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Dead Men tell no lies by Janine di Giovanni May, 2001 (The Times of London) Kingston, Jamaica A few hours ago, Daphne watched her 26-year old son take three bullets into his brain. She's crying and screaming and clutching the fabric of her dirty brown dress, as though she is trying to rip it off her own body. Her face is a map of pain, misery, and submission to a life of hell. All she has ever known is poverty and child bearing and back-breaking work. Now her son, the one she says "never gave me any trouble was never a bad boy," has been killed by the Jamaican police. Because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. "They took the wrong man!" a young girl in a yellow t-shirt screams. She witnessed the scene, saw the killing and she is bursting with outrage. "Chewie didn't do nothing! They got the wrong man!" In places like this, places where the poor people live, they call the Jamaican police "death squads." That's because there are 140 cases a year of citizens being killed by them, the highest number per capita in the world. When you look at them like a line of numbers, it means nothing. But when you go to the funerals and walk through the dusty townships where these people lived and died, when you meet their families who try to find justice for their loved ones' killers and rarely do, then you see people who died for nothing. This is an undeclared war, a war between civilians and the security forces. Amnesty International calls it a human rights emergency. Daphne doesn't know statistics, and she hasn't thought about calling a lawyer. What good can a lawyer do? The police haven't come back yet to apologise to her for killing her son; and she is still in shock. In between animal howls of pain, she recounts Chewies' story. He was a simple man, a factory worker, a father to a small daughter and boyfriend to a pregnant young girl called Kay. Kay stands, hands on her belly next to Daphne with a look of sheer disbelief. She is beyond tears. Did Chewie have a gun, I ask. She looks at me hard. "I knew him for nine years," she says. "He never had a gun." The crowd around Daphne, who have seen this too many times, are riled by the heat and the injustice of their situation. They are screaming and chanting: "They kill him! Police kill him!" Murder!" Murder!" But they know no one is listening. Kingston is going up in flames. For the entire month of May, violence has been rising and the police and the army are on the streets with APCs and flak jackets and helemts, with the intention, they say, of trying to separate turf wars. It looks like Bosnia or the West Bank. Every morning over my papaya at breakfast, the local paper, the Daily Gleaner reports more killings, more havoc, and more editorials about the police being out of control. WAR! The Star reports in five-inch high letters. Gangs trade bullets in West Kingston! I was not standing on the corner watching when Chewie was shot. All I know is what Daphne says, and I believe her. The police, led by a man she knew called Bobby Red, arrived at the boat factory where Daphne and Chewie worked. They were looking for a man who owed them money. The guy wasn't there. So Bobby Red got angry and they dragged Chewie, kicking and screaming and clinging to his mother's legs, outside and they beat him for a few hours. She said it hurt, watching her baby get his head stomped in. Chewie was crying out to her for help and Daphne tried to intervene and then she saw a gun. Then she heard three bangs and Chewie slumped forward to the ground, dead. *** Chewie died because he was poor, because he was powerless and because the police knew they would never be charged. Access to justice in Jamaica is like apartheid. It exists, more or less for the middle classes. If you are poor, your life is cheap. Carolyn Gomez, a soft-spoken pediatrician who heads a grass-roots organisations called Jamaicans for Justice, says that the rate of police killing citizens – which is five times the number of another notoriously violent country, South Africa – is a human rights emergency. In her small office in Grants Pen, a crime ridden inner-city neighbourhood where nightly one hears the music of automatic gun fire, Gomez sifts through a pile of manila files. Dead ends, cases of police killings that have been painfully unresolved. "Our police force has been killing an average of 150 of our citizens for the past eight years," Gomez says in a resigned voice. "That's an emergency. That's 1400 in eight years. And in those eight years, you can count on both my hands the number of policemen that have been held accountable." Gomez sighs deeply, the breath of someone who believes they are fighting an impossible battle. "It is an emergency if one more person dies." **** Jamaica is a schizophrenic paradise. North of Kingston, coming out of the grime and the dust and the traffic and the heat, you drive through the Blue Mountains, acres and acres of velvety banana trees and fertile coffee plantations before reaching the turquoise sea. The beaches are golden: miles of endless white sand and hoards of sunburnt tourists piling in on charter flights from Europe, North and South America. They have no idea what is happening to the people who live and die here. I had