Why did 2009 happen?

The bloodiest weekend in the history of Jamaica is not the day the eventide home massacre by fire occurred or the Orange Street burning.

It didn’t even occur in the last 100 years. It happened on the weekend of October 11, 1865 — the infamous and much-celebrated Morant Bay Rebellion.

I may differ to many who celebrate this event because of my feelings about the loss of lives and the betrayal of the Maroons, but there is no debate on its title as Jamaica’s bloodiest weekend.

But 2009 holds its own title as the bloodiest year in Jamaica’s history. This is also undisputed, 1,690 Jamaicans lost their lives at the hands of other Jamaicans.

What is disputed is why?

Unlike the peak of other years, such as 1993 to 1996 that was attributed to Colonel Trevor Mcmillan’s stand-off with front-line cops or the 2001 to 2004 peak that was a result of Jamaicans for Justice’s attack on the armed forces — this year had no real identifiable stimuli.

Even 2017’s carnage can be attributed to the Independent Commission of Investigations (Indecom) campaign to arrest police officers without waiting on the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ruling. So what made 2009 the bloodiest in our history?

If we look on the leadership of the police force at that time, there can be no real fault identified. I served at that time and never felt that I was in fear of confronting criminals.

There was not even an independent commission of enquiry back then. Well, technically, there is not one now because it can’t be independent if the very act that empowers it makes the members activists. But that is for another day.

Jamaicans for Justice’s image by then had been exposed as less of a foreign lobby group and more so a coffee posse of uptown, bored housewives.

So what drove the bloodshed?

In two words, gang domination. Not gang warfare, not gang control, but gang domination.

This was the period before the liberation of Jamaica from gang domination that occurred in 2010, commonly called the Tivoli Incursion. This name is somewhat of an abuse of the English language. You cannot in reality have an incursion into a community that falls under the jurisdiction of the assault team. So let’s call it an extreme police/military operation, mortars and all.

What is important to understand is that the 2009 peak was the result of the empowering of gangs, which took hold in 1974. It actually began in 1967, but we will get into that another day.

In 1974, gangs were the tool that political parties chose to further their political agendas. Some say they were actually used to prevent the country becoming communist. There is a very strong argument also that they were used to advance a communist takeover.

History is what it is, usually a distortion aiding one agenda or another.

Once the leadership of the country’s political parties walked down this road, the fuse was lit. It just exploded in 2009.

So over 25 years the gangs grew. They were to a large degree supported against law enforcement efforts, particularly in Tivoli Gardens and particularly by the community’s then parliamentary representative Edward Seaga.

This was not isolated to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) garrisons. The People’s National Party (PNP) had theirs too, and they too had overt political support, but none as obvious and embarrassing as Tivoli Gardens.

That support, in fact, led to the end of the JLP period of Government in 1989, which was the period of “Jim Brown”, the untouchable. This was quite sad, as the 1980s was a period of recovery in many ways from the disaster of the 1970s.

In 2009, though, we were literally back in the 1980s. The gangs led and their king or “President”, as he was called, was “Dudus Coke”.

Many don’t understand what life was like pre-2010. There is no community that I fear going into as a member of law enforcement, in respect of breaking protocols. I go where my investigation or intelligence leads me. I may be cautious in respect of risk assessment or public safety, but never would I think of getting permission from my supervisor, hoping that he has got clearances from his superior, and the process keeps climbing till the Member of Parliament says okay.

That was the 2000s, before 2009. That type of domination always leads to a high rate of murder. Look on Colombia in the 1980s during the Pablo Escobar era. They went up to a murder statistic of over 50 per 100,000. In Medellin, they went up to over a 100 per 100,000 on more than one occasion in that era.

So gang control is no control. They have no court and no lock-ups. They can only kill to effect and keep control. In effect, a prescription for a high homicide rate.

The extreme Tivoli operation that the media likes to call the Tivoli incursion ended the myth that the gangs can effectively fight the armed forces. It broke the back of the gang structure and laid the foundation for an environment that allows for some type of control at one level or a total destruction of the gang network in short order.

What did we do?

We created the Indecom Act to ensure that law enforcement would never again be able to fight a gang rebellion in this century.

Why? God knows.

I simply can’t fathom how the intelligent, experienced, and exposed could give up the advantage that we had and set us back on the road to gang domination that led to 2009. So the question is: Can we prevent another 2009? And what is the road to achieving that?

We can. But we need the extreme incursion approach without the bloodshed and without the trigger being warrants generated in a foreign land.

We need the same destroy-them-atall-cost approach, but again, without the bloodshed, without foreign interference, and without interference from the human rights lobbyists. It’s doable, but you first have to have a united Parliament. Particularism and self-interest would need to be set aside. Do I see this happening? No, I don’t. So the opportunity to defeat the gangs that existed in 2009 is over, and the question to be asked is: Why did it happen?

It happened because this is what occurs under gang domination.

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