JG - Guns and peace treaties

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Gleaner

Guns and peace treaties

published: Sunday July 6, 2008


Barry Chevannes, Contributor


Chevannes


A wave of scepticism from many quarters, including a Gleaner editorial, has greeted the announcement and signing of a peace treaty between warring factions in the August Town community. As long as the guns remain in the hands of the signatories and their gangs, so reason the sceptics, a peace agreement is a sham. The peace will not hold; we have been down this road before. For this very reason, the August Town Ministers Fraternal declined to join the list of signatories, though they welcomed the agreement. There is cogency in this line of reasoning. The peace, which was brokered by the Peace Management Initiative (PMI), was not the first in that area, but the fifth over a period of 15 years - 1993, 1998, 2002, 2006 and now 2008. Obviously, the PMI, which was founded in 2002, figured only in the last three. In all the peace agreements prior to this latest one, demobilising the guns was never one of the terms, so that when the breakdowns occurred, the guns were easily brought into action and with deadly impact. Most of the scores of people killed over those 15 years were innocent, in the normal sense of that word, including a 12-month old baby girl whose murder in the arms of her mother so shocked the community that it contributed in no small measure to the partisans agreeing to give peace yet another chance. So, why should we invest any hope in this one, the fifth, when the guns are still out there?

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"(T)he violence in August Town is essentially 'tribal' - the People's National Party (PNP) tribe versus the Jamaica Labour Party tribe, but it has been complicated over the last 18 months by a splintering within the PNP tribe.

It is more comparable, therefore, to Northern Ireland, once locked in a struggle between a Protestant tribe and a Catholic tribe, than to Colombia, where a state found itself rocked by organised criminal networks."