It’s hardly classified information that reading is not this community’s most favorite pastime. Yet another regrettable state of affairs over the years ignored, and for which we can thank our blatantly self-interested leaders, political as well as religious. The less we know, which is to say, the more uneducated we are, the easier it is for them to persuade us to believe in things not seen, to get us hooked on spirits whether wholly holy or bottled, and to think only as directed, by which I mean not at all. This is not to say our leaders are themselves readers. But they know their territory.
Life experiences had taught them that people, poor people especially, the illiterate unambitious, tend to take to heart whatever sounds good in their untutored ears: Free lunches. Jobs for all. Heavenly rewards for the meek and the humble, the unquestioning obedient, when finally they’ve succumbed to a lifetime of deprivation.
Who can say for certain this kind of brainwashing is not at the root of what causes our discombobulating number of young citizens annually to take their own lives? It’s a fairly safe assumption that many among us never heard of Maya Angelou, let alone that she believed “any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of its needs, is good for him.” Or of Kofi Annan, for whom literacy was “a bridge from misery to hope.” Our politicians continue to bedazzle and impress gullible single moms with questionably acquired laptops for their school-age offspring, never letting on that “children are made readers on the laps of their parents,” to borrow from Emilie Buchwald, author of several award-winning children’s novels—not by reconditioned computers cynically handed them a few months before they leave school to join our ever growing army of street-corner illiterate unemployables, or to take up residence at our stand-alone and broke and misnamed correctional facility.
As for the ubiquitous pushers of “the people’s opiate,” who better to elaborate than the coiner of the almost two-centuries-old phrase?: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people.”
There can be no denying we live in a world today that is as oppressed as it is heartless and soulless. (Interesting that Karl Marx, widely considered an atheist, should imply that certain circumstances hint at a soul!) Just before I sat down to write this piece one of our front-row “media practitioners” went a distance, it seemed, to prove the current prime minister had not kept his 2016 campaign promise in relation to crime. Or was the reporter seeking to establish the overall superiority of the prime minister’s predecessor? The reporter offered viewers (at this time of year we can only speculate about how many were in their cups!) a purposefully resurrected 2016 news clip that featured Allen Chastanet on the hustings and, in the manner of campaigning politicians everywhere, asking and answering his own rhetorical question that for reasons of his own our raconteur du jour curiously described as ‘this now infamous statement’: “Has Kenny Anthony made this country safer? He didn’t but we will. He didn’t but I will!”
“But did he?” asked the off-camera reporter, before he presented his audience with the homicide scores for 2011 through the remaining few days of 2019, numbers he must’ve tallied over and over before taking to the airwaves—as would any other media practitioner of his caliber: Anthony 112; Chastanet 168.
A familiar police superintendent also contributed to the news report now under examination, albeit indirectly. At a recorded press gathering several days earlier he had referenced the number of homicides in 2019. “It goes back to people being unable to settle disputes without violence,” he said, head bowed. “We need to, er, and not just the police but everyone else . . .” He paused before saying, eyes now on the camera lens: “Persons including the media.”
This was hardly the first time the police officer had attributed much of the violence reported by the mainstream and social media, often by the same individuals, to a poor sense of conflict resolution, family quarrels, domestic rumbles, drunken disagreements, armed warfare at a number of the island’s ubiquitous watering holes. Often the police were featured by anonymous sources in a manner calculated to make them appear incompetent, undeserving of whistleblower trust, and possibly in cahoots with unidentified criminals.
Several years ago, in a desperate effort positively to affect the countless stabbings and choppings, the day’s government had enacted laws to control where and when citizens carried their cutlasses, sheathed and unsheathed. I am assured by reliable police and hospital sources, never mind the publicity afforded firearms-related incidents, that the cutlass remains our weapon of choice. Who knows why? Could the fact that many carry a machete for purposes of regular work be a factor? Many commuters keep a cutlass within arm’s reach while driving. What conceivably they have uppermost in mind has nothing to do with the stray cows on our roadways, neither overhanging tree branches. The bloody evidence tends to suggest motorists, in the absence of any kind of highway patrol, rely on their own defenses against alcohol-induced road rage and other ominous possibilities.
The above considerations have never been part of the crime discussion. Not now, not at any previous period. It is hardly surprising, however, that a brash platform boast by a campaigning politician has grabbed the attention of a particular section of the society that enjoys shouting on cue about “politicizing crime.” It’s almost as if some believe Allen Chastanet should be locked up for daring to imply he might be more equipped to do what Kenny Anthony could not, or would not do. We might as well argue over whether Donald Trump deserves to be thrown in jail and his cell key handed to Nancy Pelosi—for not delivering by this time on his campaign pledges to turn Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Putin and Kim Jong-un into Trump puppets. Or that Kenny Anthony should similarly be ostracized from regular society for failing to take back our streets from the assassins of Michael Gaboo Alexander and Bonnie Clarke back in 1998. Also for failing in 2005 to keep Vieux Fort safe from bold-faced criminals even at Christmastime. We need not get into his failure to deliver on his promise five years earlier of state of the art hospitals north and south “before the end of 2015!”
