Horace Levy | Dangerous lurch towards authoritarianism

A two-party arrangement may seem like the ideal for maintaining democracy. In the past, we had good United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) examples. Though not so in fact, to us, Europe’s multiparty coalitions appeared clumsy and ineffective.

The division of state authority between two parties has to be managed carefully, however. It is beset by dangerous tendencies – authoritarianism, indecisiveness or inaction, and partisanship – dangerous especially when the first and third combine. Just consider the UK’s problems over Brexit, the US’s with Trump, and the global swing to autocrats like Bolsonaro and Duterte.

Is our current situation so different? PM Holness refuses to even enter a national dialogue over violence and murder. Consider the history. Alternating in power since 1944, Jamaica’s two main parties set it firmly on the road to respectable democratisation. However, this authority sharing has also, more than once, led to a harmful partisan division. Today, we seem to not have learned from our past.

Harmful partisan division on a national scale occurred in the late 1970s as the impact of party garrison creations – the conversion of poor communities into machines for electoral violence – played out across capital Kingston and climaxed in the 1980 war.

Every sector of society was divided – business (some hoarding, some emigrating), security forces (some shooting up a PNP meeting with top leaders), churches (anti-communist or pro-socialist), people generally (by community).

Because it was both economic and ideological, the division was really deep, the latter backed by international Cold War divisions, the former by IMF policy. But digging below the communist-capitalist labels and connections, the issue for Jamaica was really over equality for the excluded black poorer classes.

Another major division of the country came 30 years later in 2009-10 over the extradition of Christopher Coke. A large majority of the country was demanding it against a resisting Prime Minister Golding and a handful of top JLP leaders. But that was the surface issue. The real issue was about putting an end to the ‘mother of all garrisons’ and to partisan divisiveness. You can see this in the recommendations of the West Kingston Commission of Enquiry (ch 15): address community deprivation and complementary security forces reform.

Golding finally yielded with what was nothing less than the long overdue assertion of the central authority of the state, a declaration ofthe unity of the country over partisan divisiveness. It was a profound landmark decision, even if delayed, and, by the murderous behaviour of sections of the security forces, climaxed in a slaughter of Tivoli citizens.

Here now, nine years later, the country is again caught up in a division, this time over states of emergency (SOE) as a tool for controlling violence and crime. Backed by popular demand (created by divided state failure to act) and the security forces, the JLP administration wants continuous extensions. The Opposition refused in December to go along, and, with civil-society backing, argues that extensions violate the Constitution. Private sector, civil society and churches have been calling also for interparty dialogue and community social intervention.

Partisanship underlies the current division. The JLP has wrongly labelled the PNP’s December blockage as a partisan act. It is its own policy that must be judged to be partisan. Its position is motivated by SOE popularity being a sure way to win the next general election. In authoritarian fashion, Holness stubbornly resists even national dialogue.

The SOE is a surface problem. The deeper issue is community empowerment and, along with it, the reformation of the police that the alternative to SOEs involves. Since the 1990s, many commissions, committees, and studies have urged these two elements repeatedly but have been ignored.The middle-class character of party leadership has blinded both parties from appreciating especially the needs of deprived lower-income classes.

To put it another way, the issue is not one merely of method. It is about the KIND OF SOCIETY we want Jamaica to be – class-divided, ‘us and them’, or one that is inclusive.

Horace Levy is a human-rights lobbyist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and halpeace.levy78@gmail.com.