ON a hot summer day in 1996, sections of the streets of West Kingston were extremely tense in the wake of a brief “war”, and many areas in the wider garrison were frozen by fear.

Every hundred metres or so along Spanish Town Road, to the east and west of the Denham Town Police Station were ramshackle roadblocks – old fridges, husks of what used to be cars, tyres burning and huge slabs of metal and concrete — mounted by residents of the JLP-dominated community after the police had shot and killed four young men — in a shootout, of course.

I was there after the Denham Town Police Station had come under fire from gunmen, but at that time so convincing were the poor residents of these areas in articulating their tales of death and destruction at the hands of the police, in almost every instance I sided with the people and found holes in the police reports.

At one stage of my investigations I was walking with about 20 young women northwards into Denham Town and up towards Rema, which had fallen out of political favour with Denham Town and Tivoli Gardens. As we approached the Rema high rises, a female voice from Rema rang out. “Hey, big &%@# Cynthia, go $#@% yuh man!”

In response, one of the young women near me shouted, “Dutty gal, go $#@& yuh modder,” then gesticulated wildly with her hands as if telling the Rema girl to go to hell. I was nervous but didn’t want to make a show of being so. “What was that about?” I asked casually as we continued heading north towards the dangerous border with Rema.

“Dah gal dey,” said the girl, “a mi cousin. She want a shot in har head.” Two cousins separated by politics, by the garrison!

It was the late Professor Carl Stone who coined the phrase “garrison politics” in the late 1980s, but it must be remembered that in the late 1960s to the early 1970s the late great Michael Manley paid homage to his “paseros in the garrison” in reference to the PNP-affiliated Garrison gang which ran amok in the 1960s, beating up JLP supporters on the streets of Kingston. Headed by the brutal Winston “Burry Boy” Blake, the Garrison gang’s presence was felt in assisting Manley to win his Central Kingston seat in 1967 and 1972.

It has been established that it is politically built housing which created the garrison phenomenon, described by Stone as geographical areas where residents support one side while demonising those who support the other. Any political virgin who buys into the instant dismantling of garrison areas is living in a fool’s paradise.

First, the politicians like Eddie Seaga, formerly JLP leader and the late Tony Spaulding, a hard-core PNP garrison politician in his time as MP for South St Andrew, exemplified political division. Over many years JLP supporters, in areas like Tivoli Gardens, Denham Town and Rema (in a section of South St Andrew), were schooled to believe that PNP supporters, including their own relatives, were children of Satan and the epitome of evil.

At the same time, PNP supporters in “Jungle”, otherwise known as Arnett Gardens (named after the late PNP stalwart, Vernon Arnett), and Trench Town, all communities in the PNP garrison of South St Andrew, were led to believe that the only good JLP supporter was a dead one.

So, as the PNP’s “Burry Boy” and his Garrison gang, armed with sharpened machetes opened up on JLP supporters, the answer came in the JLP’s Claudius “Jack” Massop from Tivoli Gardens returning the favour in brutality heaped upon brutality. As it took place, the elected politicians who created the madness in the first place simply accepted it as politics, Jamaican-style, and openly supported the rot, providing the murderers with the means to continue the mayhem.

If we accept that we cannot suddenly take up half of Arnett Gardens and place it in West Kingston, and it is impossible to physically uproot Tivoli high rises and implant them in Arnett Gardens, what is the next best move?

Well, Eddie Seaga and the PNP’s Omar Davies demonstrated this through football. Maybe it was convenient for Seaga to do so as he reached the end of his political career, or it could be that too many political ghosts were out and about, eerily haunting the minds of those who had much to answer for. The fact is that Seaga and Davies sat together and watched football in Arnett Gardens. At the same time, many residents of the JLP garrison of Tivoli Gardens felt free to venture into the PNP garrison to watch their sporting heroes “kick ball”.

The convenient denial of PNP leader Portia Simpson Miller that first, she rejects the “garrison” description and second, she would only accept Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s offer of a walk-through after certain agreements on economic transformation of the inner city, garrison communities are signed off indicates shallow thinking.

In one breath, it appears that she is reacting to being bettered on the offer. Maybe it should have been she herself who made it, but since it was the JLP leader-in-waiting and prime minister who made the offer, she had to make a political punch because that is what she knows, what she grew up in, since she entered the political fray in the turbulent 1970s.

A mass “walk-through” is powerful symbolism, but only if those of us on the outside appreciate the demonising of those on the “other side” which has taken place in the minds of the poor, inner-city residents over a generation. In such a walk-through, those brainwashed and tribalised into believing that those “over there” are evil people just itching to murder them will come to the realisation that they are all the same flesh and blood cousins fooled for too long by their political benefactors.

This walk-through must take place in all of the political garrisons. Men, women and children from the PNP’s Hundred Lane must walk through the JLP-dominated Common and the favour must be returned. Residents from the JLP-dominated sections of Seaview Gardens must feel free to walk through Payne Land and the favour must be returned.

And at the head of this mass “walk-through” across all the political garrisons and pockets must be the respective MPs, the Opposition Leader and the Prime Minister.

I have seen the dreaded fear in the eyes of young children in political garrisons once it is said “di PNP dem a come” or “di JLP dem a come”. They and their parents need a chance to catch a fresh breath of freedom.

It is only a start, but the mind must first be unfettered if the body is to lose its chains.

observemark@gmail.com