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Amanda
Organization: Maxinform
Subject: Maxwell's latest
Column for Sunday July 15
Time for a long, cool look
By John Maxwell
Despite hours of television, landslide helpings of talk radio and assorted
analysts, suss-mongers and 'do-good" men, most Jamaicans are still far away
from understanding the events of the last few weeks.
The foreign commentators and some of the local, are satisfied with the
disinterment of the stereotypes of the 70s. Other seize their own piece of
the action, police brutality, PNP wickedness,, JLP wickedness, donmanship,
drugs and tribalism among others.
After weeks of sporadic hostilities between rival elements, possibly sparked
by a drug connected killing, the police decided to search Tivoli Gardens
against which most of the recent complaints of armed aggression appear to
have been made. In attempting to search Tivoli, the police were fired on.
They summoned reinforcements and there resulted a three day standoff during
which more than 20 people were killed.
The people of Tivoli, through their MP and others, claim police
victimisation. Tivoli, it is said, has been singled out for victimisation by
the government in an attempt to make its leader, Mr Seaga, look bad.
What is Tivoli?
On election day in 1962, there was a disturbance in Western Kingston which
prevented nearly 600 residents of a slum called Back o' Wall from voting.
Back o' Wall was believed to be a stronghold of the PNP, an unplanned
settlement which had developed its own political loyalties. Had those people
been able to vote, it is possible that Edward Seaga, a newcomer to the
political scene, would not have been elected. He was elected, and over the
next 40 years, his plurality of 51.6% in 1962 increased progressively
reaching 95% in 1993.
Before the '62 elections, Norman Manley had located funds for the rebuilding
of Back o' Wall. The JLP won the election so the rebuilding was done by
them. A loose aggregation of mostly PNP squatters, was replaced exclusively
by supporters of the JLP recruited from all over Jamaica, leading the PNP to
make a horrendous row about the new system of allocating scarce benefits to
members of one party.
The process continued. By 1973, Tivoli was consuming a disproportionate
share of national educational resources, a fact exposed by a report
submitted to Douglas Manley, then minister of Education.
Tivoli is a walled enclave, with one entrance and one exit, a community
segregated from the rest of Jamaica physically, and as it turned out,
psychologically as well. When Douglas Manley attempted to re-allocate some
of the resources unfairly allocated to Tivoli, there were protests that the
area was being victimised. The claims of victimisation have not ceased
since, and paranoia is rampant in Tivoli; the walled city considers itself
perpetually besieged.
After Tivoli and Rema, the next step was obvious in Jamaica's tit for tat
politics. The PNP built Arnett Gardens in South St. Andrew, and though the
distribution was through the NHT, PNP people were officially given
preference on the ground that they had been victimised in Tivoli and Rema.
The reasons for Tivoli
The reasons for Tivoli were very simple. In 1944, Bustamante, leader of the
JLP, had his seat in Western Kingston. He was for some of that time also,
Mayor of Kingston and his party controlled Kingston. But Ken Hill , Wills
Isaacs and the TUC led the PNP in a successful campaign to swing the capital
city to the PNP. Bustamante fled to South Clarendon in 1949 for fear of
losing his seat in parliament. For the JLP, Kingston kept slipping even
further out of control. By 1955, instead of continuing to share the KSAC
area 50/50 with the PNP, the JLP retained only one seat, Rose Leon's in West
St. Andrew. It got worse. In 1959, with four new seats, the JLP held just
one, again Rose Leon's seat, held by her husband after she had been
disqualified for election offences.
Tivoli became for the newly independent government of Jamaica a beachhead
for winning back Kingston because whoever controlled the streets of Kingston
controlled Jamaica.
By 1967, thanks to gerrymandering and the construction of Tivoli, Rema -
Wilton Gardens and Tavares Gardens, the JLP could boast five of 11 seats in
Kingston.
But then Clem Tavares died, Wilton Hill defected when Seaga became leader of
the JLP and the situation was ripe for Arnett Gardens and an intensification
of the politics of the 'ghetto' aka the 'garrison'.
Meanwhile, no one had noticed that the governmental infrastructure of
Jamaica was slowly reverting to the authoritarian blueprint bequeathed by
the British and their Governors, a system designed for rule by division and
conflict.
De-linking patronage and the Ghetto
The "ghetto-garrison" reduces politics to pure patronage and authoritarian
coercion. MPs especially Ministers, need to depend on a network of
assistants, some of whom are serious political workers but their younger
replacements now tend more to be enforcers, strong-arm men, some simply
goons with guns.
