EDITORIAL - Time to account for Tivoli casualties

IT WOULD be the most hardened cynic who would argue other than that the state of emergency imposed in May was necessary and that the country is still reaping the value of the action.

For that, we need only point to the latest crime statistics for the month of September, when the 77 murders represented the least number of homicides in any month for more than eight years. Not since the 72 murders in July 2002 have Jamaicans killed each other less frequently.

Moreover, the number of murders in September was a 42 per cent decline on a year earlier, a drop of 13 per cent on the previous month. Indeed, there has been a drop in the number of murders each month since the spike in May, at the height of tensions in the society over the Christopher Coke extradition issue.

Despite this, there are those who will remind us that correlation does not necessarily equate to causation. However, only the calcified will continue to insist that the state of emergency, including the incursion into Tivoli Gardens by the security forces to route Mr Coke's force of irregulars, did not change the societal dynamic, allowing us to get this toehold against crime.

But even as this newspaper hails the bravery and professionalism of most of the police and soldiers who repulsed the challenge to the Jamaican state by Mr Coke's militia from his Tivoli Gardens redoubt and elsewhere, we believe that there are still questions to be resolved from that campaign.

There are, for instance, as we reported on Monday, the cases of those three young men from Tivoli Gardens who remain missing, having allegedly been taken from their homes by police and/or soldiers during the Tivoli operation.

While their families insist they were in the custody of the security forces, the authorities have no record, they claim, of their detention. Nor have their bodies turned up at any morgue. The assumption, though, is that they are dead.

There is no such uncertainty, however, about Mr Keith Clarke. He is dead. He was killed by soldiers who stormed his home far away from Tivoli Gardens, during what was said to be a hunt for Mr Coke, who had by then escaped Tivoli Gardens and was on the run.

Circumstances fuzzy

The circumstances of this incident, however, remains fuzzy and improbable. Mr Clarke, 63, a respected businessman at home with his wife and daughter, seemed an unlikely challenger of heavily armed soldiers.

The bottom line is that there has to be some accounting for these missing boys, Mr Clarke and more. This is not because we hold that the security forces misbehaved or that any of their numbers are guilty of crimes. We do not know.

The point is, though, that in a circumstance in which over 70 people were killed, as happened in Tivoli Gardens, it is the responsibility of the State to ensure, and assure, that all that happened was legal and legitimate. And those who misbehaved, or operated outside the law, must be held accountable.

Put another way, our security forces can't be measured by the same low standard as the illegitimate forces that gathered to defend Mr Coke.

If the police can't provide answers in a normal investigation, which is increasingly appearing to be the case, maybe a commission of inquiry is required.

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