PUBLISHED: Dennis Minott | Jamaica’s bespoke wickedness; tailored for Haitians alone

Published: Sunday | June 1, 2025 | 12:06 AM

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Judas used a kiss. Jamaica uses deportation. For 30 pieces of silver — filthy lucre in our time — we have betrayed Haitians seeking refuge, dignity, and kinship among us. We have uncharacteristically turned them back into the hands of their tormentors, without hearing, without compassion, without even a pause to remember who we once were.

This is not poetry. This is refoulement — the forced return of asylum seekers to danger without due process. It violates the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Inter-American Human Rights system, to which Jamaica belongs. But in recent months, we have ignored these obligations. Haitian men, women, and children who risked death to flee death — crossing shark-patrolled waters and dodging rape and gang bullets — have been rounded up and expelled. Their belongings destroyed. No interviews. No interpreters. No legal aid. No pity for the weakest.

Let it be said: not even the Dominican Republic, often rightly criticised, behaves with such cold disregard. Their deportations are typically overland — by known crossings, regular buses, tap-taps. There is at least the form of process. But we, here in Jamaica, deny our blood relatives any due process. We burn their belongings, erase their names, and send them off like disease.

Credit: AP - Gleaner in Focus. A woman sweeps debris next to a blazing barricade set up by demonstrators during a protest against insecurity in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

And the unspeakable hypocrisy? Haitians are CARICOM citizens. Our regional family under treaty and law. Yet no other CARICOM country treats them with such cruelty. Not one.

DAMNING

And still more damning: We never treat Bahamians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Colombians, Honduran fishermen, or other Meso-American wanderers this way. They drift in. They find rest or indifference. But not this targeted expulsion. Not the bonfire of their lives. This bespoke wickedness is for Haitians alone.

Why?

Why this cruelty?

Why is our government terrorising Haitians?

What was our thirty pieces of silver this time? A wink from Washington? A whispered nod from the IMF? Another trinket in our bowl of billioneering and state capture? Or just the new cost of global respectability — that we be seen to “handle” the Haitian problem like the powerful want? We know what “thirty pieces of silver” buys now. It buys contracts. Silence. Beachfront “developments”. Swiss accounts. Political cover. Dubai apartments for cousins. And now, betrayal of kin — black refugees fleeing anarchy.

What of our moral compass? The Jamaica Labour Party once stood on BITU, SDA, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Holiness foundations. Sobriety. Service. Even Michael Manley, no goody-goody Labourite, admired the early JLP’s conscience, but today? Is there any evidence that such shame survives?

Has the shame tree — that towering symbol of moral restraint — been felled and sold off, branch by branch, for thirty pieces of silver?

We weren’t always like this. Jamaica once had the courage to defy Washington — for Angola, Cuba, South Africa. But today we behave like petty collaborators, locking the gate as our cousin, fleeing fire, arrives trembling at the door.

Yes, Jamaica is not an African country, and the African Charter may not bind us. But the Inter-American system does. The CARICOM Treaty does. Basic decency does.

REFOULEMENT

Even the Nazis used refoulement. In the 1930s, some Jews were turned away by states that feared upsetting Hitler. Sent back to terror. Later, Latin American dictators did the same — returning “undesirables” to disappear or die.

Do we really want to join that shameful lineage?

No one says we must absorb every Haitian. But we must act with human decency. Due process. A case-by-case review. Shelter for the most vulnerable: babies, minors, the raped and maimed.

Instead, we torch their few possessions in places like East Portland’s Ross Craig. No, not their bodies — but the symbolism is ghastly. “Unworthy belongings of an unworthy people,” as Nazi-era functionaries did say.

We, who once said “Out of Many, One People” now seem out of empathy, out of memory, out of moral breath.

To the silent: your silence is complicity. This happens under your watch, in your name, with your taxes. And every church leader, teacher, political leader, journalist, elder who stays mute becomes a co-buyer of those Pieces of Silver.

To the poets, prophets, preachers: speak now. In Patwah, in prayer, in print. Mek wi stop di backstabbing. Mek wi water di shame tree again. Mek wi fling way di silver and tek back wi soul.

Why, why, why… Thirty Pieces of Silver??

Addendum: The original title of this article which had the word “reserved” was amended by the author to read “Jamaica’s bespoke wickedness; tailored for Haitians alone”

Why? Because while “reserved” does convey exclusivity, it carries a more passive or bureaucratic tone. In contrast, “tailored” heightens the sense of intentionality and malicious precision. It also complements “bespoke” more organically — both words suggesting a deliberate and customised cruelty. I believe it is a more chillingly appropriate phrase given the Haitian-treatment subject matter.

Dennis Minott, PhD, is the CEO of A-QuEST-FAIR. He is a multilingual green resources specialist, a research physicist, a modest mathematician who worked in the oil and energy sector, and an educational consultant. Send feedback to a_quest57@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.

May 29, 2025.