no idea what was happening here when I stayed, once blissful winter, in the Jamaica Inn reading Milan Kundera and drinking rum punch. In the 1950s, elegant resorts like Round Hill lured the British aristocracy along with Hollywood stars. Noel Coward found the tranquility to write; Errol Flynn had his own private island and used to run banana boats down the river to Kingston; Ralph Lauren still has a cottage near Montego Bay. There are golf courses and tennis courts and murals of Bob Marley and quaint stands selling spicy jerk chicken. On the surface, it seems so cool and laid back, a lucrative tourist industry and a country of gentle rastafarian-insired people. But the reality is much, much darker. Tourists don't venture much leave their heavily secured resorts or the beaches of Negril or Ochos Rios. If they did, they would see this: inner-city barrios of Kingston with names like Havana or Trenchtown or Hannah Town or Denham Town, where the Jamaican Army has to be called out. If they walked the "lanes" (ghetto streets) of Olympic Gardens and got caught up in a shootout with a hail of 9mm bullets fired by police, they would understand. They would find a society that is believed to have the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere. "There are only two ways out of the ghetto, one is to become a DJ, the other is to become a gunman," one local journalist told me, one night over Red Stripe beers. Young men grow up fearing for their lives: if they don't die by the gun-fuelled gang wars, they could die at the hands of the police. "The police have been able to kill with impunity," says Yvonne Sobers, who is founder of Families Aganst State Terrorism (FAST). "Young men, in particular, are very fragile. They simply do not feel safe because there are too many people who have witnessed police brutality." What is perhaps the most troubling is how under-reported and how unnoticed Jamaica's human rights offences have been. That began when in 2001, then-Secretary General of Amnesty International, Pierre Sane, met PJ Patterson, Jamaica's Prime Minister. Sane was assured that his government was committed to protecting human rights. But Sane returned from Jamaica concerned: not only about the death penalty – which still exists – and conditions of the jails, which are atrocious, but most of all, about the fact that so many seemingly extra-judicial killings were occurring. Six months after Sane's initial visit, 65 more people were killed in police incidents. By the time Sane returned the following April, following a massacre of seven young boys which became known as the Braeton Seven, the Jamaican story had gotten out of control. In May, following the death of a local "Don"; West Kingston communities were trading nightly bullets and the Kingston General Hospital was full of bodies peppered with gunshots. A few weeks later, the government had to call out the army to restore order and over one single summer weekend, 21people alone were killed. Helicopters patrolled the sky like black spiders and tourists cancelled their holidays. Paradise had become hell. *** The motto of the Jamaican police force is to serve, to protect and to reassure. But it is often the last thing that they do. Growing up in Jamaica, children learn to fear the police almost as if they were an occupying force. In an attempt to handle an extremely violent country, they clamp down hard on civilians. When they do kill, when it is an accident, they are rarely held accountable for the crime. Often they act as if they are above the law. Sometimes, people fear, they act on the spot, not only as police but as juror and executioner. The roots of the current violence stem from the early 1970s, when, in the shadow of the cold war, Jamaica was pulled apart by pro and anti Western political factions. Later, Prime Minister Michael Manley and his People's National Party (PNP) would take a hard stand aligning himself with Castro and Cuba and alienating himself from the United States, at a huge economic cost. The country, in the 1980s, plummeted into depression and thousands of people emigrated to Canada, Britain or America. With the advent of more poverty, violence reached epic proportions. Domestically, politicans from the PNP and its' opposition the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) led by Edward Seaga began the dangerous process of polarisation and began going into the teeming inner city neighbourhoods and arming people to rustle up votes. This political tribalism was the beginning of the gang culture, which would increase the political divide and lead to more violence. Drug traffiking increased; and thousands of people died in shoot outs and reprisal killings. Election times were particurlarly vulnerable: in the 1980 elections, more than 1000 people were killed. The police, whose roots were an early protection force for the wealthy sugar plantation owners, were unable to control the gangs. They used a suppression of crime act which gave them extraordinary powers of arrest and detention without charge and search without warrant. It was finally rebuked after 20 years in practice, but not before an entire generation of policemen grew up not knowing how to respect the rights of citizens. This is why the streets are now full of what the