THE HARDER THEY FALL

Blood Flows In The Streets Of Jamaica's Capital And The Island Famous For
Rum, Reggae And Beautiful Beaches Is On The Brink Of Disaster. Murray
Campbell Tours Kingston's Battle Zones And Finds That Three Decades Of Guns
And Drugs Have Left The Nation Pining For Peace And Afraid Its
Free-spending Foreign Visitors - 107,000 Of Them Canadian Last Year - Are
Booking Flights To Different Destinations

Latoya Brown is sitting very quietly, waiting to talk about her nightmare.
Her hands are crossed in her lap and her long legs are stuck out motionless
in front of her. The semi-darkness of this spare, concrete building is a
relief from the brutally bright sun outside. But that is something Ms.
Brown can no longer appreciate. She is blind. The clean, white pads taped
over both her eyes are the evidence.

It has been 10 days since she left her home early one morning to pick up
her child, and was walking through the narrow streets of her neighbourhood
when a bullet struck the left side of her head and went out through her
right eye.

There is no brain damage, she says in the softest of voices, and that is
something of a miracle. But at 19 she must come to grips with the fact that
she will never see again. "The doctors say both eyes are gone completely,"
she says. "There's no chance."

There are many walking wounded these days in Tivoli Gardens, the rough and
rundown waterfront precinct west of downtown Kingston that is home to as
many as 14,000 desperately poor people. Three weeks ago, the neighbourhood
was at the centre of a merciless three-day gun battle that left at least 28
people dead. Two days ago, the shooting resumed in other parts of the
capital, and five more people have died.

Tivoli's dead have been buried in showcase mass funerals, but the wounded
still roam the littered streets, eager to tell their stories.

Vivian Lobran shyly pulls down his pants to show the bandage covering the
wound on his left buttock. The bullet is still in there, he says, and he is
waiting for a doctor to tell him when it will be removed.

Chris Maxwell, who lives in the streets, displays the dressing on the side
of his chest, where he was hit by a bullet -- a police bullet, the crowd
around him agrees.

There are others. Nicholas Barnes, shot in the right shoulder as he tried
to buy bread. Bibs Powell, a mute, shot in the ankle. Kaydian Burke, an
11-year-old hit in the leg by a bullet that pierced an eight-inch concrete
wall.

"How can men do this, shoot a little girl as she's lying in her bed?" asks
Desmond McKenzie, a Tivoli Gardens municipal councillor.

Thousands of rounds were expended that murderous first weekend in July as
security forces battled civilians (although it's not yet certain how many
were fired by each side). Roadblocks sprang up around the city; residents
were pinned down in their tiny, hot houses and apartments. Not since a
rebellion against colonial powers 136 years ago had so many people been
killed in so short a time. The bodies were left in the street for days, the
stink of rotting flesh in the air. Finally, the Jamaican Defence Force was
called in to assist the police and restore calm.

Coming after several years of relative peace among the heavily armed gangs
that rule inner-city Kingston, the return to brutality has broken Jamaica's
heart. "Our entire nation is grieving," says Prime Minister Percival
Patterson, known universally as P.J.

People across the island are being urged to pause at noon on Tuesday for
two minutes of silent prayer. There is a widespread feeling that this time
Jamaica's future really is on the line.

Indeed, some members of the middle class have already concluded that the
island is the region's next basket case. "Jamaica was the pearl of the
Caribbean," says a man who runs a manufacturing company. "This is no longer
so. In my mind, the Haitianization process is moving apace."

Because the bloodshed stems from the same toxic blend of politics, guns and
drugs that has afflicted Jamaica for more than 30 years, few believe the
peace will last for long. To counter such sentiments, people try almost
frantically to impress upon a visitor that the violence is the work of a
few and contained to a small area of Kingston well south of the major
tourist centres. But it's hard to ignore the fact that Jamaica has already
registered a staggering 566 homicides this year, compared with 887 in all
of last year. Toronto, with a roughly comparable population of 2.6 million,
has just recorded its 30th homicide of 2001.

