The Green Bay Massacre
On January 5 1978, the Military Intelligence Unit, a special unit of the Jamaica Defence Force, shot and killed five men at the Green Bay shooting range. In its aftermath, there would be plenty of commentary and debates on what exactly transpired. But wrapped its legacy is the events that came after where the shooting at Green Bay ultimately serve as a vehicle for citizens to be more on edge in the already political charged climate of 1970’s Jamaica. A Tense Atmosphere
It’s the middle of the 1970’s and Jamaica is experiencing a state of political violence never before seen. In later years, historians and social scientists would deemed it the island’s “unofficial civil war”. In a sponsored back and forth between supporters of the ruling left-leaning People’s National Party (PNP) and the right-leaning Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Jamaica was at a standstill.
By December 1976, Jamaica was going to have its general elections and despite a state of emergency in place, political violence would continue to spiral out of control as both parties fought to gain leadership of the country. Within this tense atmosphere, many persons got caught in the crossfire - including reggae superstar Bob Marley. On December 3rd, gunmen would blast their way through his home at 56 Hope Road. In the aftermath of this assassination attempt on the reggae star’s life, Marley, his wife Rita and manager Don Taylor was injured in the attacked. Still, despite the shooting and his injuries, Marley showed up and performed at the Smile Jamaica concert on December 5th. Immediately after, Manley went into a self imposed exile from Jamaica and relocate to England. In the wake of the 1976 December election, PNP, would held on their leadership of the government but despite Marley’s best effort, as the concert was to be used a tool to bring peace to the island, the violence did not slow down. As such, political violence continued to plague Jamaica in 1977. According to the island’s premier statistical institution, STATIN, Jamaica’s murder rate was 152 in 1970 where by the end of 1977, it was 397. And it is within this tense, violent political atmosphere that this story of a state murder took place. The Massacre
The Green Bay incident took place on January 5, 1978 and involved the Jamaican army killing five men: Trevor Clarke; former national footballer, Norman ‘Gutto’ Thompson; Glenroy Richards; Howard ‘Gargo’ Martin; and Winston ‘Saddle Head’ Hamilton. The men were from High Holborn and Gold Streets areas of the traditional JLP stronghold area of South Side in Kingston Central. In an report release by the Jamaica Defence Force, the army gave their version of what happened. At the centre of the incident was the Military Intelligence Unit, MIU, a covert branch of the JDF, which was established to deal with persons who were deemed a threat to the island’s security. It was the members of MIU who was involve in the shooting and according to them, they discovered armed men at the Green Bay shooting range in St. Catherine. A shoot out transpired and in what they claim as self-dense, thus killing the five men. However during this shooting, persons escaped and the survivors would tell a completely different story. According to survivors, they were set up by the MIU. A coroner’s inquiry backed this up when it later stated that the men were lured into an ambush with the promise of getting jobs transporting some “materials”. Now they were actually fourteen men who heard about this “opportunity” but only 10 went, as some change their mind or felt uneasy about the whole thing. The survivors, there were five, stated that on the morning of January 5, they were picked up in South Side and then brought to the firing range at Green Bay where they were told to stand in a group, after which they were shot at. Delroy Griffiths, one of the survivors, of the incident recalled in detail what exactly happened in a 2012 interview with the Jamaica Observer: “They promised us jobs paying $300 a week, which was big money in those times… Them times I used to run Ladd Lane. After watching a show the night called Godfather, I heard the men talking about the trip and saying who don’t come meet a big man who giving out work, can’t come again. But that was a trick to draw out everybody. I said I didn’t want to know that there is work and I don’t turn up for it, because I had my children going to school, so I said I was going for myself.
They woke me up the morning and I told my baby mother that I would soon return. One of the youth was sleeping and I pushed my mouth up to kiss him and said ‘Paulette, me nah bother kiss him, me soon come back’ and I put him down. They brought an ambulance and a van. I went into the blue van at Laws Street. When we reach, my teeth were hurting me.
