Submitted by Gary Cole (with daughter)
Congratulations to David Thompson and the DLP, to usher in this wind of change. I didn’t think it was going to happen, when I left Barbados 7 years ago the BLP firmly had the country in its grip. The vote swung, and I think it is the Internet. Certainly when I see the power of the reporting on the web, I think you are seeing the beginning of a future on-line Barbadian community that is larger mass based.
The issue of corruption, I will talk to you about, and please don’t take any issue fellow campaigners against corruption. It not meant to be an issue, but a strategy. I am all for clarity of thought and action…woolly headed actions don’t impress me at all, and words without the ability to back up and prove yourself are wasted. So I wont waste my words and I don’t want you to waste your actions. There is no way that David is going to be able to come up with legislation to fight corruption in 100 days that is going to work, or do the job of getting to the roots of corruption. Do you want short term gain or do you want long term strategy. I don’t think corruption can ever be handled with a short term strategy, so any idea that this is a short term goal and achievement can easily be countered. Give David more time but secure a vary public pledge to root out corruption. We don’t want more world Bank legislation on our books. If when campaigner’s asked and were interested to find out that the DLP draft proposal on integrity legislation was cut and paste from a World Bank source, it was sign of the political will therein lacking.
Its great on the election platform…corruption – CARSICOT, Glendairy, Deep Water Harbour, Pele, Diplomatic Dope etc but when the elections are over each successive administration has dealt organically with corruption. By that I mean it was just dealt with with how it had to be done, and it just had to be done. So we stand in a situation today that the whole thing is like a pack of cards stacked into houses – the whole thing could just fall with a false move. I think most of you campaigners, if any there be, but I see Mr Loveridge and the effort behind the various blogs, would agree with me so far, but here is where I signal a departure. Intelligence is needed first and foremost in rooting out corruption. By intelligence I mean just that knowledge, sources, reliability, deception, and counter-intelligence. But that’s just one part of intelligence, in fact it is not even the main part of intelligence – the collection of information etc. It is the analysis of intelligence that lies the key. So it is the analysis of corruption, rather than corruption itself that we should be dealing with.
So one person may say when they see the corruption, OH MY GOD!, an analyst, like me may see opportunity. What do I mean by the opportunity for change afforded by the perception of corruption? I mean we must come to analytical terms as to the root and system of corruption in Barbados. If there is no shared analytical framework there is no shared intelligence. Corruption is like chance. But is it? Its not it has design and it has plan. Before these blogs started in the mid 2000s, in the mid 90s, even in the 70s and 80s there were very few people writing and doing investigative journalism…it was confined to journalists (and certainly not every journalists), a lawyer here and there with a conscience, maybe even a calypsonian who did his research. Writing was very controlled…and the Libel laws well – draconian.
But my mother and I, Angela Cole and Gary Cole, together dreamed up this idea of writing a series of books exposing what we called the rottenness of Barbadian society. We used the term for the title Catharsis. Now I am not blowing my own trumpet, but I have to sometimes, like the Attorney General designate, Freundel Stuart, I remember very clearly when I went around selling galley copies of the first book in the series to lawyers ( see limited preview of the book in Googlebooks, just go the Googlebooks and type in Boys in the Band by Angela Cole) how interested he was to know more about the lives of my mother and the issue of Mark Stokes.
And in that book, and the second in the series The Khaki Boys or Who Killed Pele? , written together with my mother, and with the insights of a brilliant John Cheltenham QC, and bouyed on by Harold Hoyte at the Nation, and the son of The last White Attorney General in this island, Rocky Wallcott, and helped by researchers in the archives, in the libraries, in the major newspapers, and with input from historians like Ronnie Hughs, and the Work of Woodville Marshall on early Barbadian free villages, and list goes on to people in the street, who would in every way lend their support if even just in the asking, we clearly concluded a premise summarised by a time-line, but encapsulated in the argument of the first book in the series, on the disappearance of Mark Stokes.
I spent a long time with Cheltenham, during my mothers 8 years case against the government (which she won), debating this point. And I only mention Johnny as he is affectionally called because , he did some of the most high profile murder cases in the Caribbean, with wealthy people, but with motive and desire, and johnny always looked for the human factor, it kept his love of the law. If in 1973, special security started following my mother, that is 38 years ago, and they have collected information from watcher reports, case officers, and for more than 25 years observed her, can we not have access to the reports made, as part of her case, can we not force the disclosure – and johnny knew no – that is something that we as writers would have to do but could you please give him a copy of the book, because this is the place where politics and the law, meet in a dialectic.