Economist deemed "Killer Cops." Even now, with the police being trained by special British police forces sent over to educate the force in human rights abuse and how to arrest without shooting, they are still coming to terms with this deadly legacy. The police Commissioner, Francis Forbes, is a man who genuinely seems concerned with the situation, but seems at a loss of how to control it. "The homicide rate is the cause for serious concern," admits Forbes, sitting in his colonial-style office with a map of Kingston behind him. "We continue to have a problem with that." But when pressed with specific cases, he seemed alienated with what was actually happening on the streets of Kingston. Clearly, as the National Security Minister KD Knight angrily tried to point out to me when I confronted him with the human rights dilemma, the police do not have an easy job. Patrolling at night with a group of special officers through the twisted lanes of Grants Penn and Olympic Gardens is as frightening as being on patrol with the Israeli Defense Force in the Gaza Strip. Suddenly, you know what it feels like to be the enemy, to be hated, to be targetted, to be stuck between a rock and hard place. The Jamaican police do not have armoured cars and the gunmen who want to get them have easy access to shoot at them from behind tin fences which hide their positions. According to Commissioner Forbes, 26 police officers have been killed in 36 months, and random killings, such as the shooting of two officers who were riding a bus, are not uncommon. The gangs, meanwhile, shoot at each other from across gulleys – empty trenches – and violence erupts at any second without warning. Everyone seems to have a gun – British made, American imported or homeade. I began to joke that there were more guns in Jamaica than in Montenegro, where every family has a small arsenal. It is a culture bred on violence. The movies people love to see on Friday nights are films like Scorcese's Scarface which feature 15 minutes of unadulturated shooting. You stay alive, I was told by one young boy, by following the way of the gun. But even this extreme culture of violence does not excuse the police brutality. The Crime Management Unit, an elite crack force of the Jamaican police, are particulary notorious. Led by Superintendent Reneto Adams, a man whose name conjures fear in the hearts of most simple Jamaicans, they have a record for operating with impunity and are usually sent in to do the dirtiest jobs. Created to crack down on the gangs and drug traffikers, their raids that often end in bloody massacres. Adams, who sports a Mohawk-style coif and who excuses his mens' behaviour as justifiable, has been likened to Dirty Harry. Despite the number of casualties, he says, casually, "we have a job to do and we will continue." Francis Forbes told me that Adams was respected by many Jamaicans who want to see crime squashed. But at what cost? One steaming hot day, as Hannah Town was burning with riots and shooting, I sat in a car with a tiny woman, Millicent Forbes, whose little girl was killed by police in April 2000. Millicent had just come from court where nothing had happened. Nothing is going to happen either, and she knows it. When a popular radio program led by "Mr. Perkins", a campaigning journalist, came on the radio and began talking about Reneto Adams, Millicent cringed. Her entire posture shrivelled. "Wherever that man goes, there is killing, killing, killing," she cried, and her face crumbled. "wherever he goes, there is death..." her voice trailed, defeated. Millicent is 43 and raises chickens and lives in Trenchtown, and her story is beyond sad. Her 13-year old daughter, Janice Allen, was shot in the back by police during a raid near her house. She was going out to buy rice for her mother with her older sister. She felt a bullet enter her spine, and died in a car en route to the hospital. A passer-by picked her up because the police had refused to take her to the hospital. Millicent just wants to see the man who did it go to jail. Instead, her family is getting harrassed by police who want her to drop the case. When I asked Francis Forbes about Janice, he feigned ignorance and said he had no recollection. Strange, because he had talked to Carolyn Gomez about the case the day before. "They are death squads, no different from death squads that operated in Latin America" agrees Leonard Wilson, a trade union negotiation, whose son, Tamoyo, was murdered along with six other boys by police on March 14 this year, in perhaps Jamaica's most infamous case of police brutality: an incident known as the Braeton Seven. Like Millicent Forbes, Wilson is a father fuelled by injustice. He is not going to let his son's murder get buried. "I am going to fight it until I can't go any further, until they try to stop me and there is only one way they can stop me," he said. Wilson knows what it means to say something like that in Jamaica, but he insists he is not scared. "No way, I am not going to let it rest," he says. The next day I met a man called Barrington Fox, a 49-year old plumber whose 18-year old son Joel was rounded up into police jeep last October and was next seen with a bullet through his brain. His sister tried to stop them taking the screaming teenager away, because