksed man to me as we spoke about the state of Jamaican Reggae music and its universal message of protest and liberation throughout the world.

He had approached me because he said that present-day Rasta is dunce to the meaning of much of the symbolism of the past. In the 1960s when Desmond Decker sang Poor Mi Israelite, it is my belief that Decker was as interested in making a hit as he wanted to make a statement.

“Listen, di point mi a try put to yu is that di ting no really change up but we, especially Rasta, have never looked at the Palestinian people. How much a wi check out whey the great late Winston Churchill said of the Palestinian people?”

Listen to what he said in 1937 of those whom he termed as lesser beings. ‘I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’

In other words, to the colonialist and racist Churchill, the white people of the world were of ‘higher grade’ than others.

Rasta and Reggae music are today presented with a cause that needs a greater understanding than Biblical myths and stories. The Israel of the Bible is not the Israel of 1948! Present-day Israel is little more than a highly oppressive state to the Palestinians.

In 1947, the UN formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine’s land to the Zionists. In 1948, after Israel was formed, they increased the allotment to 78 per cent of the land. That was stolen land in the first place.

I have always been amazed that the Jewish people of Israel who faced such horrors under the evil tyrant Hitler can indulge themselves in meting out such injustice to the Palestinian people.

Present-day Rastas, who remain students of history, have backed away from the bastardisation known as dancehall music.

It is just last Wednesday that one of my sons pointed out to me that the number one song in Jamaica is something called, Mi waan mi Cowfoot. With much pain I was forced to listen to it and, I must confess, I found my feet moving to it. At the same time it occurred to me that Marley, Dennis Brown, Tosh and the other greats of the past must be turning in their graves.

Where are the songs of liberation? When Marley sang of Mount Zion, even he was doing a disservice to the cause of the Palestinian people. The fact is, the Mount Zion of the Bible is a far cry from the Zionists who have been cursing the Palestinian people from the day they arrived to steal lands.

In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared, “Palestinians do not exist”. One of the original terrorists and later Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, hero of the Six-Day war in 1967, described the Palestinians as “two-legged beasts”.

And still Rasta and Reggae music are into this love affair with the Israel of the Bible when no such incarnation of what they believe that Zion ought to be exists in the state of Israel.

Step up to the plate, Rastaman, and put your voices behind liberating the Palestinian people! Be the strong voice that you were in the days of Apartheid. Only you can articulate it in your music, that is, if you want to take back the music from the pretenders who have captured it.

observemark@gmail.com