They took us to a spot at Hellshire and told us to stay ya so. They said that every man should stand one place and they set us up in front of the general purpose gun, which we didn’t know about. Then they took away the head one, ‘Saddle Head’, to where the big gun was, give him one shot and then turned the big gun on everybody. Anybody who was not hit by that gun, the macka that you had to run into would rip you up and tear you up. I run away when the shooting started and while I was going through the macka, I met up on a soldier, so I turned and run off. He shot at me and I ran away on a lonely road until I reached on a little hill with the sea below
I spent the entire day in the bushes and made my way down from the rocks toward the sea, when I saw some fishermen way out, went on a rock and signalled an X sign to them. I took nearly 20 minutes to make the X sign and I saw a man put up his hand. The fishermen came towards me and said I had to tell them what’s going on. I said that the soldiers were coming and if they saw us, they would spray us with bullets.
The water over that side was cold and shark-infested. My knees were knocking. I jumped off in the cold water, got into the boat and they took me toward Greenwich Farm. When I reached there, I took off toward Caymanas Park, before realising that I should be going the other way towards Southside. It was like I had lost my mind.
I saw some men at a betting shop at Harbour Street and told them that they had just killed some men and they said I was joking. By this time, the other men who escaped went through the macka and into the hills. As it turned out, every man who was killed had a bullet wound in his head.
I escaped because I went to watch a movie called Honour Thy Father the night before, and seeing the guns and people saying hit the dirt, so I was crawling on my hands and knees when the firing started. Is that me use pon dem.”
In the aftermath of the event, there would be plenty of commentary on whats transpired. Big Youth and Papa Kojak would release his songs about the event. Then, there is Dudley Thompson, a member of PNP, who stated “no angels died at Green Bay”. According to the Gleaner, Thompson was also reported to have said, “the only that went wrong was that all of them were not killed.” Ironically a day after the incident on January 6, Thompson was sworn in as Minister of National Security; but in later years, Thompson would apologised for his remark on the incident. Still, at this time, given Thompson’s remarks, some persons were of the view that the men were alleged gang members aligned with JLP. To this, political scientist, Dr. Obika Gray in his book, “Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica”, states: “That the gunmen were from the JLP enclave would also further the PNP’s campaign to convince the public that the dead men were in fact part of a continuing plot to destabilise the government”
But some persons, including members of the South Side community, thought the incident was a coordinated attempt to get rid of JLP supporters in the Kingston Central area - whose MP was actually the prime minister of Jamaica - Michael Manley. To this Dr. Laura Gunst in her semi-ethnographic book, “Born Fi Dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld” stated of the incident:“In late 1977, a little cabal of rogue officers from the Jamaica Defense Force - loyal to Manley and convinced that the police was in Sega’s pocket - hatched a plot to destroy the JLP Posse in Southside”.
There’s also a camp of persons, mostly those aligned with the PNP, who thought the incident was a ploy spearheaded by JLP to smear the PNP government. Soon after the incident, an official inquiry and coroners’ inquest took place in the Spanish Town Coroner’s Court which concluded what happened at Green Bay was a conspiracy to kill the men and that persons at the MIU were criminally responsible for the massacre. By July 1978, warrants were issued for the soldiers involved, including the head of the operation Major Ian Robinson, where charges of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder were brought against them. However by 1981, some of the soldiers saw their charges dropped while for others, February 1982, saw them being acquitted due to lack of evidence.Now to all of this, there is still debate on the motivation and who was behind the events of the Green Bay Massacre.To this, Amanda Sives, who spent years at the University of Liverpool as a lecturer of Politics, concluded in her book, “Election, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica, 1944-2007”:“It is significant that neither party pursued the case while in government and no one was ever held accountable for the deaths, highlighting that neither party was prepared to uncover the truth in open court”
Regardless, Griffiths still maintained to this day that “is because election was coming on why dem kill the man dem,”Nevertheless, the event would largely be forgotten in Jamaica’s society as the years went by. That was until 2010 when the acclaimed filmmaker Storm Saulter would released his debut film - "Betta Mus Come". The award-winning film starring Sheldon Shepherd, Chris McFarlene, Everaldo Clearly, and Sky Grey, dramatise the lives of the victims of the Green Bay Massacre. Hope and Despair
Nevertheless, one of things that the events of Green Bay exposed is the loss of trust in the state, by the general public where many persons began to see themselves as pawns in this civil unrest. As Dr. Gray writes, “The attempted execution proved to be a huge political blunder and it galvanised the ghetto… The veil had obscured the poor’s perception of their condition and shrouded the extent to which they had become merely fodder in the communal wars.”
