Archive for May, 2010

Jamaica now but St. Kitts could be Next

By Deniece Alleyne

The incalculable tragedy now unfolding in Jamaica will reverberate throughout the CARICOM region for years to come.

Undoubtedly Prime Minister Golding will try to extricate himself from shouldering all the blame for the low grade warfare that has erupted in West Kingston by trying to claim that his obfuscation over the last nine months was an attempt to avoid precisely the fate that has now befallen the already benighted Tivoli Gardens. Yet such retroactive insight will not and should not erase the reality of using state funds and influence apparently at the behest of a notorious drug baron. The situation in Jamaica is unfortunately of long vintage and implicates both the JLP and PNP in making underground links with drug lords in order to secure stronghold constituencies. It will take long term work to reverse what has become an entrenched feature of Jamaican politics but the situation is not intractable and certainly cannot be treated like an isolated problem in Jamaica that does not affect the wider CARICOM region.

The siege in Tivoli Gardens did not happen overnight. It is the culmination of years of neglect by successive administrations; this in turn has created a domino effect of neglect by other parts of the government including the police and social services. Aggravating this problem has been the creation of communities that closely approximate the notorious projects that are the blight on urban areas in the United States. These communities are isolated from the wider society, lack social and cultural amenities, are peopled with those who lack the social capital to ameliorate their living conditions and are therefore completely dependent on the largesse of the government and inevitably these communities deteriorate into depressed, violent and marginalized ghettos.

This lack of basic urban or community planning is painfully visible when one observes several of the government communities that have been built in St. Kitts. They lack basic infrastructure like paved roads years after people have begun living there. They lack parks, sidewalks, and cultural outlets. There is no thought given to creating employment opportunities within the vicinity. There is however a population that is fanatical in its support for the political party that delivered the houses with a mistaken impression that gratitude is owed because they were “given houses” and no inkling about the facilitation of entrenched multi – generational dependence.

While the fiscal situation in St. Kitts and the Caribbean as a whole continues to deteriorate as the region is ravaged by external economic shocks and undermined by internal mismanagement and corruption these communities, as the example in Jamaica shows, have the potential of becoming vulnerable to the control of criminal despots as a vacuum is created when the government becomes incapable of delivering handouts.

Lest anyone should think that the notion of drug kingpins being resident here and exerting influence on the local economy and politics is farfetched a trip down memory lane should dispel that notion. Christopher “Dudus” Coke is a leader in the Shower Posse gang which should be familiar to Kittitians and Nevisians because a local businessman named Charles Miller was also associated with that gang and extradited to the US in the late nineties. His was not the only extradition. When this fact is added to the recent MSNBC reporting that highlighted concerns about the vulnerability of St. Kitts and St. Vincent to drug trafficking because of government corruption the local situation is suddenly much less secure. Another salient fact is that the actions of the US government along its border with Mexico have already begun the movement of the cartels towards this region as an alternative transshipment route for their drugs into the US. This trend will continue and accelerate. Jamaica seems hapless now but what of the other CARICOM governments.

In St. Kitts the scourge of crime and especially the epidemic of cold blooded killings, in broad daylight, with an alarming supply of illegal firearms is scoffed at by some because supposedly “crime is everywhere.” However, this situation, already difficult to handle without the demonstrably toxic influence of drug trafficking can only be worsened. It is clear that any drug trafficker seeking to set up a base here will have ready made gang turfs, gang soldiers and gang armaments.

If the Caribbean is to be spared the fate of Mexico which many experts argue is in danger of becoming a failed state, or the spreading of small scale civil war between the state and drug gangs then concerted and decisive action needs to be taken. Firstly local governments must be such that they would repel even the association with corruption and that is the responsibility of the voting public in each CARICOM country. Electors must demand the very best practice or bear the responsibility when these storms of violence become full fledged hurricanes.

Secondly the integration process needs to be completed with the utmost urgency. It will be next to impossible to address a pan – Caribbean problem with trans – national organized crime in the form of drug trafficking from Columbia to the Unite States if criminals can simply cross borders and play one jurisdiction against another. Each of our tiny sovereignties prevents an obstacle if, for example, a drug baron can live on St. Kitts or Nevis and control activities in St. Vincent, Grenada and Montserrat but cannot be prosecuted in this Federation for murders that occur under his orders in one of those islands because he was not there. Or perhaps, a drug baron in Antigua commits a murder there and decamps for St. Kitts where his deep pockets hires the best criminal lawyer and he fights extradition for years while creating havoc here. Already we have the issue of gun smuggling here in St. Kitts and Nevis – there have been another two shootings in Newtown and McKnight jut this week – but how much easier it would be to stop if tips could be passed onto authorities in other islands and they prosecute smugglers there.

The reality of modern technology is that my example is how legitimate business is already conducted so why would the young and tech savvy criminals be any different. What would be needed under these circumstances is for there to be one legal jurisdiction contiguous with CARICOM so that a crime committed in Jamaica can be prosecuted in St. Lucia without the need for extradition effectively denying criminals the space to move. This would of course help legitimate business as contracts would be enforceable anywhere in the region and so on. The first step for this is the full and complete implementation of the CCJ across CARICOM.

The Caribbean will face the scourge of drug trafficking as one space and will have to fight it as one space. This requires proactive thinking about confronting current and potential problems head on. It means that those territories that are relatively crime free have a responsibility to share best practices with those that are struggling and those that are struggling have a responsibility to listen, learn and implement.

Most importantly however Caribbean people will have to confront an existential threat if we do not become politically mature and fast. The days of being blindly loyal because of tradition and ignoring egregious deficiencies because it’s our party in power should be consigned to history. We are already paying an economic price for turning a blind eye that will only get worse and fast. Economic problems bring social problems and we are already struggling with those. Adding another problem will create a situation that we cannot control; but whose fault would that be.