There is a commercial currently running on cable television that I find humorous and, at the same time, infuriating. The scene is played out in a dentist’s office. A worried-looking patient is seated in the dental chair; mouth agape with contraptions hanging out. A man in dentist garb is peering into the open orifice. With a look more worried than the patient’s, he makes a discovery that elevates him to the equal of Christopher Columbus. “You have a problem”, he says. The patient’s worried look changes to one of expectancy that relief would follow. The man in dentist garb removes the surgical gloves, turns his back on the patient and walks out of the room, muttering words to this effect. “My job is to diagnose, not fix problems.”

That is the context in which I view the recently released report coming out of months of hearings by the Commission of Enquiry looking into events which occurred in Western Kingston and related areas in May 2010. Remaining true to its terms of reference, the commission succeeded only in opening the proverbial Pandora’s box of problems, but missed the opportunity for real and lasting solutions. The cynic would go further in likening the results of the commission’s work to a woman’s bikini. What it reveals is suggestive, but that which it conceals is vital.

Montego Bay implodes. Another valuable life is lost to a youth with a gun in a senseless act that yields little more than lunch money. People generally fail to make a connection between the murder disease that has spread to every nook and cranny of our beautiful island and the garrison germ, which has been allowed to go unchecked and untreated for close to a generation. The Commissioner of Police Dr Carl Williams maybe gets it. His cry for social and other forms of intervention to stem the rising tide of crime in the tourism capital is tacit admission that this murder problem in Jamaica is “bigger than the police”.

And the problem is big; really big. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in its report entitled ‘Global Study on Homicide – 2013’, reported a global average intentional homicide rate of six per 100,000 persons in the populace. In 2014, when Jamaica recorded its lowest murder toll in over a decade to reach approximately 39 people per 100,000 of the populace, that same report listed Jamaica as the country with the sixth highest murder rate in the world. The haemorrhaging of life is the most painful measure of the magnitude of the murder problem. But the country is haemorrhaging in another important way: Its wealth is being sapped.

The document, entitled

Report of the Macro Socio-Economic Effects of the Events in Western Kingston Area, 22 May – 7 June 2010, enumerates the dollar cost of the Tivoli intervention to the Jamaican economy. I quote from the executive summary of the document: “The total cost of the fallout from the civil unrest was determined by, among other factors, the severity and duration of losses to affected sectors and activities, the cost of physical assets damaged and the extent of contingency spending occasioned by its impact. Influenced by these factors, the total effect of the unrest on the economy of Jamaica was estimated at $22,515.18 million, equivalent to US$258.8 million. The total impact represented some 2.1 per cent 0f 2009 current GDP and 50 per cent of tourism GDP.”

That is the estimated one-time cost to the economy of that single event. It is commonly estimated that if the crime rate in Jamaica were at the level of, say, Costa Rica, the country would experience ongoing additional GDP growth in the region of five per cent per annum without our economic planners taking any further actions. This is the same level of growth that recently appointed growth czar Michael Lee-Chin has promised Jamaica at the end of five years. Readers will readily see the greater wisdom in the call by former Jamaica Social Investment Fund Managing Director Scarlette Gillings, reported in the press, for a community development czar to stimulate growth and development by integrating man-made zones of social and economic exclusion, our garrison communities, into the national growth strategy.

Jamaica with a handful of other countries may be accurately described as outliers, that is, out of the norm or in a class by themselves, in terms of their homicide rate. In almost every one of these cases, there is an aberration that occurred along the particular country’s development path. For South Africa, the aberration was apartheid; for Colombia, the cocaine trade; and for Jamaica, garrisons. There is no getting away from the link between the crime that seeks to overwhelm us and the garrison phenomenon. And there shall be no permanent solution to the problem until we acknowledge the root causes, then study and understand the pathology of the particular strain of the murder disease that’s let loose in the country.

Writing in one of his regular newspaper columns, November 29, 2015, Mark Wignall predicted that the result of the Tivoli Commission’s work would amount to little more than a palliative in treating the underlying cause of the murder disease: “The present commission of enquiry into the Tivoli incursion of May 2010 has not been empowered to present the case for the social, political and overall historical underpinnings of what brought about what Public Defender Earl Witter described as the greatest loss of life in a single State security forces operation in independent Jamaica. Instead, it wants to know broadly what happened, who did it, if the State security apparatus overstepped its bounds, and if residents were denied basic human rights.”

So, I and like-minded souls who desire to see a cleaning of the sore that remains a blemish on our democratic tradition await a National Tribunal on Reparation for Victims of Tribal Politics and Political Garrisons. As one who has studied and sought to understand this aberration in Jamaica’s modern political history, I relish the thought of being asked to appear before the tribunal should it be established.

The work of Agency for Inner-city Renewal in Trench Town and surrounding communities was given prominence in the public defender’s report into the events of May 2010 (pages 177 – 180) as a possible option towards community transformation. On this basis I offered myself to give evidence before the commission but was denied the privilege. It’s time to end the denial and treat with the root causes of the crime disease. Hard and intelligent policing must play a central role but a permanent solution cannot be had on the cheap; such as the cost of bullets fired from the guns of the security forces.