she knew he would never come back. He clung to her, begging her to save him. But once he was inside that jeep, that was it. Joel Fox was no angel, he was going the way of the gun, and Barrington is the first to admit it. But it doesn't mean the police have the right to play God, he says. So after Joel's death, Barrington co-founded Families Against State Terrorism (FAST) so that what happened to Joel will never happen to anyone else again. And he keeps Joels' ashes in a tall glass jar near him just to remind him not to quit. "This is what keeps me going," he says, pointing to the jar. "That's my son there. And I want to see justice. And I am going to see justice." *** All the families' stories are horrible, but there is somthing about the Braeton story that leaves you with a sick feeling in your stomach. Braeton is a horrible story, a horrible crime with a horrible aftermath. It is a story that never should have happened, and worse, it is a story of men who killed who will never be punished. Sorting through photographs of the seven boys that died so violently on March 14, as they played dominoes and ate a dinner of fish and flour dumplings, one can help but get the sense that their lives were halted so quickly, before they got a chance to grow into men. Braeton is a middle class community of hard-working Jamaicans. It's the kind of place where families aspire to send their children to university in Canada or the U.S., where Sunday afternoons are spent visiting relations or watering the rose garden. It is a quiet place and the small white house where the seven boys – none of whom had police records, and by all accounts of numerous witnesses interviewed, none of whom were gun men or gangsters – looks neat and clean. Four of them were teenagers, three had just turned 20. When you step inside the house where they died, it is clear that something evil happened here. Despite the attempts by the police to scrub away blood in a back room where it is believed the boys were assasinated, you can still smell and feel death. If you think hard enough, you can still hear the boys screaming out for their neighbour, Mr. Carpy, to come and help them, and hear their frantic pleas for their lives. Worse, you can hear them crying and saying the Lord's Prayer, which according to witnesses, the police ordered them to do before shooting them with 9 mm revolvers. The crime management unit arrived in full – 60 men – at dawn on March 14. They had come on a tip off that the house full of boys might be linked to the killing of a policeman and a high school principal. As the first light swept the sky, they crept up on the house. What happened next is sketchy. The police say the boys began firing at them – but there is no evidence of a shoot out, and witnesses say they only heard one volley of bullets, police bullets. Bullet holes in the aluminum shutters of the house do not tally with the amount of bullets in the boys' bodies, or the positions. Some of the bodies had been shot from above, again suggesting execution. All of this does not back up the police official version that the boys died in a shoot out. "It seems not possible that these lesions could have occurred just by random shooting," reported an independent pathologist from Amnesty's Danish Medical Group who came at the request of the families. Yvonne Sobers from FAST, who arrived a few hours after the murder with Barrington Fox who collected parts of one of the boy's skull (suggesting he was killed at close range) is more blatant. "It was execution," she says firmly. After the killing, the police removed the bodies without using body bags, tampered with evidence (they claim they found a gun inside the house but they handled it without using gloves); performed seven autopsies in less than six hours and did not check the boys's hands for gun powder residue to prove they were "gunmen". All this is standard procedure in Western Europe. Yet, despite the lack of evidence, Reneto Adams still stood in front of the crowd of bewildered and grieving neighbours, who had known the boys all of their lives, and told them that the young men were gun men and gangsters. To fathers like Leonard Wilson, who was proudly waiting for his sons' acceptance letter to a Canadian University, this was a second assasination on his sons' life. For other parents like Valdene Beckford, whose 15-year old son Regean died in the house, taking nine gun shot lesions on his frail body, it felt like her heart was getting ripped out. Her son was dead, now his reputation was being destroyed. "Regean was no gun man," she says, tears running down her elegant face, unable to control her pain. "He was my baby. He was tall, but he was still just a baby." She shows a picture of Regean wearing long shorts: he looks like a child. She shows hsi bedroom which is still full of his art work. She says she is never going to remove it, never going to clean the walls. When I left, the case was being investigated. But most legal advisors told me, straight out, that like the many other cases before it, that it would be buried. Due to the sluggish judicial system, the Braeton case would die because it will be nearly impossible to finger one perpetrator. According to Jamaicans for Justice, it takes just under two years for the cases