Sovereignty only in our heads

Martin Henry, Columnist

Easily the sound bite of the week goes to Howard Mitchell, the spokesman for outgoing Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington who has been pressured to jump into retirement without offering a mumbling word of his own.

Nothing said in the tiresome Sectoral Debate in Parliament which ground to a halt last week after some two months at it carries the weight of the Mitchell declaration. After all, the debate is nothing more than the posturing of poppy-show Parliament on its Government and Opposition sides of a likkle bruk-pocket country living on handouts.

Towards the end of the week, the Office of the Prime Minister, preening with the pride of accomplishment, announced that the Jamaican Government had received the final instalment of a grant from the government of India for the mega-project of installing floodlights at Sabina Park! Imagine our need for assistance with the matters of security and justice!

Speaking to RJR's Earl Moxam on behalf of his silent client, Howard Mitchell said, "The idea of sovereignty and independence exists in our minds."

Mitchell had blamed pressure from the US Leahy Act for causing the commissioner to jump. Ellington, he said, had more likely jumped than he was pushed but "there certainly was pressure at the top of the cliff". The commissioner had said, via the minister of national security, that he was leaving instantly to avoid any semblance of interference in the upcoming Tivoli commission of enquiry and investigations of the operations of a police death squad in Clarendon. "Critical to both of the reasons given by the commissioner," Mitchell said, "is the issue of the Leahy Act and, in fact, of human rights, generally."

Let's pick up the conversation with Earl
Moxam from here, Earl having kindly provided me a verbatim
transcript:

EM:
You seem to take a rather sympathetic view of the American position in
respect of the Leahy Act. No question of injury to Jamaican national
sovereignty arises
here?

HM:
I'm a nationalist; however, over the years,
I have become convinced that, largely because of the way that we have
handled our own affairs in Jamaica, the idea of sovereignty and
independence exists (only) in our
minds.

EM:
Arising from that then, if Uncle Sam says
you have to go, you have to
go?

HM:
I would say that, in the present
circumstances, where we are at the mercy of an international finance
organisation, where we are unable to stand on our own two feet, if Uncle
Sam says you have to go, chances are you have to go. The focus I take
from that is that we should make every effort to make ourselves
independent once again."

As pulled from
Wikipedia, which knows everything, the Leahy Law "is a
human-rights law that prohibits the US Department of State and
Department of Defence from providing military assistance to foreign
military units that violate human rights with
impunity".

It is useful to note that the law
mandates removal of aid support from the security unit, not
specifically removal of commanding officers. How Ellington's jump will
help the aid issue is an open question. And the business of 'impunity'
is called into question over the allegations of the Clarendon death
squad when investigations are actively under way with Ellington's
initiation and cooperation.

Security
assistance

Our own dumbstruck Government certainly has
a lot to say to us on these matters.

To implement the
Leahy Law, US embassies and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labour and the appropriate regional bureau of the US Department of State
vet potential recipients of security assistance. If a unit is found to
have been credibly implicated in a serious abuse of human rights,
assistance is denied until the host nation government takes effective
steps to bring the responsible persons within the unit to justice. While
the US Government does not publicly report on foreign armed force
units, it has cut off from receiving assistance, press reports have
indicated that security force units in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia,
Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan have been
denied assistance due to the Leahy Law. And we know of St Lucia in the
Caribbean. It does not appear that the law prevents purchase of regular
equipment and supplies in the private market.

Before
the Leahy Law of 1997, the primary US legislation constraining aid to
countries with poor human-rights records was the Foreign Assistance Act,
which prohibited security assistance to "any country the
government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations
of internationally recognised human rights." This law was seen
as too vague to be effective in cases where the US government had an
overriding interest.

According to Senator Patrick
Leahy himself, his law "makes it clear that when credible
evidence of human rights violations exists, US aid must stop. But, it
provides the necessary flexibility to allow the US to advance its
foreign-policy objectives in these countries." And that's the
catch. A powerful criticism of the law has been that it has never been
enforced against Israel, exposing gross hypocrisy in US foreign
policy.

And, as Human Rights Watch notes, if a unit is
"considered important enough to drug war objectives or other objectives
of US foreign policy ... the US will violate the Leahy Provision in
order to continue funding and training it".

Howard
Mitchell has a point about sovereignty. But it is only a little one in
the larger scheme of things. Were we more independent and
self-sufficient in handling our national affairs and not needing the
IMF, for example, we would have more wiggle room for sovereignty. We
could get Leahy off our back if US aid to our security forces were not
an issue. And the more I think about this is the more I wonder about how
much of an issue Leahy really is.

Imperial
threat

But the big issue is the United States behaving
in the world as a standard-issue imperial power with very little
prospect of effective opposition.

Whether the Leahy
Law has been invoked against us or not, FATCA is now here, as it is
around the rest of the world. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act
demands compliance or face the risk of exclusion from the global
financial system and markets. We have seen the potent US threats of
pressuring Iran and the giant state of Russia out of the global
financial system and markets.

We can expect increasing
pressure by the imperial power and its EU partner for the normalisation
of homosexual relations cast as a human-rights issue. Opponents,
including the Church, are fighting a brave but ultimately futile
rearguard action. Assuming that the Government capitulated over Leahy
and briskly offered up the commissioner of police as the sacrifice of
appeasement, what is to prevent capitulation on the homosexual issue
with not only aid at stake but inclusion in the US-controlled global
system?

When the US was just an imperial boy in short
pants, Commodore Matthew Perry, in 1853-54, pried open a Japan closed
for 200 years to international trade with the encouragement provided by
US navy ships in Tokyo Harbour. The Monroe Doctrine, dating back to
1823, has kept the US managing its Latin American and Caribbean backyard
to its perceived strategic advantage. The recent repudiation of the
doctrine by the presidency is a comfort to a fool. The Cuban embargo
holds. Watch Venezuela. And, by the way, the Leahy Law originated with
Colombia in mind at a time when that country was battling multiple rebel
forces.

With the post-WWII founding of the United
Nations, we have been lulled into somnolence by vain promises of
multilateralism in a new world order. A decade ago when deposed Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein was plucked from his hiding hole "like a rat"
by US occupying forces, I wrote a column, 'Imperial powers', (December
18, 2003). In that column, I said, citing several examples,
"Recorded history is largely the story of imperial powers, the
strong dominating the weak and imposing their will over a larger sphere
than their own original national boundaries until they are deposed by
the next power to emerge in the same
space."

I further said then, "The
world is going to be organised around the strategic interests of
American imperial power as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. Varying
degrees of force, diplomatic, political, economic, and, as necessary,
military, will be applied. Ultimately, no great power has ever
sacrificed strategic self-interest to the flaccid niceties of
'international law'."

The police
commissioner of a small island developing state, to use UN-ese, is a
tiny pawn in this geopolitical game. And Owen Ellington may well have
asked himself, "Why bother?" Men and nations will fall in line and
flourish to the extent possible. Or face the wrath of angered imperial
power.

Martin Henry is a university administrator and
public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and
medhen@gmail.com.