Whether citizens feel safer today than at any other time is a question useful only to campaigning politicians and their dim-witted surrogates. Better to ask whether Saint Lucians have ever felt safe. A little reading of available addresses to the nation and countless press releases from the prime minister’s office will quickly deliver the indisputable answer: Barely a year after taking office, in 1998, so overwhelming was crime in all its varieties—from bank robberies at gunpoint to burglaries to hold-ups of visitors on tour buses and in our streets, to chain snatching, to cutlass choppings and drug busts—that the new prime minister and his police commissioner decided to launch Operation Restore Peace. He promised then to take back the streets from the criminal elements. Not so long afterwards, still not having taken back the streets, he set up a crime commission attended by leading representatives of law enforcement, as well as regular citizens and captains of commerce at their wits’ end. The police commissioner blamed the high rate of crime and the lack of arrests on deportees from the United States that he said were several times more sophisticated than his crime unit, and a whole lot better armed.
A World Bank report at the time observed: “Youth in the Dominican Republic and Saint Lucia are untrusting of the legal and judicial systems in their neighborhoods. They report that the police are prejudiced against youth and treat them badly. This is particularly the case in poor neighborhoods, where police assume that all the youth are engaged in the drug trade or crime. Youth feel that the police fail at their jobs of providing security—instead drug dons run the neighborhoods, especially after dark. A similar distrust is felt of the judicial and more general political system, where youth feel that all authorities are corrupt and untrustworthy.”
Did I mention the quoted World Bank Report was published in 2001? One year earlier, New Year’s Eve worshippers at the Castries cathedral were attacked by torch-bearing lunatics. A nun was killed at the scene. A priest died a few months later. Am I blaming the day’s prime minister for the situation underscored in the World Bank report? I most certainly am not. He inherited a crime wave from the John Compton-Lewis eras. I must also acknowledge it was in Compton’s time that Rastafarians were unofficially declared vermin to be wiped out, in much the same way the Jews were dehumanized by Hitler in advance of the Holocaust. For those who will accuse me of exaggeration, let them consider the reasons offered by our police back in the day for some of their atrocities, all of them endorsed, if only tacitly by our Christian society, with no complaints by our elected officials. The government that replaced Compton, headed by former judge Allan Louisy and inclusive of George Odlum and Kenny Anthony (as senator) seemed only to make matters worse. They had been in office but a few days when their supporters rioted at a United Workers Party rally and turned the William Peter Boulevard venue into an open cesspool.
The day’s police blamed almost every robbery, every burglary, every assault on marijuana-smoking Rastafarians whom they mercilessly gunned down at the smallest opportunity, with impunity, all in the name of law and order. Some victims come to mind: Charlie Boo, 18-year-old Terry James, Corbeau (as he waited on National Day for his Rastafarian lawyer Miguel to return him safely to prison). Inquest verdicts were always predictable: Death by misadventure!
Allan Louisy and Kenny Anthony inherited the killing consequences of poor education, an unskilled workforce barely able to handle menial work, wall-to-wall frustration, pampered foreign investors at the expense of locals—as did Allen Chastanet from his immediate predecessors, IMPACS for one. For those who would conveniently insist on a connection with Operation Restore Confidence, launched by Vernon Francois with the endorsement of the Stephenson King cabinet, I am forced to repeat myself: That alleged connection remains to be established by an appropriate tribunal. On the other hand Chastanet’s predecessor went to amazing lengths to re-investigate what the State Department in a Country Report on Human Rights had described as “gross violations of human rights by the Saint Lucia police”—contrary to the findings of local coroner’s courts that declared there was nothing unlawful about the alleged “potentially unlawful fatal police shootings, some reportedly committed by officers associated with an ad hoc task force within the police department.”
The investigation was announced to the world in a televised statement by Kenny Anthony on August 20, 2013; its “damning” findings were also read on TV by the prime minister in early 2015—in shocking detail that need not be revisited at this time. Suffice it to say the revelations continue to have devastating impact on the police (Commissioner Vernon Francois was one of the more obvious casualties!), the Chastanet government and the general populace.
Not that the nation has experienced crime as never before. In an earlier article I debunked the notion with verifiable facts, without dispute. What is worthy of more serious consideration is the statement by police superintendent Nicholas: that domestic violence is rampant, that we seem unwilling to settle our private conflicts without resorting to cutlasses and firearms. In most of these incidents the police are called only after irreversible harm has been done. It is also worth noting that despite our undermanned police with all their handicaps, such crimes as bank robberies, burglaries, murder for profit, tour buses ambushed at gunpoint are for the most part unheard of. Perhaps the police and the government, as responsible as they are for our safety, may not be as culpable as some of us who insist on resolving disputes with knives and cutlasses and firearms. The government would do well in the early months of 2020 to revisit the reports on the causes of crime in Saint Lucia, committed by males barely out of their teens.
In his Nationwide Survey of the Fear of Crime and Community Policing in Saint Lucia, published in 2003, Professor Ramesh Deosaran observed: “There is no doubt that the problems of crime, personal safety and their serious implications are uppermost in the minds of the Saint Lucian population. Ninety percent of the interviewed 1620 residents from all over the island said crime is a serious problem in Saint Lucia. They feared being robbed in the street, being swindled out of their money, having their homes broken into, being murdered, being attacked with a weapon.”
Additionally: “The highest amount of public fear was of being attacked by someone with a weapon [65%] and being murdered [63%]. Fifty percent of the population feared being a victim of crime in the near future.” I remind readers: the cited report reflected how Saint Lucians felt in 2003.
Deosaran recommended as follows: “The overall levels of fear, especially for being victims of crime, need to be carefully considered for possible amelioration.” As earlier stated, the police and the government have their responsibilities, for which they must be held accountable. But who will hold the citizens accountable for our incivility toward one another; incivility that too often has us reaching for our sharpest cutlass?
To be continued!
