Americas Quarterly - Spring 2009

Intervi

Jamaican activist Carolyn

Gomes was awarded the

2008 United Nations

Human Rights Prize

in December for her

crusade against extra-

judicial killings. Gomes,

a former pediatrician

who founded Jamaicans

for Justice a decade ago,

talks to AQ about why her

country has one of the

world’s highest rates of

gang murders and police-

related assassinations.

Americas Quarterly: How will the United Nations Human Rights Prize affect your ability to bring greater attention to the challenges faced by Jamaicans today?

Gomes: We hope it will provide visibility for the work that our society does not necessarily see. We have a real problem in Jamaica. For many decades human rights have been equated with criminal rights, dividing our efforts and voice. This award can hopefully provide us with needed legitimacy and recognition.

AQ: Why have human rights been equated with criminal rights in Jamaica?

Gomes: Perhaps because it challenges some of the assumptions that people are comfortable with. Realizing that the police are in fact murdering people puts you in a frightening and lonely position. This is quite uncomfortable because you then have to ask: “Whom do I trust?” [When crime is high] people want to be secure and they just want things to be dealt with. Until you raise the issue of human rights and the need for a new process, people will see our work as interfering with the police efforts.

AQ: Jamaica has long had problems with inequality and high rates of violence. What domestic factors have contributed to this?

Gomes: You must take into account the history of slavery and

the devaluation of the human being that came along with that. But we are not unique. You also have to look at what happened in Jamaica’s social and political systems over the years beginning with our pre-independence and post-independence periods in the 1960s. During the Cold War, and especially under Prime Minister Michael Manley in the early to mid-1970s, socialist rhetoric sparked active internal and external resistance.

Politics became divided along ideological lines, and resistance was seen throughout society, whether it was against communism or aimed at enemies of the revolution. Political parties then resorted to gang-like activities. Gangs of young men, driven by strong tribal divisions, were given guns to defend their parties’ ideology and leaders. That phase generally subsided in the 1980s, with the source of the violence then changing to the drug trade and Colombian narcotrafficking. We’ve always had ganja here, but now you had the political gangs, with their guns and willingness to shoot, caught up in the drug trade and becoming more and more autonomous from the politicians, but still aligned with the parties.

The situation has not gotten better since then. The police force became tied up in this ideological struggle and aligned itself with political parties, and society came to think that it was OK to use violence to solve problems.