Most Belizeans believed that the chief executive of BTL (whatever BTL now stands for) wouldn’t go to Belize jail, because he works for Lord Michael Ashcroft, an Englishman who is bigger than the laws of little Belize. (Oh, Boyce is also white, by the way, by the by, by hook or by crook, and so on and so forth …)
In colonial days, contempt of court was a charge you went to jail for. Straight up. It was a charge which absolutely intimidated journalists. Contempt of court was one of the ways the ruling British chose to send us black natives a simple message of raw power.
Contempt of court meant that nobody could say anything when Judge Alfred Crane, a sick man both physically and mentally, was hanging natives right, left and center in British Honduras in the 1940’s and 1950’s. To be a judge was to be a god in British Honduras. (Of course, all the justices in those days were white, by the way?)
When Shabazz and I were arrested in February of 1970 and charged with seditious conspiracy, I was 23 years old and the only law I had ever broken, as far as I could remember, was the law against smoking cannabis “from which the resin had not been removed.” The government of Belize was saying that I had brought the administration of justice into contempt by writing a short, satirical article in Amandala, which was six months old at the time. The sentence for a seditious conspiracy conviction was two years in jail.
Now, to tell you the truth, I felt that I had spent three years in jail between 1965 and 1968, in a single dormitory room at Dartmouth College. The idea that I would have to go to jail again, on a bogus charge, was an idea which enraged me. And so, the same night of the day on which I was first arrested, and then bailed, I began to break laws for real.
It is man who makes laws, not God, and sometimes you can see plainly that it is man who is enforcing the laws. Sometimes you can see, or believe that you can see, that justice is not blind. Sometimes you can see, or believe that you can see, that it is selective. But you can’t say it, much less write it. All you can do is whisper it, ear to ear.
At the end of the clichéd day, it is might which enforces the laws. The might in Belize is the legally elected government of Belize, and those foreign governments, beginning with the United States and the United Kingdom, which provide GOB’s “backative.” If one or more of those in the group of “might” choose to defy the law, as we have seen happen earlier this year, then it is as if the law does not exist, because it cannot, or should I say “will not,” be enforced.
In colonial days, as much as I have written here would have been considered contempt of court. I would have been jailed without a trial. They would first have had to find me, of course, and they would second have had to apprehend me, alive.
Leigh Richardson and Philip Goldson, leaders of the early People’s United Party, served nine months in jail in 1951 on a sedition conviction in His Majesty’s Supreme Court. (George VI ruled England in 1951, not Queen Elizabeth II.) Richardson’s and Goldson’s “sedition” consisted of writing that sometimes the conditions in a society caused revolution. About ten years later, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said basically the same thing. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” Kennedy was considered surpassingly articulate, and lauded for this statement. Richardson and Goldson had to break rocks “back-a-Baptist” for saying pretty much the same thing.
Hon. Mark Espat of the Albert constituency quoted from a United States Supreme Court judge in a speech to the Belize House of Representatives in June of 2005. Mr. Justice Brandeis had said, “Crime is contagious. If the government becomes the law breaker or the law bender, it breeds contempt for laws, it invites every man to become a law unto himself…”
In the streets of Belize, we, the people, believe that a specific Cabinet Minister in Belize is a law breaker and a law bender. He is, to use the words of Justice Brandeis, inviting every Belizean to become a law unto himself. This is terrible. The question is – who is to blame? You tell me.
All power to the people.