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Where did Amnesty International get 'Let them kill each other'?HEART TO HEART With Betty Ann Blaine
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Dear Reader,
The world's foremost human rights watchdog group, Amnesty International, has lashed Jamaica with perhaps the most damning report the country has ever received. The title of the report, "Let them kill each other", speaks volumes, and I am curious how Amnesty settled on that title. Who exactly spoke those words? Were the words spoken by someone in authority, or did Amnesty International come to that conclusion on its own?
I believe that the government should insist that Amnesty International explain the root and the motive for entitling its report, "Let them kill each other". Were those words spoken by a government official or someone in the police force? Do the words reflect the sentiment of the Jamaican people?
It is clear to me that Amnesty's objective is to create "shock and awe" against the background of the horrendous levels of crime and violence being experienced in the country. However, there is a problem when that is done in a way that misrepresents or distorts the spirit and the views of the Jamaican people. While the abandonment of the poor by various governments could easily be construed as "wilful neglect", I myself have never heard any public official say, "Let them kill each other", and that statement in no way represents my own attitude or views regarding the poor and the dispossessed.
What is of grave concern to me is that Amnesty's report is available for the whole world to see and digest. At the click of a button, anyone anywhere can download the report.Just based on the title alone and without reading the contents, the reader could easily come to the conclusion that those words represent the sentiments of our government, law enforcement officials, ordinary Jamaicans, or all of us.
This is not the only case in which our country has been misrepresented and maligned by foreign entities and governments. For several years now, Jamaica's name has been sullied and spread abroad as a country engaging in the trafficking of children. That information is only a click away on the Internet, and yet, the citizens of Jamaica had never heard of it, nor even understood the phenomenon of human trafficking. To date, the evidence supporting that claim is non-existent or sketchy at best.
Jamaicans are aware that there are adolescent girls who become victims of prostitution, but the buying and selling of children across national and international borders for profit is an activity that is unfamiliar, and to date, unsubstantiated. The US State Department, however, paints a completely different picture and has unilaterally placed Jamaica on its tier system.
Amnesty International, like other agencies funded by particular governments, must carry out its mandate, and the issue of the protection of human rights is unquestionably a noble endeavour. The organisation is correct in identifying our country's crime problem as a case in which "Jamaica's poor have been abandoned by the government and left to the mercy of violent criminal gangs". In fact, I don't think that any of us could fault Amnesty for describing our situation as a "human rights crisis". Where the organisation has fallen short, however, is its shallow treatment of the root causes of the problem, and in challenging those countries that have contributed to our demise.
While successive governments since independence have failed in eradicating poverty and in protecting the lives of the citizens of the country, the root of the problem is found in the structural and systemic inequalities that have its antecedents in slavery and colonialism. As the cities in the motherland, Great Britain, grew and prospered, the colony Jamaica was systematically raped and plundered. Those structures and systems that promote and maintain the inequalities, have remained constant, with the exception of the name change - from colonialism to globalisation. In this regard, Jamaica is not unique among the world's "developing" nations. The acclaimed Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, captures the essence of the structural inequalities when she states: "Once the economies of Third World countries are controlled by the free market, they are enmeshed in an elaborate, carefully calibrated system of economic inequality. For example, Western countries that together spend more than one billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers, demand that poor countries withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity. Then they flood the markets of poor countries with their subsidised agricultural goods and other products with which local producers cannot possible compete."
Amnesty International has not told us anything that we don't already know, or for that matter, anything that Jamaicans here at home have not been speaking passionately about for decades. Yes, we understand that corrupt and incompetent governments have directly contributed to the "genocide" (my word) in our country, but we also understand that deliberate and calculated economic systems of the past and present, continue to drive poverty, and by extension, crime.
With love,
bab2609@yahoo.com
