EDITORIAL - Rescuing Spanish Town

"We cannot believe the funeral of a don resulted in the police preventing us from keeping a march and prayer for peace. This is sad."

Sad indeed.

Those were the words of distress uttered by Bishop Rowan Edwards in bemoaning the cancellation of a 10,000-man march that sought to send Christians stomping through the asphalted roads and dirt tracks of the St Catherine capital.

Bishop Edwards believes it was a travesty that the funeral of a reputed criminal enforcer could have prevented law-abiding citizens from shaking a symbolic fist at the gangs which have bathed the St Catherine capital in blood. Never mind the thugs might have used the march as cover to flex their muscles.

The image of Spanish Town has for decades been spiralling into disrepute. The densely populated township is blighted by infrastructural decay, and cobwebs of informal settlements teeming with poor and underprivileged Jamaicans have mushroomed, without check.

parallel governments

These zones of exclusion have largely been forgotten by the political directorate, except when candidates don their party garb to rustle votes by trifle inducements and comfort-to-a-fool promises.

Otherwise, Spanish Town's many enclaves have fostered the growth of parallel governments, or gangs, which have carved out swathes of territory as their criminal kingdoms where the State is, to some extent, an insufferable intruder.

It is these circumstances which have led to the entrenchment of the criminal gangs called One Order and Clansman, which have genetic links to the two political gangs, the ruling Jamaica Labour Party and the Opposition People's National Party. Even if the political gangs have not had direct command over the power structure of these bandits, or have not ordered the plunder and murder of Jamaicans, their hands, like Pilate's, cannot simply be washed clean of complicity.

For it is the JLP, for which One Order and its splinters are sympathisers, and the PNP, which is the party of choice for Clansman, which have accommodated these groups in maintaining their electoral power in sections of St Catherine, and Spanish Town in particular, even though constituents have, generally, not seen the commensurate benefits of political affiliation.

ineffective measures

Last year's state of emergency and the establishment of curfews since then, while important, will not be long-term palliatives in quelling the orgy of bloodshed and social abandonment that have come to define the Old Capital. They may change the momentum, momentarily, but they won't change the game.

The mayor of Spanish Town, parliamentary representatives, and church and business leaders must forge a coalition that seeks to achieve feasible and measurable objectives to staunch the tide of hopelessness that covers this key town.

Civil-society groups must hold their political representatives to account and demand that a vision of change be articulated. The political gangs will not break links with the criminal gangs until well-thinking Jamaicans force them to.

The Church is a powerful tool by virtue of the captive audience it has to its message. It must use this advantage not only by adding seats to the pews but by using its massive numbers to change the social order which breeds the One Orders and Clansmans of Jamaica.

We pray Bishop Edwards would be more heartbroken about the state of the Old Capital, and the seeming inefficacy of the Church there, than the cancellation of symbolic marches, potent as they might be, which will not, we believe, change the fortunes of Spanish Town.

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