The gun and arson attack which has left one man dead, several people nursing moderate and severe burns, and some 80 people, including 30 children, homeless, must not be viewed with a squint. Neither must it become the prologue to the resurrection of a particularly awful and deadly time.

Those who planned, funded, and wickedly executed the deadly attack on citizens of Walker’s Avenue in Gregory Park, St Catherine, must not find any place of refuge in Jamaica. They are enemies of the State. They have given us a disgusting preview of what can happen if well thinking citizens do not remain eternally vigilant.

Believe it, there are some among us who have no qualms about plunging the country into a nasty and debilitating state where mayhem, murder and monstrosity are norms, if doing so will satisfy their narrow objectives of self-aggrandisement, terror, displacement, and other basal motivations. These wretches must never win.

The deadly fire and arson attack in the wee hours gives off an awful smell. We have a duty to do much more than simply cover our noses. Indeed, too many did only that in the past.

Some for reasons that are obvious to the discerning will choose not to remember. That might explain their silence in the wake of this attack.

Long shiny robes that are prejudicially donned must be seen for what they really are, severely ugly cloaks. Civil society groups which jump into formulaic modes of condemnations when criminals are killed in violent confrontations with State agents are stonily silent. Noticeable silence too from those who routinely use their credentialed state to camouflage, sanitise and deodorise wrongdoing.

It bears repeating, well-thinking Jamaicans cannot afford to cover their ears, noses and eyes to attempts by some to reintroduce an unusable past. We must resist these devolutionists with every democratic sinew.

Lest we… repeat it

Those of younger vintage might not have heard or read about the arson attacks of the 1970s and in the run-up to the October 30, 1980 General Election. This was our bloodiest national election. Some 900 Jamaicans were killed and dozens injured.

Forty-three years ago, on May 20, 1980, 144 Jamaican citizens perished in an apocalyptic-like fire at Eventide Home for the Aged on Slipe Pen Road in Kingston. Forty-eight hours after the tragic inferno, two more elderly women died from their injuries. Seven were never found. The hellish orange flames spared only 58 of the 211 women in State care. Myers Ward, which most called home for several years, was destroyed. The charred remains were interred in a mass grave in National Heroes’ Park. The Associated Press ran a story headlined ‘173 feared dead in Jamaican fire’, describing it as Jamaica’s deadliest ever.

“Cho, Higgins, why bring back up these things?, some will doubtless shout. If we ignore the wrongs, tragedies, and calculated evils of the past we will repeat them, likely with more awful consequences.

Some of the residents at Eventide were blind and some were physically handicapped. Treachery, that is what it would be for well-thinking Jamaicans to twiddle thumbs and bury heads in the sand, hoping that inaction and/or ambivalence will stop evil people executing their agendas. Think the story of the scorpion and the frog.

As I see it, the Eventide Home Fire was the epilogue of a peculiar sort of madness. Some claim the fire was the result of some kind of spontaneous combustion. They, of course, know why they would want to retail and wholesale that narrative. Police report said that the building for the old and indigent was torched by men from the St Andrew Southern constituency. Some will deny that arsonists were responsible for the tragedy until the next of never. Their better angels have succumbed to the “corruption of consciousness”. (Norman Manley)

Prologue is epilogue, some say. Others maintain that epilogue is prologue. That debate won’t detain me. Eventide was not the first fire/arson attack on an entire community. Some credible media reports say Eventide was a rotten scheme predicated on forcible removal. It did not escape my notice that some of the traumatised victims at Walker’s Avenue said that criminals from a neighbouring community wanted to forcible evict them. This is an old leaf from a rotten playbook. Recall the forcible eviction of hundreds of our citizens from Rema in 1977?

In 2006, Gareth Manning, Gleaner writer, did a five-part series on the findings of a commission of enquiry conducted by the late puisne judge Justice Ronald Small into the forced eviction of residents from Wilton Gardens (Rema) in early 1977. (The Gleaner, May 7, 2006)

In part one of his series, Manning noted, among other things: “The day was February 2, 1977. It was a very eventful day for many residents of Rema. Armed men from neighbouring “Jungle” in Arnett Gardens raided the community, forcibly evicting people from their houses, throwing and smashing their belongings on the streets, and looting their homes. This was done while the Housing Ministry carried out an eviction exercise on 1,000 residents who they said were not paying rent.

