Dear Editor,

There is something particularly cruel about a 3:00 am demolition. It strips away not just walls and roofing but the last shred of dignity a family has left because it happens in darkness, without warning, while children sleep.

At least 20 homes in Cooper’s Pen, Trelawny, were reduced to rubble that morning, and scores of Jamaicans woke to find their lives in pieces on the ground. No amount of political spin can soften the brutality of that image, and no citizen watching from afar should be allowed to look away from it.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness has called it a humanitarian crisis, and he is right to call it that. His shock at learning of the demolition, and his swift mobilisation of disaster relief through the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security deserves genuine credit.

Equally, Opposition Leader Mark Golding’s decision to visit Cooper’s Pen in person to sit with displaced families and hear their fears directly was the right instinct. Golding’s call for the prime minister to identify appropriate relocation sites and commit the necessary investment is not an unreasonable partisan jab. It is simply what leadership looks like when citizens have nowhere to sleep.

Both men, in their own lanes, said the correct things last week, and Jamaica should hold them to those words rather than let the news cycle move on.

But sympathy is not shelter, and statements are not policy. Tents from ODPEM are already being described by residents as inadequate, with reports that some were even told to vacate the very campsite meant to shield them, less than a week after losing everything. That is not humanitarian relief; that is a second displacement layered on top of the first. It cannot be allowed to stand, and it must be corrected within days, not weeks.

The immediate priority has to be relocation, and it has to happen now, not on a timeline dictated by bureaucratic caution. Families should not be expected to wait indefinitely while lawyers argue over caveats and equitable interests. A concrete resettlement plan, with named parcels of suitable land, needs to be on the table immediately. Anything less leaves elderly residents, mothers with newborns, and children preparing for the new school term exposed to the elements indefinitely.

Alongside relocation, there must be a full and independent investigation, led jointly by the prime minister and the minister with responsibility for lands. That investigation needs to answer hard questions. Who authorised heavy equipment to roll into a residential community before dawn, under heavy police presence, without notice to the people living there? Reports of men being detained during the operation raise serious human rights concerns that cannot be waved away as incidental to a private property dispute. Jamaicans for Justice has rightfully called on Police Commissioner Dr Kevin Blake to investigate that allegation immediately and take the appropriate action required.

This is bigger than one community, though, and Jamaica needs to be honest about that. The absence of a fully operational National Squatter Management Policy is the real villain of this story. A National Squatter Survey sitting on a shelf, without an implementation plan attached to it, offers no protection to anyone.

Various governments have known for years that informal settlements exist across this island in the hundreds of thousands, and they have treated the problem as a footnote rather than a national priority. That has to end now. Jamaica needs a comprehensive national lands policy, properly resourced and legislated, not merely announced at a press conference and forgotten.

Every squatter community in this country deserves a pathway to regularisation and, ultimately, security of tenure. People who have built lives, raised children, and paid what informal dues they could on land for 20 and 30 years are not criminals; they are citizens who have been failed by a State that never gave them a formal option.

Montego Bay, St James, is the clearest proof that Cooper’s Pen is not an isolated tragedy and is waiting to repeat itself elsewhere. Nineteen inner-city communities in that city alone live under conditions of tenure insecurity, overcrowding, and neglect. The five sitting Members of Parliament for St James, across party lines, have a direct obligation to bring this to Parliament with the same urgency Trelawny is now receiving before Montego Bay produces its own version of last week’s headlines.

None of this is complicated in principle, even if it is difficult in execution. Cooper’s Pen residents should be resettled within three months, with their homes rebuilt on appropriate, properly titled land and funded by the State. A national land policy should follow within the same year, not the same decade. Squatter communities islandwide deserve regularisation, not raids.

Jamaica has watched its leaders utter the right words, now the country needs to watch them act, because a family sleeping under a tarpaulin does not need sympathy from a podium, it needs a key to a new door, and it needs it soon.

However, let me state here that under no circumstances should Prime Minister Holness be blamed for the demolition of those houses. The land is private land, and the prime minister and his Government will act in the best interest of the residents.

Robert Dalley

opinionwriter3@gmail.com