Jamaica may be a vibrant, civil society that is more colour-blind than most
and boasts a glorious record of individual freedom. But it lags far behind
many of its Caribbean cousins in providing a decent standard of living,
which explains why so many Jamaicans have moved elsewhere -- including
about 350,000 now in Canada.

More violence can only make things worse. The $1.3-billion (U.S.) tourism
industry, the country's chief foreign-income earner, was already feeling
the impact of North America's economic slowdown, but the widespread
publicity given all the gunfire has stung it badly. The resort hotels
strung along the island's lush north coast, which last year welcomed more
than 107,000 Canadians, reported a string of cancellations and nervous
queries even though they are all several hours' drive from Kingston.

"North American travellers are geographically illiterate," noted Douglas
Brooks, general manager of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Montego Bay, which
reports $2-million (U.S.) in cancellations since the killings. "No use
telling them that the violence in Kingston had nothing to do with the north
coast because as far as they are concerned, Jamaica is Jamaica."

Any decline in tourism and foreign investment would simply compound the
economic problems of a country already burdened with so much foreign debt
- -- nearly $4-billion (U.S.) -- that interest payments take up more than
half the annual budget. Unemployment is officially 16 per cent, but widely
estimated at double that because anyone who works even a few hours a week
is considered employed. In some desperately poor communities, seven of
every 10 young men are jobless -- and ripe for the picking by the drug
lords who ship domestic marijuana and Colombian cocaine to Britain, the
United States and Canada.

The runners gathered before dawn, parking their cars at the base of the
walls that shield some of Kingston's finer homes from the unpredictable
world beyond. They want to cover the 14-mile course and still escape the
worst of the oppressive heat and humidity that cling to the city after sunrise.

The friendly, multiracial group is still chattering as it sets off. Guard
dogs, alerted by the slap-slap-slap on the pavement, bark in chain reaction
as the runners pass through suburban Barbican, Hope Gardens and Papine.

This is Jamaica's middle class. They are lawyers and businessmen. They
mingle with politicians and civil servants. They know Jamaica's history and
they are worried about its future. They condemn the government and say they
hold out little hope that they will ever know the complete story of what
happened in Tivoli Gardens.

The foreign press is sometimes criticized for its slipshod characterization
of Jamaica, but nothing could be worse than the opinions offered by these
well-educated Jamaicans. "I can't prove it," one young lawyer says. "But
what keeps coming out is that the system is corrupt to the core."

They say that, for as long as they can remember, politicians have relied on
neighbourhood gangs to marshal votes at election times in return for
favours. For them, Tivoli Gardens is no aberration -- in fact, it stands as
the model for what's now known as "garrison politics."

When Jamaica gained its independence from Britain in 1962, the area now
known as Tivoli was a slum called Back o' Wall. Norman Manley, leader of
the last colonial government, found the money to rebuild it, but he and his
People's National Party lost the election that year to the Jamaica Labour
Party led by his cousin, Sir Alexander Bustamante.

Thus, the task of overseeing the rebuilding fell to JLP newcomer Edward
Seaga, who had secured the constituency with just 51.6 per cent of the
vote. Under his watch, the shacks were razed and a walled enclave of
pastel-coloured houses and medium-rise apartment blocks (with utilities)
was constructed.

JLP supporters moved in to make Tivoli a party garrison. Before long
"political tribalism" covered the landscape and all that mattered was who
controlled what Jamaicans call "scarce benefits" -- access to housing,
jobs, grants. If voters' loyalty ever wavered, they had only to contemplate
the gangs who lived among themn and were armed with guns smuggled from the
United States -- if not, as many argue, actually provided by the U.S.
government.

By the end of the 1970s, Colombian cocaine had appeared in Jamaica, whose
hundreds of miles of coastline and inadequate policing make it an ideal
staging point for drug shipments abroad. The political gangs soon got into
the act and before long their leaders -- or "dons" -- had outgrown the
control of their party masters.

Even so, political vestiges remain. Residents of inner Kingston's hard-core
garrison communities are aware of boundaries that are invisible to
outsiders. They will tell you, for example, that such-and-such street is
the border between JLP and PNP enclaves even though in the summer sunshine
both sides of the road look equally forlorn, the street dogs similarly
skinny and the children identical in their shabby beauty.