“The security forces were rushed to the scene to quell the flare-up of violence, but at the end of the day one man was shot dead by the security forces, while several were wounded by gunfire and knives. A 12-hour curfew was subsequently instituted at 6:00 pm. The violence triggered outcries from the people as well as the Opposition JLP [Jamaica Labour Party], which heaped venomous criticisms on the Michael Manley-led Government. Then Opposition Leader Edward Seaga issued a statement the next day condemning the incident and accusing the Government of orchestrating an illegal and violent eviction of JLP supporters.”

Let us not delude ourselves. Similar kinds of cold-blooded sponsors of evil still walk among us today.

See the connections

The 1980 General Election was the mother of violent elections in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The rotten seeds of this cataclysmic event were not placed in the ground by accident. They were planted some 40 years before they sprang up and almost choked us. Think Group 69. I wrote about them previously.

Unfriendly banter, nasty epithets, and vitriol which graduated into stone-throwing and distribution of assorted weapons, inclusive of Molotov cocktails, thereafter, involving guns, were the thorns from which political violence germinated.

The sordid 1976 State of Public Emergency and the holding of a general election during one of the most horrendous periods since political independence was a maturing of an invasive plant.

Jamaica went to the edge of the political abyss in the run-up to and during the mentioned events.

It must not escape our notice that very recent comments by some who lust after political office — high and low — seem to suggest that they are not averse to resurrecting those deadly days. “Tek sleep and mark death” is wise strategy here.

‘You will not win’

Prime Minister Andrew Holness on a visit to Walker’s Avenue in Gregory Park, St Catherine, last week gave a commitment that the miscreants will not win. All well-thinking citizens need to join in this commitment to help ensure that those who seek to cancel years of gains by conscientious Jamaicans do not win. It is the right thing to do.

The Jamaica Observer story said, among other things: “We are going to treat this one special. The people who committed the crime were seen and I am going to be personally on it to ensure that every last one of them is found and dealt with within the remit of the law. We cannot allow this to become a feature in Jamaica. You have no right to try and destroy people’s homes and displace them,” Holness said.

“I give the commitment that the 11 houses that were destroyed will be repaired. If the objective of the terrorists is to displace the people here, so that they could possibly import who they want in the area, they will not have that comfort and they will not have that victory. We will rebuild the structures so that the people who are here will have good life and living conditions. We will never allow them [criminals] to win,” Holness said, adding that the area was already being considered to benefit under the new social housing programme.” (‘PM sounds warning on firebombing culprits; pledges to rebuild 11 houses burnt’, Jamaica Observer, August 15, 2023.)

Some among us I suspect have remained mum on this tragedy because they feel it can never happen to them. They are wrong. Some, who have commented, have chatted out of both sides of their mouths regarding the trauma visited upon fellow citizens. There can be no shilly-shallying regarding the arson attack upon the citizens of Walker’s Avenue. God forbid, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that Walker’s Avenue can be replicated in Arnett Gardens, Jack’s Hills, Beverly Hills, or Cherry Garden if evildoers are sufficiently emboldened.

I agree with Holness that the response from the State, therefore, has to be solid, swift, and sure on numerous fronts simultaneously. The mentioned Jamaica Observer article also noted: “The prime minister was mindful that the incident definitely will have an impact on the children who had to cower in fear during the incident. Holness said that the various government agencies will work alongside [Member of Parliament Alando] Terrelonge and the police to implement a peace-building programme.”

Reprisal is the motive for dozens of murders in this country, yearly. We are all familiar with the saying, “If yuh can’t ketch Quaco, yuh ketch him shut.” I think the prime minister did the right thing to warn victims that reprisals would not advance their interests.

Said Holness: “Obviously, this kind of incident is going to percolate in the minds of the residents here, and you could very well have an entrenchment of the internecine gang war that exists, meaning that people who suffered may want to take things into their own hands, which we can’t have. Sometimes, when we engage them in the restorative justice process and they begin to speak, they realise that what they were fighting over is meaningless and of no value.”

The entire country must see the Walker’s Avenue attack as another wake-up call to immediate dangers lurking in our midst. Criminals and power-hungry maniacs must be exposed for what they are. Those who advocate a return to the time when a majority of Jamaicans were at daggers drawn must be alienated. Those who waffle and remain conveniently silent when terrorists invade some communities, but shout, pontificate, and demonstrate when terror is visited upon others must be shown for the charlatans they are. What happened at Walker’s Avenue in Gregory Park, St Catherine, is a blot on our history.