ST JAMES, Jamaica — Half a decade after the first Zone of Special Operations (ZOSO) was rolled out in Mount Salem, St James, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Minister, Marlene Malahoo Forte, is convinced the Government made the right decision, despite naysayers who initially opposed the measure on the basis that it would trample upon citizens’ rights.

“I remember again just looking at the naysayers about the ZOSO, the scorn poured on it because they just did not understand the vision,” she said.

Malahoo Forte was speaking at a ceremony, on Friday, to mark the five-year anniversary of the first ever ZOSO launch. The event was organised by the Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF), which has played a major role in the infrastructural development component of the ZOSO’s implementation within the community.

“When it was being decried, it was being decried falsely because the statements that were being used were not correct, the stats were not correct. But change is not easy to swallow and so change will be resisted and those who stand to lose will resist even more and those who stand to gain will embrace it,” Malahoo Forte stated.

Malahoo Forte is also the Member of Parliament for St James West Central in which a section of Mount Salem falls. The first ever ZOSO was launched in the community on September 1, 2017 as a way to address the crime and violence plaguing the area.

Since then, ZOSOs have been launched in Denham Town, West Kingston; Norwood in St James; Greenwich Town, Parade Gardens and August Town in St Andrew, and Savanna-la-mar in Westmoreland.

The minister said there was pushback, very early on, from inside the Parliament.

“Before we actually came to operationalise, when we went to Parliament, there were cries that Andrew Holness, [and] Marlene Malahoo Forte were going to take away people’s human rights,” she noted. “The opposers labelled me as one who was prepared to abuse the rights of the citizens. Not true, not true.”

From the very outset, she said, she had toed the legal line in the implementation of the ZOSO.

“Now I had said in my first address to the Parliament that I was prepared, in other words, to engage the rights where we believe it was demonstrably justified to do so. And everybody in the media played the clip but they didn’t play the second part because they didn’t understand the full statement. Because ‘where it is demonstrably justified’ is what the constitution says is the standard of derogation,” she said of what transpired then.

Mount Salem, Malahoo Forte noted, is today vastly different from what it was before. A new police station is among the developments that have taken place there.

“What a transformation, absolutely no one present here today has any dissenting voice on the positive difference that the ZOSO has made. The same ZOSO that was decried in principle, in practice, in operationalization,” she said.

The Minister said residents have told her “their life experience in the zone has been transformed because when they step out, they don’t feel like they’re living in squalor. When they need to access government services, they don’t feel like a second class citizen.”