Jamaica looks to its children to end the days of killing

The Canterbury killings shook even Jamaica, a country steeped in violent death. The first bullet was fired at dawn on a Wednesday morning, when police approached the inner-city ghetto, planning to pick up guns, drugs and wanted men. Ambushed by gunmen positioned on the hillside, they pressed on through fire from M16 and AK47 assault rifles. By the afternoon, three policemen were injured, and three other men lay dead. One was later named as Ronald Young. The others were identified only by their noms de guerre, Che and Mad Dog.

In Chaucerian fashion, Canterbury supplied assorted tales. To sceptics, it offered further proof that the police are merely gunmen in uniform. For Susan Goffe, head of Jamaicans For Justice, the lack of indiscriminate shooting was tentative evidence that officers had learnt respect for ordinary citizens' lives. But the fallout spread further than the watchdogs of human rights.

The squatters' suburb of Canterbury lies close to the center of Montego Bay, Jamaica's tourist center. The holidaymakers ferried from the airport to their resort hotels would have known nothing of the shoot-out. Seven kilometers separate hibiscus-fringed beaches and the blood and dust of Canterbury, but they might as well be in different universes. The frontier of paradise had not been breached, but suddenly it seemed more vulnerable.

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