Lambert Brown, Contributor
Friday, June 27, was indeed another very sad day for Jamaica. Yet another Jamaican lost his life at the hands of 'dawg-hearted' criminals. Douglas Chambers, the chairman of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC), was brutally killed minutes after taking a break from a very amicable meeting at which I was present.
Imagine someone touching you on the shoulder and saying in 15 minutes' time we will continue the meeting. You are there sitting in the room with others, relaxing, running jokes and waiting for that person to return and resume the meeting. Then there is commotion outside and shouts are heard that the chairman has been shot. Within a minute, the worst news you could possibly hear hits you like a ton of bricks: The chairman has been killed! The man who had touched you and for whom you were waiting to continue a fruitful meeting, was cut down in a hail of bullets.
In less than 15 minutes, in an area with scores of people present, cold-blooded criminals defied decency and dealt a death blow to law and order. The insecurity of our citizenry was once again laid bare. No longer here today, and gone tomorrow. The shocking and heart-rending reality is now, 'Here this minute and gone the next'.
No big thing
When the low-profile murders take place, we tend to treat crime as no big thing. Now another senseless killing has taken place. However, given the high-profile nature of the victim, one would expect not only a natural outpouring of condemnation of the killing, but more important, a national unity around the goal of finding and bringing to justice the murderers. This was an occasion for all well-thinking Jamaicans to reaffirm our resolve against all crimes and to rally around the call for a crusade against criminals. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.
Long before the police - who are the professionals trained to detect and find the killers and their motives - even started to collect statements, there are those in the society who were already convicting and sentencing the innocent. Within minutes of the dastardly death of Douglas Chambers, sections of the media started to point fingers at workers who were being made redundant. "This does not look good on the workers and their unions," was one comment from a radio journalist, while interviewing a union leader who was at the scene of the murder.
Where was the evidence that workers and/or their unions had anything to do with the killings? None existed, but the irresponsible elements in the media started to fan the destructive flame of character assassination. One newspaper observed in its self-righteous editorial that some of the people who expressed their sincere condolences had no moral right so to do. The partisanship observed so frequently in that newspaper now wishes to deny the right of other Jamaicans express genuine grief in the face of the tragic and unfortunate death of a controversial person.
'Noisome pestilence'
Disagreements and opposition to policies and programmes are an essential part of the democratic process in any country, community or workplace. The fact that such disagreement or opposition took place at the JUTC is no basis on which to make wild and unfounded innuendoes of murderous designs on the part of the workers or their trade unions. However, where people have evidence which could show that people have acted outside the framework of the legal and democratic process, it is incumbent on those with such information to share it with the security forces. Failure to do so would justify the label of 'noisome pestilence' being placed on such individuals who have polluted the country's airways and newspaper pages with heat rather than light. We must help the police fight and solve crime, not spread partisan and poisonous propaganda aimed at holding on to power and dividing the nation.
In the past, lies have been used to justify many wrongs and to deny rights and justice to people all over the world. It was Hitler's propaganda minister, Goebells, who said that if a lie is repeated over and over, people will soon believe it is true. I fear that some of the allegations about corruption at the JUTC are taken straight out of Goebells' playbook. T
ake, for example, the allegation that Chambers discovered "payroll upon payroll", as alleged by a minister of the Government. The information available to the Government shows that many workers whose pay went directly to the bank, never bothered to collect their pay slips. The chairman realised that there were over 400 uncollected payslips out of over 2,000 employees. A stop order was placed on the payment to those employees by direct bank payment. Each of those 400-plus employees then came with their ID cards and their payment via the bank was resumed. The damage was, however, already done; allegations of corruption in the payroll system were all over the media and repeated ad nauseam. No retraction was ever made by the chairman or the Government indicating that the corruption allegation was unfounded. The truth was being suppressed.
Corruption allegations
Another unfounded allegation of corruption is that some union delegates were cheating on overtime claims. Again, the facts revealed that the chairman of JUTC had full knowledge, actively supported, and endorsed the special programme in which the delegates were engaged. Yet, absolutely no retraction of the corruption allegation was done. Nevertheless, surrogates will keep repeating the allegations of corruption until their political agenda benefits from the lies becoming 'truth'.
It would seem that political considerations have overtaken objectivity and rational discourse in this country. Chambers' untimely and tragic death, instead of being used to unite the entire country against the brutal criminals, has now been turned into a political circus. The political hawks are using the sad and regrettable event to promote political divisiveness in our already fragile society. The martyrdom being sought by some while pretending to be paragons of virtue is simply a smoke screen which the winds of justice and fairness will soon blow away.
Let us, all the days of our life, choose the unity of Jamaica over partisan division!
Lambert Brown is president of the University and Allied Workers' Union, one of the unions representing employees at the Jamaica Urban Transport Company. Feedback may be sent to labpoyh@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.
