Blood and burning

THE TURN of events in Western Kingston now spreading menacingly - since the murder of PNP and don William (Willy Haggart) Moore (How else can it be dated?) is to me as astonishing as it is distressing. It is also horribly unfamiliar, since I was not in Jamaica during the 1970s and early 1980s and I visited troubled Northern Ireland only twice.

The relative peace of the 1997 general election (Dr Broderick's infamous motorcade into August Town notwithstanding) misled me. So also have the intimations from our popular culture. There, after all, you can find a mid-1990s Beenie Man singing, Big up all PNP. Big up all Labour. True, he subsequently fell into the lap of one and not the other, but still. More indicatively, the politicians were supposed to have been warned off my the likes of Mutabaruka telling them and their friends: We know what you up to, Big Boy. We know wah yu up to! Spragga Benz claimed hopefully: Di youte dem noh too interested inna palitics again./ Now, ah jus money an house an cyaar dem a defen./ We put de war pan park an di guns dem."

If in this instance the best popular cultural consciousness does not reflect social reality, the explanation may be that the Rastafari livity that informs the one is sometimes morally and political in advance of the other. I find it disturbing that almost everyone I have asked or everything I have read about the violence in western Kingston has been as much at a loss for cogent causal explanations as myself.

The process of escalation has made good radio business, especially for HOT 102's Breakfast Club and Perkins on Line. They opened the airwaves to the often mindless, fear/revenge-driven desperation, no less than the obviously politically motivated symbols-oriented (including references to Jim Brown's grave) telephone representations of events from within certain communities.

In the matter of this outbreak my old sparing partner, Wilmot Perkins has surpassed himself. He is the Talk-Showman-who-knows-what-is-happening-with-absolute-certainty. For, he says, I predicted it, did I not? Perkins claims to be a follower of the Austrian/British philosopher, Sir Karl Popper; on the basis of whose work he has come to know that theory is only good theory if it predicts testable, falsifiable things. Now predictions are required to be clear and specific. Yet Perkins' vaunted prediction concerning events in Western Kingston is striking only in its vagueness. Perkins says: On the basis of what happened before a number of recent general elections - especially Tivoli Gardens in mid-1997, when members of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) and the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) poured thousands of rounds of largely un-aimed ammunition into that community with next to no evidence of return fire or gunmen to target - I predicted that something would happen in Western Kingston before the forthcoming general election. And something has, indeed, happened.

As prediction this does not reach even first base. It is not an example of any sort of social or natural scientific prediction. It reminds me much more of the ravings of King Lear: "I shall do such things.

What'ere they be, I know not. But they shall be the terror of the earth". Does Mr Wilmot Perkins really expect us to believe that he conceived of/predicted the carnage now taking place in our capital city and the particular pattern of escalation leading to it?

Of course something has happened! But what precisely did Mutty say prior to the escalating outbreak to specify its nature or character that could possibly help to confirm that what is happening even remotely resembles what he so vaguely predicted. Nothing, is the short answer.

Perkins is not neutral in alternately clutching his alleged prediction to his bosom and waving it about like a trophy. He is, in a determined and deliberate way, using the alleged prediction to absolve Mr Seaga and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) of all blame for the current orgy of blood and fire in the Corporate Area. (Twenty-odd persons dead and more than fifty wounded between early Saturday 7th and Monday 9th July, says Mr Seaga). Mr Perkins is using it to accuse Mr Patterson and the Peoples National Party of responsibility for the violence. He rejects any and all claims that P.J. Patterson is not and has never been personally implicated in any political violence.

Perkins asserts a one-to-one correspondence between the fact of P.J. Patterson's leadership of the PNP and his being mired in violence. On the Perkins' reading PJ is as much indeed much more a Blood for Blood, Fire for Fire man as Edward Seaga. This does not strike me as an honest reading. I for one am not minded to buy it.

In the lead-up to the last general election Perkins was an open campaigner for the JLP: The lesser of two evils, he said. He declared an intent to migrate should the PNP win. The words were quietly eaten. He was very inventive in accounting for how the PNP won that election: they stole it, he said. There was no question that he (Perkins) could simply have been out of step with the Jamaican electorate. Next time, perhaps, he may be less so.

There is, of course, a strong multi-dimensional case against the PNP and there is mounting evidence that the security forces on the ground in the Corporate Area are acting outrageously.

Indeed, the PNP would now be far less vulnerable to Perkins' charges had they allowed a public inquiry into those 1997 events in Tivoli.

Why does what is happening Downtown feels to me so much like an orchestrated campaign of destabilisation? When the first incidents occurred this time Mr Seaga was in the USA. From there he knew instantly that his people were under attack. Since then he has resolutely refused talks with Omar Davies and the Prime Minister - as things worsened. The role in which Seaga casts himself echoes John Wayne's Rooster Cockburn. If the aim is to drive the PNP prematurely from office, I hope that such a drive to early JLP power is effectively frustrated by the PNP and the Jamaican people.

Cecil Gutzmore is a research student and lecturer at the University of the West Indies. E-mail: gutzmorecr@hotmail.com.

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