Martin Henry, Contributor
Hartley Neita's 'This Day in Our Past' reminded us last Tuesday, July 8, that the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was launched at the Ward Theatre in 1943 on that day. Led by Alexander Bustamante, the new party pledged to work unceasingly for the progress, expansion, growth and successful accomplishment of the ideals and principles which the party was formed to achieve.
Five years earlier, the People's National Party had been founded with equally high ideals for Jamaica's future, with Bustamante's cousin, Norman Manley, as president, and Busta himself, a founding member.
Things haven't quite turned out that way. Whatever successes have been achieved, Jamaica has degenerated into one of the most violent and deadly places on Earth. Bustamante's successor down the line as both leader of the JLP and prime minister, Bruce Golding, is publicly confirming that our country has a crime problem that is the second highest in the world.
On the very day of the 65th anniversary of the founding of the JLP, there was a major blow-out in a meeting of the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC). Things got so bad that JLP mayor Desmond McKenzie felt obliged openly to describe the behaviour of a council member of his tribe, Rosalie Hamilton, as "disgraceful". The mayor himself apologised to PNP councillor, Angela Brown-Burke, and urged a public apology from Hamilton to Brown-Burke and the council.
Set off firestorm
And the subject of the disgraceful behaviour? Political violence centred on the shooting of Rosalie Hamilton in her Rae Town division. "I was shot for no other reason than because I wear green [the party colour of the JLP]," Hamilton declared, setting off a firestorm in the chambers of the council.
Tens of thousands of Jamaicans have been shot, murdered, burnt out and chased out, directly or indirectly, over politics.
In his astounding defence on Sunday, of the indefensible August Town peace treaty, Professor Barry Chevannes made it quite clear that "August Town violence is not violence of organised crime, which is based on drug-trafficking, extortion or some other criminal enterprise", but, "rather, the violence in August Town is essentially 'tribal' - the People's National Party (PNP) tribe versus the Jamaica Labour Party tribe [which] has been complicated over the last 18 months by a splintering within the PNP tribe".
This splitting of abstract hairs must be of the deepest significance to the people whose loved ones have been murdered and who have had to flee their homes. Tell that to Mr Pottinger, one of Jamaica's finest foundry men, who has had everything that can be moved stolen from his workshop in August Town.
By the time Norman Manley retired in 1969 from having led the PNP for 30 years, armed gansgterism had already firmly fastened itself to the parties. When Bustamante finally retired in 1967, a doddering old man, gun violence had already infiltrated political competition. Neither leader, destined to be National Heroes, did very much to turn the rising tide of political violence.
But political tribal violence is almost as old as the parties themselves. And it was organised as a matter of political strategy with the complicit knowledge and sometimes active participation of the most senior leadership of the parties. In an excellent survey of 'The Historical Roots of Violence in Jamaica: The Hearne Report, 1949', in Understanding Crime in Jamaica, edited by Anthony Harriott, now professor of criminology at the UWI, Amanda Sives makes this quite clear. Obika Gray also traces the "fateful alliance" of politics and violence in his Demeaned but Empowered.
PNP-JLP peace pledge
Two months after a May 16, 1949, PNP-JLP peace pledge, the first of many "not to use force in political campaigning", a man was stoned, beaten and then stabbed to death in the culmination of a series of clashes between supporters of the two parties in a by-election in the KSAC Eastern St Andrew No. 2 Division [Gordon Town].
As Sives notes, one of the striking facts to emerge from the one-man commission of enquiry quickly ordered by the governor and headed by Sir Hector Hearne, particularly noticeable in the context of the peace pledge, was the key role of candidates and other leaders as agents of conflict rather than peace. The Hearne Report, the first of many on politics and criminal violence, set out more than any later report, the dirty details of gang mobilisation for political violence and the role of the leaders as it bluntly fulfilled its remit to "nail responsibility to the mast".
In the face of the violence marring the 1949 general election later that year, The Daily Gleaner switched from hoping that the peace pledge in May would mean "goodbye to the severing of the people into two hostile camps" to lamenting that "men who should be considered to be of high dignity too often appear in the company of people known to be of evil reputation. The election is being conducted in some quarters as if it cannot be won without the support of criminals".
In his own Editor's Overview, Tony Harriott notes that "in Jamaica, crime cannot be fully understood without reference to politics … The significance of the garrison lies not just in its role as a place where politics and crime intersect and which provides a protected site for criminal enterprise, but also in its being a mode of political administration that subverts democracy … This raises the issue of the political parties being criminal organisations [in the sense of] the resort to criminal means of gaining office, and the alliances with criminals that are used for this purpose [giving] criminal networks considerable leverage over the parties".
Growth of garrisons
In another chapter of Under-standing Crime in Jamaica, Mark Figueroa and Amanda Sives point out what many others from rum bar to university have done, that "the growth of the garrison communities has been one of the key factors in the development of crime and violence in Jamaica". These communities now account for 75 per cent of the murders in the country and a great deal of the crime directed against other communities and citizens.
When Prime Minister Golding piously proclaims that "we are going to get tough on crime [and] we might offend the sensitivities of certain groups", if he is to be taken seriously, he has to have his and the other party at the top of the list as leading 'criminal' organisations which have led in fostering the rising crime and violence of the last 60-odd years.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.