Given their freedom to 'run things', and in a country rapidly losing
intellectual and economic capital in the process of liberalisation and
structural adjustment, new sources of patronage soon become necessary.The
underbelly of Jamaican politics is now distinguished by a network of
sometimes loose, sometimes strong ties to drug smugglers, Jamaican and
foreign. Community silence can be bought for transactions which are large
enough to be obvious to anyone within earshot.
These networks are effectively protected by the political representatives,
witting and unwitting, who can arrange legal and other assistance whenever
one of their dons gets into trouble with the law. The system also,
naturally, sucks in corrupt members of the police force, members of the
formal private sector and others of all ethnic backgrounds and social
strata.
There is one sure way of de-linking some of these connections. Abolishing
constituencies would effectively abolish the garrisons. Under a proportional
representation system the Tivolis and Arnett Gardens of this world would
become irrelevant. Gerrymandering would be impossible and politicians would
need to pay more attention to the real interests of their constituents,
globally, instead of being able to bribe strategic segments of the
electorate. Real planning might actually come into fashion.
The reputation of the Police
Some people will say that it serves the government right that some of the
fantastic fairy tales we have been told are believed by many people,
especially abroad. The reputations of the police and the security forces
have been battered by the conduct of some policemen and soldiers, by the
apparent lack of accountability and by the absence of effective redress by
the public.
If the police force were to be broken up into parochial groups, as in
Britain and the United States, and made answerable to local police
authorities, an immediate crimp would be put in the police-drug nexus. The
police instead of being centrally directed, would now have real incentives
to operate as they should, knowing the people they served instead of
oppressing strange populations of whom they are afraid.
Some commentators would have us believe that all the people killed in West
Kingston were "innocent civilians"; that the firing was from one side only,
that all the dead were killed by police bullets, that the police were
responsible for the dead lying un- collected, and that the police have no
right to search certain areas of their own volition. Garbage.
The reputation of Mr Seaga
The PNP has been accused of wanting to demonise Mr Seaga. I cannot imagine
why. Mr Saga's power to intimidate decreases with his apparent humanity.
Last week, when he was seen to be all too human was not, perhaps, his most
potent moment. Strangely, certain commentators had prophesied something very
like what happened last week but none of them, I guess, would have believed
that the episode would have left Mr Seaga looking less demonic, more
vulnerable and less able to inspire terror than in 1980.
Mr Seaga was all too human when he was asked on the Breakfast Club what
could put an end to the internecine strife. His answer was simple:
"Elections". On another programme, he admitted that he was feeling like
giving up. Eerything fall into place: his age, his impatience, the fact that
his party has been in opposition for 12 years, everything. His refusal to
speak to the Prime Minister was seen by most people as childish and
unhelpful.
Mr Seaga seems to have painted himself into a corner. Always a last ditch
gambler, he bet the farm on an imminent general election. He made one major
miscalculation. His opponent is not Michael Manley whose democratic reflexes
were easier to excite. As a result, the JLP's "general election campaign" is
moribund if not dead, falling as flat as the attempt to block the roads and
lock down Jamaica. In the process, Mr Seaga destroyed the image he had been
carefully building and upset many people who see no percentage in shutting
down the country and sacrificing money just to discommode Mr Patterson. The
JLP has suffered a huge financial as well as a psychological and public
relations disaster. That was not in the script.
The reputation of the Press
The Jamaican media has not exactly covered itself with glory. Despite the
haranguing of our witchfinder in chief, no TV station has had the wit to
replay the clip in which policemen were said to have been seen firing
wildly. Since this allegation has become the basis for the most serious
charges against the police, I would have imagined that this evidence would
have been widely exhibited. One brief shot of a policeman hefting a firearm
through a window does not qualify a 'firing wildly'. I would like to see the
alleged clip.
The talk shows have been filled with drama, but little else. Some of our
apprentice radio-journalists have no real clue about the medium which
employs them, and come off soundingmerely hysterical and peevish instead of
presenting the grave, intellectual personae they apparently strive to
achieve.
And the press does not do itself or Jamaica any favours by allowing farceurs
to turn the public dialogue into a pipeside fingerpointing exercise. If we
are ever going to root out political violence in Jamaica, we need to start
by insisting that our talk show hosts and their guests try to look seriously
at the causes of our discontent, rather than behaving like armchair
generals, lighting their way with matches and bottle-torches through
warehouses filled with gunpowder and other explosives,
Copyright©2001 John Maxwell
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Karina Williamson Department of English Literature University of Edinburgh
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