to trawl through the legal system just to reach the coroner's court. Braeton has precedents, other cases that are clearly miscarriages of justice that have never been resolved. Another story in that catalogue of horror is Michael Gayle, a 26-year old mentally disabled man who rode his bicycle through a checkpoint manned by nine soldiers and four policemen in August 1999. Although Jamaicans for Justice say the curfew was illegally called, Gayle was thrown off his bicycle, kicked and stomped with clubs, batons, fists and finally, his ribs were smashed with his bicycle. His mother, Jenny Cameron, heard that someone was being beaten at a checkpoint and rushed to see her son lying on the ground. She remembers him crying, "Mama, Mama" and she could not believe that was her boy lying bloody on the ground. Michael's internal injuries were massive. But the police would not let Jenny take him away. They told her to go to a police station and report that she had seen her son strike a police officer. Stunned, she refused. Michael was taken to a mental health clinic where he was given insufficient treatment and died several days later. His case, according to Jamaicans for Justice, has gone no where, but his mother, like the families of the Braeton Seven and Millicent Forbes, is refusing to let it go. A former farm hand on the sugar planations, Jenny never learned to read or write. She lives in one small room in a "yard" sharing a toilet and washing facilities with her neighbours, but she keeps her space neat and she treasures the gifts that Michael gave her for Mother's day – two china figurines. She is not going to forget, no way, she says, shaking her head defiantly. "Just because I'm some little woman from the inner city with six kids and they kill one...they are not going to get away with it." At the age of 53, she says she wants to become a lawyer, even if it takes years. Since Braeton, something has changed in Jamaica. Before, families of victims fell into complacency because they did not know how to fight back, or if they did, they were convinced they would never see justice. Organisations like FAST or Jamaicans against Justice, along with the awareness that Amnesty and the outside world are monitering their story has encouraged them to unite against the police and the justice system. The police, for the first time, are getting nervous. "Braeton has changed something, definetly in Jamaican society," says Father Richard Albert, an American priest who has lived in Jamaica for 40 years and who runs the St. Patrick's Foundation, which organises various inner city projects, as well as being active in Jamaicans for Justice. "We now have good police men and women who look at what is happening, and they feel ashamed." On a steamy summer night in Father Albert's church hall near Grants' Pen, a group of families of victims are seated in a circle for a counselling session. You can tell that every one in that room lost someone because of their posture, their sadness, the heaviness in their faces. One by one, they speak: "I lost my son," "I lost my daughter," "I lost my husband." The stories all sound similar and senseless. A psychologist is talking to them about grief and about the circle of rage and sorrow that occurs when one person is killed by the Jamaican police: not just one person, but an average of eleven. Take that and multply it by the number of people killed each year, and it is an ocean of pain. As she speaks, I watch all of their faces. There is a kind of deadness to all of them, that deadness that comes when something or someone you love has been ripped from you, and you don't really know why. I have seen that deadness all over the world, from Kosovo to Grozny. The difference is, this is Jamaica – this is supposed to be a Carribbean paradise, not a country at war. Finally, the counsellor lights a candle and asks each person to come up and remember their loved one and blow out the candle. One by one, they shuffle up to this small table – old women, young men, wives, a pregnant woman, all of them united by loss. Then, the strangest thing happens. Softly, and slowly, they all begin to sing the Jamaican National Anthem. It is about freedom and beauty and how much they love this country, this place that has robbed them of family and of trust and of reassurance. I am stunned. If it were me, and I lost someone, I don't know if I would have that much generosity in my heart towards a plac that had destroyed my life. But afterwards, Jenny Cameron, whose beloved son Michael, who she says would never hurt anyone, who was kicked to death by fourteen men, comes up and touches my arm. She was singing loudly and now she has tears in her eyes. How can she still sing? I ask her, and she looks surprised. "Oh yes," she says quietly. "I still love Jamaica. No matter what has happened. I always will." A few days later, I saw Leonard Wilson. He had a thick envelope, which he knew was his son Tamoyo's acceptance to a university in Canada. The boy had been waiting for that letter for months, it was his ticket out of Jamaica and into a different world. Leonard hasn't opened the letter yet, even though he knows what is inside. He says he doesn't have the heart. © Janine di Giovanni |
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