Thus motivated by the events of Green Bay, two “political activists” stepped in. They were Claudie Massop who was affiliated with the JLP and Aston “Buckie Marshall” Thompson who was aligned with the PNP. Soon after the massacre, the two men declared a truce - a peace treaty of some sort, to end the political violence. Out of this, the Central Peace Council, CPC, was formed to deal with the politically induced violence in affected communities. A peace fund was also established to assist small businesses and social programs in these communities. Edward Seaga announced his intention to donate $5000 of his salary towards the fund. Likewise, The Gleaner also established a Community Peace Fund. There were also peace marches in volatile communities like Tivoli Gardens and Arnett Gardens, where other political activist would declare their truce. Then, the Jamaica Council of Churches founded an advisory body to mediate this truce. However, the major highlight of this truce was a benefit concert, which like the 1976 Smile Jamaica Concert, was intended to address the violence plaguing the island. As Syd Massop, Claudie’s wife stated in the 2018 Netflix documentary “ReMastered: Who Shot the Sheriff?”“It was all about unification. Thats is the reason they came up with the idea of the One Love Concert”
With this, Claudie and Buckie travel to the U.K. to convince Jamaica’s biggest superstar, Bob Marley, to end his self-imposed exile and come home to headline the concert. The persuasion was successful as both men promise Bob that he would be safe plus Marley already had a trust in Claudie. As Syd Massap further stated:“Bob and Claudie grew up in the same community, and they were boys together. They kept their friendship all along"
The concert was held at April 22, 1978 at the island’s national stadium. A number of the island’s top musicians performed included Peter Tosh, Robbie Shakespeare, Culture and Dennis Brown. During Jacob Miller’s set he would call Claudie and Buckie as well Tony Welch on stage. The men would hug in a circle. But it was Bob Marley’s performance that would garner the most attention. While him and his band was performing his hit, Jammin’, he called both Manley and Seaga on stage. In a show of symbolic unity, the two political leaders would clasped their hands with Marley’s. This act and the entire concert, serve as hope that the political violence that has brought the island to its knee, would come to a end. But that hope was short lived as the violence only got worse. Some time after the concert, Claudie stated publicly that there were external forces trying to derail the peace effort. By May, The Jamaica Council of Churches ended their mediation roles and The Gleaner closed their fund. By November,, the newspaper reported that the money which had been donated to the CPC went missing. By February 1979, Massop was killed by the police. According to reports, he was shot over 40 times. Months later in 1980, Buckie Marshall was killed in New York City. Then in 1995 when Laurie Gunst published “Born Fi’ Dead”, she mentioned that through her interviews with Trevor Phillips, the leader of the Central Peace Council, she learnt that the concert further facilitated the political violence on the island. Allegedly, guns to be distributed to “political activists”, were hidden inside the equipment to be use at the concert. As Gunst wrote: “On the night of the show, Chris Blackwell - Marley’s producer at Island Records - sent someone to the stadium to tell Trevor that this equipment was on the wharf waiting for clearance; Blackwell had no idea what else was inside the metal cases. Trevor made an urgent call to Dudley Thompson, the minister of national security, to clear the containers. It was not until a few days later that Trevor found out about the guns at a post-concert meeting of the Central Peace Council.”
Gunst would reiterate this piece of information in the aforementioned Netflix documentary:” “Bob Marley never knew this but one of the tragic ironies of the One Love Peace Concert was that, as I learned from one of the my sources, ‘is not peace we are dealin’ with here, is pieces’. Meaning firearms. Guns were brought in, in some of the sound equipment that came in from the United States. And they were later distributed to gang members of the JLP.”
And so throughout the rest of the decade, Jamaica was brought to its knees as sponsored political violence rocked the nation, ultimately reaching its peak in 1980. But within that history, is the story of the lives affected by the killing at Green Bay and the slippery slope that came after.