Easy Now.

Even though I've just started to write up the shooting of British 8 year old Imani Green in Jamaica on Friday (11/1/13) I can already tell it's going to become one unwieldy monster of a post. Therefore the full version won't be available until tomorrow at the earliest and much more likely Wednesday. In the meantime though here's the short version;

A former British colony Jamaica is part of the Commonwealth Realm. This is a group of 16 nations that have the Queen of England as their head of state. However Jamaica and in particular it's Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller want to drop the Queen as head of state and leave the realm. Therefore the Imani Green shooting was designed to act as punishment and an attempt to assess how widely Simpson-Miller's views are shared particularly within the apparatus of state such as the police by putting pressure on Jamaica as a whole. The main way this is achieved is through the British government phoning up the Jamaican government every five minutes asking them if the murder has been solved. In order to add further pressure it is tangled up in a discussion about Rihanna's festive break to Barbados which she cut short in order to reunite with Chris Brown in Los Angles. Barbados is of course another Caribbean nation that is part of the realm. The Imani story contains so many little hooks to the Rihanna story that I can't list them all here but for example Imani was in Jamaica in order to get respite from Sickle Cell Anaemia from which she suffered. This is a condition of the blood which obviously raises the issue of HIV/AIDS that was such a part of Rihanna's para-Olympic performance. Sickle Cell anaemia also almost exclusively affects people from an afro-Caribbean background and along with leukaemia is often central to drives to get people from an afro-Caribbean background to sign up as bone marrow donors - a cause Rihanna supports through her Believe Foundation although they really need to work on their spelling. The fact that Imani was given special permission to miss school to take the trip also plays into a long running argument in Britain about children being taken out of school in order to go on cheap family holidays. January and February is very much the peak booking time for British family holidays.

The main purpose of the incident was the fact that the shooting occurred in a family owned cafe/grocery store links up with the March 2011 shooting of Thusha Kamaleswaran in convienence store in Stockwell, South London close to where Imani Green lived. As the Kamaleswaran family are originally from India this very nearly caused an international incident as was hardly a high point for London's gang/gun culture. In the mid to late 1990's Jamaican gangsters known as Yardies started becoming active across South London provoking some vicious turf wars. This coupled with the shipping of Loyalist paramilitary weapons from Northern Ireland to northern English cities such as Manchester as part of the peace process really marked the start of Britain's gang/gun culture. So the shooting was supposed to look like it was feeding into the current unrest in Belfast over the flying of Union flags. In reality though having hooked them in with the Rihanna link it was Britain trying to find out what both India and the US think about the current situation in India which is quite interesting what with the border clashes with Pakistan and the gang-rapes.

As a little bonus by being seen to take a fair old whack at a Caribbean island Britain was hoping to positively re-inforce the idea that Rihanna was correct to leave Barbados to reunite with Chris Brown in order to protect Barbados. That's nonsense because the problem was Chris Brown not Barbados. Without the Chris Brown issue Rihanna's trip to Barbados would have just been her relaxing in the sun enjoying being hugely rich and massively popular. So once again I'm forced to utter what is fast becoming my catch phrase and say; "Why Brown's probation officer has yet to see any red flags raised by this relationship I do not know."

(Originally posted on 14/1/13)