THE GUNS OF KINGSTON

Jamaica's minister of national security and justice, Keith Knight, sounds
weary and frustrated. His normally crisp voice is slow and he sounds as if
he realizes that he is angry and tired and he is thinking about every word
before he utters.

Knight bristles at the suggestion that a murderous outbreak of violence
earlier this month in the ghettos that make up the western end of Jamaica's
capital city is the result of attacks by security forces on supporters of
the opposition Jamaica Labour Party.

A general election in Jamaica is only 18 months away, and the leader of the
opposition Edward Seaga claims the security forces were attempting to
intimidate his supporters on behalf of the ruling People's National Party
government.

"These gunmen are criminals who feel they are above the rule of law and
opened fire on the lawful authorities. The lawful authorities, the police
and soldiers, responded," Knight snaps.

"What would have been done in Toronto? Let them go unchecked?

"Pull out Kingston from our crime figures . . . Jamaica would barely have
as many murders as Toronto. Our murder rate, our crime rate, would be cut
way, way down.

"The problems are in Kingston. The rest of Jamaica is not a problem, or
having a problem. The current trouble is nothing to do with politics or
political gangs."

Knight is the island's top lawman. He provides political direction for the
3,000 soldiers - and an equal number of police officers - who, for four
days earlier this month, battled drug gang gunmen toting weapons almost as
powerful as those of the security forces.

The battles, mainly in the western belt of Kingston, left 27 Jamaicans
dead, including three cops and a soldier.

The rattle of the automatic weapons may have died down, but the problem of
the poverty-stricken, crime- and drug-infested western belt of Kingston
remains. Of the horrendous 537 murders to have taken place this year in
Jamaica by the time of the rioting, close to 400 - 71 per cent - were in
the parishes of Kingston, St. Andrew and St. Catherine, in what the Jamaica
Constabulary Force calls the Metro area.

Of the island's 2.6 million residents, more than 1.5 million live in the
Metro area. Only about 80,000 live in the western belt. Knight says more
than 79 per cent of the crime in the Metro area is down there, or linked to
people from there.

The problem of the western belt of Kingston isn't recent. It is composed of
three political ridings, Kingston West, South St. Andrew and South West St.
Andrew, represented by Seaga in western Kingston, Tourism Minister Portia
Simpson in South St. Andrew and Finance Minister Omar Davies in South West.

The gun battles were confined almost entirely to Kingston West, which Seaga
has represented in parliament since 1962, when Jamaica became independent
from Britain and Sir Alexander Bustamante, of the Labour, was the country's
first prime minister.

Between 1962 and 1972, Seaga built Kingston West into a fortress, with a
centrepiece in Tivoli Gardens, Jamaica's first government housing scheme,
which he built on the bulldozed site of the then Kingston dumps and a
dreadful area named Back o' Wall.

It was a degrading, stinking, horrible place, where as a child and a
teenager at my first job I remember seeing entire families living in old
car bodies and structures built of cardboard boxes and flattened tins. I
remember families scrounging from the dumps and from the rotting food
tossed out of the cold storage where I was a 17-year-old middle-class
supervisor of men two and three times my age, but born in a different class.

I remember the thousands of people taking water from a standpipe, lining up
in a seemingly never-ending stream with old buckets and cans which they
carried on their heads.

I remember the time a man mistook a bag of crystalline substance he
ferreted from the dump for sugar. He mixed the insecticide with water and a
lime. He was one of the first people I saw die.

I remember the fat white American priest, who smelled of liquor, smoked a
cigar and drove a big black car, telling these wretched people with so many
mouths to feed that the birth control that my middle-class friends and I
were pushing was "a plan to kill black people."

This was where Edward Seaga, then minister of finance, built his social
masterpiece, Tivoli Gardens, swapping apartments and homes for old car bodies.

Today, the name "Tivoli" is whispered with fear by most Jamaicans who are
not Labour supporters. Tivolites have a reputation of being vicious and
violent and unswervingly loyal to Seaga. In the political violence of the
1970s and early '80s, the Tivolites were the most feared in the battles
with National supporters.

In the 1980s, a change came to the ghettos of Jamaica. The guns that
defended the political turf and killed other Jamaicans for the slight pork
barrel benefits from politicians was replaced by a vastly more lucrative
master - cocaine.

Gunmen, mainly Labour supporters, turned their agile minds to the drug
trade in the ghettos of New York and Miami and other major urban centres of
the U.S. Since Jamaicans trust Jamaicans the most, the route from Latin
America to Yankee noses for the so-lucrative snow switched from via Miami,
to via Jamaica. Because the island is a tourist mecca, it is easy to get
cocaine in and out of Jamaica. There are close to a dozen flights a day
leaving Jamaica for North America, and incoming visitors are rarely searched.

Canada, America and Britain dump an average of 40 criminal deportees back
in Jamaica per week. Many of them are addicts, all of them are linked to
criminals in North America, and all of them well aware of the profits that
can be gained from cocaine. They have friends in the United States to send
them guns and friends in Canada to send them ammunition and friends in both
places who will receive the drugs and send back the profits.

The drug gang leaders, or Dons as they are called in Jamaica, have so much
disposable income that they have become the new leaders of the impoverished
and disenfranchised of the ghettos.

Mike Henry, a former deputy Labour leader, who last year became the first
person in 28 years to challenge Seaga for the party leadership, puts it
this way: "When you are dealing with an addictive substance, it only takes
10 days to create a market."

"Why is there so much violence in western Kingston? Why is there so much
violence anywhere? A youth, on one corner in west Kingston, can sell $10
rocks to 1,000 people in three hours. That's $10,000, or about $380 Canadian.

"The minimum wage in Jamaica is $1,200 a week, and you have to work damn
hard for that minimum wage," adds Henry, a white Jamaican. "So when his
drug market is threatened, or his drug supply is threatened, the guns come
out and the killing starts."

So the ghettos of western Kingston - less than 78 square kilometres in an
island of 10,400 square kilometres - have the ingredients for a murderous
cocktail, says Henry.

Poverty, degradation and hopelessness generate a terrible anger. Couple
that with cocaine destined for Canada and the U.S., and you have a way for
otherwise hopeless people to make huge sums of money.

"The white man's drugs, not the Jamaican drugs, are killing us," Henry says.