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With today being celebrated as 'Peace Day,' reggae veteran Queen Ifrica is urging dancehall artistes and the general public to stop displaying "the idea of peace" only on March 5 and start practising the peace 'we want to see'.

"It's all good and well to promote peace but peace without justice doesn't make any sense and that's where we need to get to in terms of justice," Ifrica told THE STAR. "[Because] in order for us to have peace, for example, in the inner-city communities that's plagued with violent crimes, you'd have to use the justice of giving the people the kind on infrastructure that would facilitate that peaceful mindset. Yuh can't have people get up every day in [unsanitary conditions] and lacking basic resources, filled with contention and arguments and den on one day smaddy jus come to yuh and seh, 'Let's have a Peace Day'. Now, mek dat mek sense," she reasoned.

The Ministry of Education and Youth, in partnership with Peace and Love in Society (PALS) Jamaica, will celebrate Peace Day 2024 under the theme 'Let Peace Run Things!'.

Ifrica strongly believes that the country can do more to make the initiative an extended practice and not just a concept that's celebrated one day annually.

"We need to seriously look at cause and effects so we don't just celebrate the idea of Peace Day but we actually practise and start the process of what it means to get to that thing called 'peace'. It's all about the effort that we put in," said Ifrica.

General Manager of PALS Jamaica, Janilee Abrikian, said with the assistance of well-needed resources for the programme, the initiative can do more to create a larger nationwide impact.

"The reality is, we need money for more things to be done. With this, we could host events in each parish but we need the collective will for us as a country to recognise the power we have to change things [because] at the end of the day, it's about transforming our minds. So for [Queen] Ifrica to look at the other pockets of influence in society as a source of peace, we have to develop a campaign. And for the week leading up to Peace Day, we have different events like townhall meetings with press coverage featuring different influencers sharing a message/song of peace, school debates etc, but this cannot continue to be a one-off Peace Day [initiative]," said Abrikian,

Ifrica's music is known to mainly promote unity, strength and social upliftment and she shared that artistes, who are some of the strongest influencers, should desist from using their music to promote violence.

"Music is heart and you are allowed to express how you feel but while that is so, we [artistes] need to remember that we have the responsibility for every action that we tek as individuals and if artistes would understand what that entails, that would be a good influence to especially these young artistes," she shared.

She opined that while artistes clashing can be peaceful, 'dark forces' are infiltrating the music and promoting negativity.

"This in turns [infiltrates] youth in these volatile communities who are living in disunity fi true, which see them bringing that lifestyle into the music and starting a movement against peace," she said.

Abrikian shared that these "artistes know better but because we have become a violent society and they have a market that buys into their messages, then this culture continues to disrupt achieving peace".

This year's Peace Day celebrations will be combined with a concert at the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre.