Who authored the Tivoli graffiti?
PICK any infinitesimal moment in the tropics and in that speck of time, Jamaica is at once a fairy tale, a paradise, a puzzle and a horror story.
A few years ago an entire beach of sand disappeared. Everyone in the area knows who did it, who owned the trucks, who hauled the stuff away, yet no one knows who did it and to date, no one has been charged.
In 1978 in a most callous operation, 14 young men from Southside were lured by military operatives to the military shooting range of Green Bay in St. Catherine. They had been promised jobs and other goodies. Lying in wait for them were armed soldiers, including one with a GPMG mounted on a tripod. Five of the men were cut down and killed and others miraculously escaped.
At the enquiry no one was found responsible for the deaths. In May this year the security forces mounted an operation in Tivoli designed to flush out West Kingston don, Michael Christopher Coke, aka Dudus.
Dudus escaped during the early stages of the operations and officially 73 people, mostly young men from Tivoli Gardens, were killed. Residents of the area –always difficult to believe in the best of circumstances — have told people, including me, that the real death count is in the region of 100-plus.
Following that, a contingent of soldiers, all masked, surrounded the Kirkland Heights home of accountant Keith Clarke under the pretext that Dudus was hiding there. In a near two-hour “operation” Clarke was killed in a hail of bullets, in his bedroom with his wife and daughter present. Many of the shots to his body entered from the rear.
No one stole the sand, no one was responsible for the deaths of the men from Southside, no one has determined how many of those killed in Tivoli were actually firing back at the security forces, and every effort at determining why Keith Clarke was roused from his bed at 2 am and killed like a stray dog in his home has been stalled.
The fairy tale and paradise that Jamaica is to the few who can afford to find it so at most times is frightening to the many who are powerless and at the mercy of state agents with guns. Certainly, when Keith and his friends and I would repair to our little watering hole in the cool climate of Sterling Castle in the late 1980s, he would have thought that having no Xs against his name, as a loyal citizen, the state had a duty to protect him were his life in danger.
Residents of inner-city enclaves have no such illusions. Dangerously sandwiched between paying homage to a criminal don and constantly in “social warfare” with the security forces, inner-city living is pure hell. Corralled by either of the two political tribes, the JLP and the PNP, these residents must at times “jump” for the former with a show of green or the latter with flags of orange.
In 2008 while I was in Washington DC, at the back of the Pentagon Mall I saw a street-side vendor selling Obama and McKain T-shirts. For a while I stared at the stall and had a dream that Jamaica could advance along that trajectory.
Tivoli Gardens is fiercely loyal to the JLP as is, say, Arnett Gardens to the PNP. To residents firmly locked in the physical garrison and mentally imprisoned there too, their colours and the likeness of their political heroes of the moment are the food of their total existence. Where some Christians will wear a cross on a necklace, a person from Tivoli will sport a green wristband, while one in Arnett Gardens will don the same, but in orange.
Near to election time when posters and graffiti are the order of the day, armed young men will venture out at between 2 am and 4 am to paint and post their colours on borderline political areas. In all of the time that I have been watching politics I have never seen PNP colours in Tivoli Gardens. I have never seen the green of the JLP in Arnett Gardens.
Since May of this year, the streets of Tivoli Gardens have been “controlled” by the security forces to the extent that some of the Tivoli desperadoes who fled at the beginning of the military onslaught and have still not returned have been complaining that they are losing their womenfolk to the better fed and now better armed soldiers and policemen on the streets of Tivoli.
In this misunderstood paradise, residents of Tivoli Gardens woke up a few days ago to discover that significant acreage of their community’s walls were spray-painted in orange with signs saying “PNP”. Why do we have to ask who did it? Isn’t it obvious?
And, isn’t it open intimidation, not just to the residents of Tivoli Gardens but to the wider administration controlled by the JLP that the national face of security is now coloured in orange?
And, like everything else there will be no answers. In this crazy country where some people have faulted the government for its excellent effort at preparing the nation for what could have been a direct hit from tropical storm Tomas, the complaint has been that “di storm neva come. A whe dem did mek wi mek so much fuss fah”. Are we serious?
It has never been a secret that there is no love lost between the security forces and Tivoli Gardens. This has been so for basically two reasons. First was the fanatic defence of Tivoli Gardens in all instances by former MP, JLP leader and Prime Minister Eddie Seaga. Second was the heavily armed nature of the community and its brazenness in opening fire on the security forces in 1996, 1997 and 2001.
In the 1990s some factions of the security forces even sided with breakaway factions in Rema in facilitating covert action against Denham Town and Tivoli after Tivoli gunmen had mounted attacks on Rema. During that time the security forces formed a buffer against Tivoli Gardens (along Spanish Town Road) while gunmen from Rema and Denham Town traded shots and firebombs across the volatile border. Denham Town was deliberately starved of its Tivoli “assistance”.
It appears to me that some members of the security forces have detected that the present time is the perfect “payback time”. The body count in May was the shock and awe that defeated the forces amassed in Tivoli Gardens and reduced the community to a shadow of its former self. Painting the walls with graffiti is merely a spice, designed to rub salt in the wound of the politically wounded.
observemark@gmail.com