Dear Editor,

Now that the very expensive Tivoli Commission of Enquiry report is in, there is one recommendation that, based on many years of past experience, some of us will find very hard to do: say we are sorry — as one of the recommendations of the commission is that the State apologises to the people of Tivoli for what happened.

While I don’t believe that the State would really deliberately send its agents to kill innocent people — if indeed these agents did kill them — one must understand that the situation that occurred in Tivoli couldn’t have resulted in anything but ordinary people being killed. After all, bullets, and apparently bombs, were flying everywhere in a very populated area.

As such, I really do believe that the State should apologise, not necessarily to the people who acted against the State, but for those who may have died in its attempts to restore control and order. At the very least, the State should apologise for those who may have died because of what its agents may have done.

However, now that the commission has unwittingly started a season of apologising, I think the State should consider apologising for other things that have made this society so violent. What happened in Tivoli was not as a result of an overnight event. Tivoli, like so many other areas, is a superbly constructed garrison. We all know how these garrisons came about. Many of our politicians, some of whom would like the rest of us to call them honourable, constructed these fiefdoms in an attempt to perpetuate their hold on power.

These fiefdoms have their own laws, and many times agents of the State find it very difficult to maintain order in them. Many of these garrison-fiefdoms, which our politicians have created, are hotbeds of crime – and criminals.

Now, while I do hope that these politicians will apologise, I get the feeling that if they do, they will find it harder than turning the sky green. When our politicians muster up the courage to apologise for what happened in Tivoli a few years ago, assuming that they can even do so, maybe they should also apologise for making our country so saturated with these fiefdoms that, in many respects, they have now lost much control over.

Some decades ago, the State went on a rampage and inflicted untold injustice, to say the least, on the Rastafarian community. To date, the State has not built up the courage to apologise for that. So, if by some miracle, it does apologise for Tivoli, maybe it may be mature enough to apologise for what it did to the Rastafarians too.

You know, come to think of it, we are the ones who continually put these politicians in power, and as such we are all, indeed, a very sorry lot, but we can be a less sorry lot if we figure out a way to say sorry.

Michael A Dingwall

michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com