Can someone wake up the Maroons, please?

THE year seemed to have started out groggily, highlighted by a surprise dilution of the Cabinet, and a fight that does not warrant a punch, being promoted by the Maroon community.

The battle between Prime Minister Holness and the Accompong Maroons in St Elizabeth intensified with the election of Richard Currie as chief of that outdated and irrelevant group of people whose only claim to fame is the sellout of their brothers and sisters to English mercenaries centuries ago.

Maybe a psychiatrist should be the man at the centre of the dispute, because it seems like the Maroons have hit their heads against the wall again.

This suggestion that the Maroons are a sovereign people, living in their own sovereign State, is the kind of hogwash that this country can do without. Legally, the Maroons have no standing. Even if some idiotic treaty was signed long after Columbus’s visit, it is irrelevant today. How do the people of Accompong and their apparently disturbed chief expect the rest of the nation to accept that they represent a nation within a nation?

A Maroon in Jamaica is defined as a descendant of a runaway slave. It would mean that around 90 per cent of Jamaicans are Maroons. Except for those in St Elizabeth, I do not hear the others huffing and puffing about their standing.

In a seeming free country, people are allowed to say whatever they want, confined, of course, by certain legal hurdles, like the penalty for defamation, and security threat to individuals.

Each individual has an opinion, but when that opinion is being foisted upon a majority in a package wrapped as ‘fact’, then the line must be drawn.