In other parts of the world, sectarian violence stems from race or
religion, but here, as Seaga points out, "politics is our church."

Rev. Peter McIsaac, a Jesuit priest from Toronto, is the pastor of St.
Anne's Church in Hannah Town, another inner-city district. On July 7, when
the siege of Tivoli began, he was in the north-coast resort community of
Ocho Rios but rushed back to Kingston and reached his house beside his
church under a hail of bullets.

He then spent more than 24 hours pinned down as the Jamaican Constabulary
and then the army fought the gangs. At one point, dozens of children living
on their own in shacks next to the manse were cleared out and their
dwellings set on fire.

Father McIsaac had taken over as St. Anne's pastor only a month earlier but
he'd already had a taste of what was to come. Hours after he took up his
post, rival gangs using automatic weapons staged a pitched battle around
the corner from St. Anne's. A house nearby was firebombed. It sits next to
a wall bearing the slogan: "Increase the Peace."

The reality of his situation -- the church and the school it runs straddle
Percy Street, the invisible but inviolate border between a PNP enclave and
the broader community of JLP loyalists -- hit home. "This," he says, "is a
very high-stress area."

The stress springs from the crumbling of an informal peace agreement the
various gangs had honoured for several years. The problems began with the
killing of William Moore, a don considered so violent that his street name
was Willie Haggart, a patois corruption of "hog-heart."

Haggart died on the afternoon of April 18, when a gunman jumped from a
Toyota Corolla and emptied a pistol into him. He may have been killed for
double-crossing Colombian drug lords, but he had been extraordinarily loyal
to the PNP. Indeed, three cabinet ministers were among the 5,000 mourners
at his funeral service held at the national arena. (It took 3 1/2 hours for
the Mercedes-Benz hearse to push through the crowds.)

The day after his death, two men from Tivoli Gardens (and, thus, JLP
loyalists) entered Arnett Gardens, Haggart's stomping ground, thinking that
peace still prevailed. But rumours had already spread that the JLP had
engineered the killing, so the two visitors were shot dead. In the next few
weeks, more than 40 people died even though the dons tried to defuse the
situation.

There are two hugely conflicting theories about just what sparked the
Tivoli massacre. James Forbes, a low-key deputy police superintendent, says
the shooting began when a foot patrol spotted a man throwing what looked
like a weapon over the wall of an old-age home. "They were fired upon and,
at that point, all hell broke loose," and the patrol was forced to retreat
to a vacant government building.

As he outlines the skirmish, Forbes keeps an eye on a TV set showing the
West Indies' cricket team walloping the side from Zimbabwe. But he perks up
instantly when asked about the Tivoli gangs' rumoured arsenal. "The
firepower is awesome, unbelievably awesome," he snaps.

Inside Tivoli itself, the story is quite different. Derrick Smith, a JLP
deputy leader, claims the police were ordered to attack Seaga's stronghold
by a PNP government worried about its future. About the time Haggart died,
he says, the JLP scored a surprise upset in a north coast by-election and
now leads the PNP by 16 points in the polls. "They wanted a particular
response -- a response they hoped would be negative and would damage our
standings."

McKenzie, the Tivoli municipal councillor, leads a tour of the
neighbourhood and points out the bullet holes along the way. He says the
security forces deliberately retreated to the abandoned building, and
points out the sandbags still piled in the second-storey windows and the
rooftop that he says police snipers used to keep residents pinned down all
weekend.

He shows the spot where Trow Seymour was hit by a bullet in the back of the
head, and describes how the 83-year-old homeless pauper staggered to his
death at the base of a wall inscribed with "Jah Jah Jesus."

Standing below a two-storey-tall poster of U.S. basketball star Grant Hill,
he points to an unmarked building in the market where a senior police
officer alleges that his team was trapped by gang gunfire. McKenzie mocks
the notion. "Nobody knows exactly what happened," he says as a bystander
wearing a jersey that reads Mississauga Girls Hockey League nods in
agreement. "But how could he be pinned down when you can't find any bullet
holes" in that building?

