THOSE of us who were hoping that the planned commission of enquiry into the Tivoli killings of May 2010 would have extended its reach into a wider probe and the producing of an official document on the garrison phenomenon had allowed ourselves to be drawn too closely to occupation of that place called a fool’s paradise.

In the 14-point draft proposal we can see that there is already a lot to be considered and, although the wider garrison probe may be eventually included, with so many other considerations, it may end up as an afterthought of a subheading and not really worthy of any authentic, official status.

The garrison is important to a number of players. First, the politicians. If Tivoli Gardens — really a JLP garrison pocket — was the mother of all garrisons, in terms of the ownership, the legacy and the number of offspring, the PNP is the father of the garrisons.

Before the first vote is counted in any general election, the PNP can safely tick off at the very least 10 constituencies to the JLP’s three.

Second, in the evolution from the politician controlling the criminal don and the guns to the criminal don deciding many matters of mutual interest between himself and the politician, the garrison is of extreme importance to the don who uses it as a shield for his criminal activities of drug running, murder for hire and extortion.

Third, it empowers the ordinary resident of the garrison to live as a freeloader and, in many instances, he or she has little choice. Utilities, like electric power and water supply, are usually stolen and the few who usually pay are seen as pariahs and spoilers.

So, the politician gets his vote, the don maintains his power and the real pawns in the big picture, the garrison residents, get the ‘reward’ of free light, free water and many times, they pay cheap rental to the heirs and successors of gun-owning thugs who themselves had seized the properties from their rightful owners at the dawn of the expansion of the garrison in the 1970s when the PNP started to copy Seaga’s Tivoli experiment.

In the planned commission of enquiry into the Tivoli atrocities, the PNP is likely to pull a political coup on the Opposition JLP as the nation will be given a front-seat view of the connection between JLP players, probably at very high level, and the criminal hierarchy that was fuelling the social and economic self-sufficiency of Tivoli Gardens.

First, as important as the commission of enquiry will be, it will present the PNP with a very important entertainment sideshow alongside the hardships which the Jamaican at street level is likely to be undergoing for the rest of this year. Second, it will provide the PNP with new political ammunition clips for the next election in 2016. The JLP had better begin preparing itself for the massive body blows to come.

Although Tivoli Gardens was never widely loved by the general public, if it is concluded that the security forces were on a rampage that went beyond the capturing of the fugitive Dudus, it is going to be spun that it was under the watch of a JLP Government that poor, black Jamaican people were unjustifiably killed.

I believe that although Jamaicans here, and especially abroad, ‘wear’ their political stripes in full view, all of us are eager to determine exactly what resulted in the death of so many, while the man being sought, from all accounts, had eluded the dragnet at the earliest stage of the security operation. We want to know if gunmen were firing at the security forces, how many were doing so, how many guns were involved and, more importantly, where are all of these guns.

If atrocities were committed on the innocent, we want those fingered to be brought to book, and we would like the living to be adequately compensated for all the pain brought upon them. But beyond all of this, we would not want to see the Tivoli and Keith Clarke killings to be seen as just another bloody skirmish in a nation which refuses to accept that most of these ‘skirmishes’ are joined at the hip to a dysfunctional politics and a severely broken political and administrative system.

We probably saw the last of dirty voting and violence associated with it in the 1993 and 1997 elections. Since then, we have made strides, and excellent public servants, like former chairman of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica Professor Errol Miller and former Director of Elections Danville Walker, have done much to bring our electoral system to the stage that one man can be assured that his vote is his.

With all of that, for purely political reasons the PNP would not want the terms of reference of the commission to include any broader look at the Tivoli killings than what proximate matters dictate.

If the JLP is to be stewed in the juices of its unsavoury association with any criminal connections with Dudus, and it can be shown — I expect the PNP battery of ace lawyers to present themselves again — that the delays in meeting his extradition request were connected to those ‘connections’, the ruling PNP will escape any scrutiny of its own involvement in fostering garrisons, growing them and maintaining them.

The prime minister’s South West St Andrew and Transport and Works Minister Omar Davies’ South St Andrew constituencies, just to name two of the obvious ones, will escape scrutiny. We will never know if similar criminal hierarchies exist in those constituencies and many will not even bother to ask. That will have to wait until another time when it dawns on us that a cancer eating away at the body cannot disappear if we do not speak of it.

My greatest fear is that too much of what is in charge in this country is politics. Not necessarily party politics, but the sinister type which permeates all of our institutions, from our universities, our hospitals, and our schools to a little desk in an obscure corner in a government office.

Too many require ‘team playing’ as a means of keeping out the brighter, more competent personnel and the maintenance of those of like mind. Sadder still is when the competent bow to the dictates of the politics directing the pulling of strings.

Early evidence indicates that at the time of the Tivoli incursion the political administration — even if it wanted to — could not call off the operations.

For a few days in May 2010 it appeared that the Jamaica Defence Force had taken over the running of this country. That should have scared the living daylights out of us, but did it?

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