So the point is this, we need some dialectical law. First of all if you don’t understand the corruption of the last 38 years, you wont understand the corruption you see today. You will be cutting at the leaves, doing a nice prune job, for spring, but by winter the roots far below would have shot forth new shoots, three and four to each cutting. We have very clear ideas on the table relating to the 1973 silent coup d’etat which lead to the passing of the police order act, and similar legislation giving the prime minister greater control of the civil service, and the Director of Public Prosecution. We have set out that you cant talk about corruption in Barbados without mentioning freemasonry, that you cannot have justice in colridge street, to quote clement payne, the political agitator beaten and killed by police after the 1937 riots, that you cant have justice in a society with police brutality, prison anarchy, and corrupt judges and magistrates. I think we went through every single case that we could find and research. Every single one from 1973 to 2001 and it runs 250 pages on A4.
And its conclusion is that the police, the jails and the judiciary are the guarantors of society, every police beating we allow, every death in custody left unexplained, every prison murder we turn a blind eye to, and the bribery and corruption of the judiciary we ignore we imprison ourselves in a jail not of our making. So the issue I have in this strategy is that Mr Loveridge doesn’t really know that corruption in Barbados is home grown, proud and bred – he might know of Mark Stokes, he might now of Pele, or of the murder of Tom, he may know about Bertram Niles disappeared now 30 years, or Michael Agard murdered in Glendairy, he may know Ryan Jordan brutally beaten by police, or the legion of young men who came up poor and brutalized, but he wont see it like how we see it, as part of ourselves, and might miss the importance of the grass-root at the people level desire for truth. The Government should not start with integrity legislation for the rich and wealthy with lawyers and money, but with a hand out to ordinary people who have been victimized all these years, myself included, but also a lot of poor and sometimes not so poor, and sometimes rich people that have been persecuted over the years as unwilling parties in a corrupt system.
I would start in the begriming with Oliver Jordan, that where Tom started as soon as he came to power in 1976, I kid you not – a former head of Intelligence in the Barbados police force has already said it publicly and to my mother privately. The night before the 1976 elections he received a call from the young and new prime minister to be that he meet him that night and show him all the evidence in the possession of the Barbados police force on the disappearance of Mark Stokes and the murder of Sgt Oliver Jordan. That’s corruption and that’s how it works, and that and much more is explained in our books, but I only give this as an example, that what we need is actions taken to roll back not one BLP government even if it was 12 years, but over a generation.Errol of course didnt do this when he got back the government in 1980s, because he was there, he knew what happened to Mark Stokes, and Oliver Jordan, and he passed the legislation to protect the country, from an armed coup d’etat. If that is too political I would start with Andrew Farmer, or Michael Agard, and revise the judgement in those cases, and begin to bring a sense of resolve to the families involved, not with convictions and sentences but with a TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMITTEE, that if you speak, no conviction, and speak your mind, as any member in the process, and I would certainly speak as a journalist who spent the best part of 4 years researching every known available fact I could find on these cases, that all you had to do was talk, and answer questions, not directed at guilt, but at exorcising the demons of the past, a process of catharsis.
So rather than going after these, you know, big time stories of corruption, you know the kick backs etc, you do people a disservice and dishonour who have been waiting in line for almost a generation, for just the truth.You know look at what happened to Ryan Jordan. Is there no truth for his family. Is it because they didnt have money? Deal with first grass root corruption – police brutality. That is an easy one to handle first, and it will win you a lot of votes. Just get a pledge from the Commissioner like Durant did to stop police brutality, but the public saw that was lying. A lot of people have been wrongly harassed by the police over the years, and you could gain a lot by even just a pledge. Things are changing.
So before you go off in a trail of corruption that leads to the offshore market, please understand that that is an international affair. It suits a foreigner, who doesn’t know Barbados, and for people who like expose, but it forgets that there are a lot of people waiting in line before you even get to wanting to know how to solve an unregulated financial market. People will ask, not because they are racist, a white man, why doesn’t he go back to Britain and American, there aint got enough corruption there for him to deal with, and of course they have a point, at least Barbados is not going around starting wars, selling arms, bribing leaders, and fomenting the fall of governments, which is a days work for an American President or British Prime Minister. They will say he want to mek his money abroad in all that corruption and then come here and live soaking up our sun and sea, and making money off of it, and talk about us being corrupt, but what about his money.
How do you neutralize this. Deal with working class issues, like the shell refinery issue, that was beautiful, but its got to be more, there are hundreds of those cases out there, the more working class the better, the poorer, the more disposed, the more downtrodden the better in this issue of corruption. Get a pledge from David to help those who are most vulnerable first. Give them a decent hand and that will win you a lot of votes. The so called Big issues, integrity legislation etc, without the dialectical framework and study of Barbadian history, they will just end up being footnotes. You see offshore corruption in Barbados, I see intractable international situation and Barbados in a cess pool of corruption not off its own making, but from the stuff that oozes out of the criminally corrupt international elites.
Nuff Said (but more to come on corruption – in fact these 100 days of anti-corruption.)
Other Articles by Gary Cole
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