The Prime Minister dismisses any suggestion that his government
orchestrated the attack to lift his party's standing before the next
election (one must be called within 18 months). And he has called for a
commission to investigate the incident, promising it will be led by a
non-partisan outsider and stating that he wants "permanent and effective
solutions" to the Kingston conundrum.

However, after 30 years of garrison politics and three previous reports on
political tribalism, few Jamaicans know what to expect. "We're all very
hopeful," said Angela Gray, executive director of Jamaicans for Justice, a
newly formed citizen-rights group, "hopeful and skeptical at the same time."

They call it a "lime." The term is borrowed from Trinidad but the idea will
be familiar to all Canadians who like to get together after work and shoot
the breeze. Here it's a Friday-night tradition for a group of men and women
to kick back at somebody's office, have a few drinks and talk about
business, politics and anything else that comes to mind.

Despite Jamaica's problems, these people have prospered. They drive
sport-utility vehicles and BMWs and they talk to each other on their
cellphones. They have cable television that gives them U.S., British and
Canadian stations. They live up in the hills above Kingston -- the same
neighbourhoods the drug dons have migrated to -- and they know they are
living in paradise.

They come in, pour a drink and kick off their shoes -- one man, a
prosperous company owner, has a pistol strapped to his ankle. It's off the
record tonight. Jamaica is a small place and it feels even smaller among
the business-managerial class that deals with the government. Freed of any
worry that their comments will go public, however, they make it clear that
they despise Jamaican governments. They talk of corruption and a political
system held hostage by the old feuds of Patterson and Seaga. They don't see
things getting better.

A young lawyer condemns politics as "a dirty business," asking why, "when a
major drug lord is killed, do you have members of the cabinet showing up at
his funeral?"

Seaga, now 71, and the 66-year-old Patterson are widely seen as relics. The
polls show half the electorate is undecided about whom to support in the
next vote. Attempts to find a third way have foundered, however.

The National Democratic Movement, founded in 1995 by a disaffected JLP
supporter, showed strong support but then attracted just 5 per cent of the
vote and elected no MPs in the last election. Its main plank -- adopting a
U.S.-styled political system -- has yet to strike a chord with a people
struggling for a better life. "The NDM offered some hope but, alas, that is
all they became: a middle-class party, the BMW crowd," a businessman says.

The pessimism is palpable, but there are suggestions that the tide is about
to turn, even if only, as NDM general-secretary Gregory Mair puts it,
because "the Jamaican people are tired of hearing all this."

Anthony Chang, who runs a food-products manufacturing business, says young
people have had their eyes opened to the world by television and the
Internet. "There's a change occurring in society and it's economic and social."

He notes, as many do, that non-governmental organizations have sprung up to
meet local needs indicates the desire to rebuild Jamaica's institutions.

A young businesswoman who volunteers for some of these NGOs says she has
lost faith in politicians and believes her generation is beginning to take
back the power entrusted in them. But she is under no illusions. "It has to
start with the civil society speaking out and we have started that," she
says. "But we have another 30 or 40 years to go to repair even half the
damage of what's happened over the past 40 years."

There is hope, too, in the desperate areas where most of the killing takes
place.

Godfrey Lothian, known on the street as Hopie, lost many friends in the
tumult of the 1980s; now he is committed to breaking the link between
politics and violence. As president of the Greenwich Town Community Centre
in inner-city Kingston, he strives to get otherwise-idle teenagers involved
in soccer. The trophies that line the shelves in his hot, airless front
room are symbols of the joy that young people find in competing without fear.

Lothian also is eagerly awaiting a government grant worth $18,000
(Canadian) that will give him the new computer and printer he needs to put
out a newsletter for the 5,700 residents of his neighbourhood. By printing
the facts, he hopes to destroy the falsehoods that often lead to
misunderstanding and then violence.

"You are seeing the last bastions of garrison politics," Lothian predicts.
"I am more than hopeful. I am sure that there's a new movement taking place
in the country, against garrison politics, against guns and against drugs."

Perhaps that's what Jamaicans will be praying for Tuesday at noon.