NONE OTHER than the Chief of Staff of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, is warning that transnational organised criminal activities, including the drug trade, are posing a serious threat to the country's democracy and the nation's way of life.
It is not usual that the national security chiefs make such statements on sensitive security issues. As head of the army, Rear Admiral Lewin would have privileged access to the most detailed intelligence on national security. The army Chief of Staff, speaking to the Rotary Club of Ocho Rios recently, said that while Jamaica was not under threat from any of its neighbour states, a threat was coming from non-state actors.
"I submit," he told Rotarians, "that the greatest threat that we face today, and in the foreseeable future, are those group of threats we call transnational threats". He explained transnational threats to be "organised criminal activities that go across state boundaries, across national boundaries." Those activities include drug trafficking, arms trafficking and the associated money laundering, corruption and violence.
What we must now ask, and what the head of the army would not be at liberty to answer publicly, is how deeply the institutions and systems of the Jamaican state have been penetrated and corrupted by this transnational, non-state threat.
We daily feel the effects of the inflow of arms in the murder rate averaging three per day. The corrupting influence of the drug trade and money laundering and their effects on the crime rate may be more subtle and less visible.
The strategic geographic location of the island in the Caribbean, as the Chief of Staff pointed out, is both a blessing and a curse. While we benefit from legitimate transshipment activities, the Rear Admiral's estimate, with his Coast Guard background, is that some 100 metric tonnes of cocaine now pass through or around Jamaica's territory annually. And some of the drug is marketed and consumed here, exacerbating the drug abuse problem and the attendant social consequences.
Calling upon every Jamaican to be concerned, the Chief of Staff underscored the links between drugs and guns and crime and violence and the potential of the trade to corrupt state officials and state institutions.
The head of the JDF has perhaps gone as far as his office will allow in elucidating clear and present danger from the transnational threat. A frank political assessment of the problem is overdue in the Parliament. Remarks in the Senate last Thursday that Resident Magistrates could be subject to political influences drew a quick and sharp negative response from the Government side. It should be less controversial to state that the political system itself is already influenced by transnational criminal activities as in the known and widely documented links of dons, politics, and crime - national and international. The only real question is to what degree.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
