(Jamaica Gleaner) Moving trucks throttling. Heavily armed police personnel standing guard. Furniture packed in haste. Fright, relief, and even near-hysterical humour etched into the faces of those who are leaving their homes behind.
It is a decades-old phenomenon in many Jamaican communities labelled ‘inner city’ where people who have ‘violated’ an unwritten code have to flee.
Others who have not been specifically targeted are also caught on the run for fear of their lives as pervasive violence perpetrated against them and their family becomes too much to bear.
That violence often takes political overtones, with communities long aligned to either the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) or the People’s National Party (PNP), as happened in the January 3, 2002, massacre of seven people at 100 Lane, off Red Hills Road, St Andrew. That community had long been at odds with the nearby Park Lane.
Homogenisation
The 1997 Report of the National Committee on Political Tribalism defines the steps in the establishment of a garrison community as follows: “The development of large-scale housing schemes by the State and the allocation of the houses therein to supporters of the party in power, homogenisation by the dominant party activists pushing out the minority from within and guarding against invasion from outside, and the expelled setting up a squatter community.”
Homogeneity also means ethnic cleansing, which a 1993 United Nations commission described as “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory of persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to make that area ethnically homogenous.”
Dr Clinton Hutton, lecturer in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, after detailing the bulldozing of Back O’ Wall shortly after Jamaica’s Independence, and listening to the definition of ethnic cleansing said, “It fits.”
Horace Levy, who compiled They Cry ‘Respect’! Urban Violence and Poverty in Jamaica and wrote Killing Streets and Community Cleansing, describes the inter-community political violence as “a kind of cleansing”. It is “a political cleansing, cleansing out persons from another political party”.
“If you change the word ‘ethnic’ to ‘political’ every time it occurs, the same thing applies,” Levy said.
He pointed out, though, that it does not apply to the recent massacre in Tredegar Park. Although previously, James Hines had been trying to force out persons from the general area who were not People’s National Party supporters, Levy says, “What happened the other day was not a part of that. It was not an attempt to force out anybody. They were going for a couple of individuals and they just killed everybody. It is part of their brutality.”
Rema Commission
There are instances when the eviction is formal, yet the process reeks of political polarisation. That was the case on February 2, 1977, when the Ministry of Housing evicted 1,000 persons from Wilton Gardens, more popularly known as ‘Rema’.
The violence which erupted that day led to a commission of enquiry conducted by late Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court, Ronald Small. The Rema Commission Report was serialised in five segments by The Sunday Gleaner, beginning May 7, 2006.
It was reported that then Opposition Leader Edward Seaga, in a statement to The Gleaner about the incident in which one man was killed and there was significant violence and chaos, said: “The illegal operation was a purely political purpose of replacing 1,000 JLP supporters with 1,000 PNP supporters.”
Senior Superintendent of Police Eric Sibblies and Superintendent Roy E. Thompson testified that ‘Junglists’ (people from PNP stronghold Arnett Gardens) gathered in large groups. They pre-empted the police, housing officers, and their workers preparing for the eviction, ready to take over the housing units. The police turned away the crowd, but they took side roads back into the community and met a barrage of gunshots fired by persons from Rema. One woman from Jungle lost an ear.
Sibblies testified that at one point in the morning when the official eviction was on, several truckloads of people and furniture arrived to take over the vacated apartments. The newcomers, all Junglists, declared they wanted an entire high-rise building for themselves, and by this time, they began to throw out legal tenants.
Still, the ‘cleansing’ may not be politically motivated.
On Wednesday, April 23, 2004, scores of persons – most of them women and children – were chased out of their homes in Arnett Gardens. Accusations of ‘informer’ had been slung as rival gangs in the area battled for turf. The individual stories were harrowing:
Sonia Edwards, a 40-year-old mother of nine, said she was attacked and beaten by gunmen who gave her less than 24 hours to leave her home in the ‘Pegasus’ area near Collie Smith Drive.
A 78-year-old woman said her family was given until the end of the day to leave its home on Crooks Street, Jones Town. She said: “A dem same man dem who kill me son pon Good Friday a seh we fi leave the area.”
Three years later, it was the turn of Torrington Park, St Andrew, when over 20 families were forced to flee in the first few months of 2007.
Levy said about three-quarters of the murders leading up to the 1980 general election were political. “It was the closest we have come to a civil war,” he said.
Hutton puts the clearing out of Back O’ Wall to create Tivoli Gardens in the context of the pervasive housing shortage in Jamaica and what home ownership meant to the formerly enslaved.
“One of the most important of the problems that the country inherited from colonialism is housing for ordinary Jamaicans,” Hutton said. “The housing stock in the country was really poor for the majority, and particularly so in Kingston and lower St Andrew.”
“The fundamental problem is in the way that our political representatives tried to deal with the problem, especially coming after Independence,” he said. So housing became “a fundamental problem in post-colonial politics and in the nation that we are still reeling from”.
Hutton said: “The ‘Dudus’ affair cannot be separated from the way our political representatives – at least, some of them – tried to deal with the housing problem.”
In addition, housing is a deeply emotive issue as “one of the ways black Jamaicans constructed freedom after Emancipation was to assert that a free person is one who is able to ‘turn’ his or her own key, especially on ‘buy land’. Home ownership became an expression of freedom”.
With Back O’ Wall being part of an area known as Smith’s Village, prior to 1962, political representation see-sawed between the PNP and the JLP.
Garrisonisation
In 1962, Edward Seaga became the West Kingston member of parliament, and Hutton said: “It has as its residents many persons of the Rastafarian faith. Some of the persons living in Back O’ Wall came there from Pinnacle (the Sligoville community established by Leonard Howell which was destroyed by the police in 1954).” It was also a cultural hub where persons such as Lord Creator and Wilfred ‘Jackie’ Edwards visited. Prince Emmanuel, later King Emmanuel, founder of the Bobo Shanti Rastafarian order, lived and worked there.
Hutton said: “In 1963, the first bulldozing took place.” The Tivoli houses which replaced the housing there were allocated to persons from outside the area, the original occupants of the land, over 3,000 persons, dispersing to Central Village, Riverton, August Town, and Warieka Hills.
In 1966, there was the biggest bulldozing, of some 800 shacks, in the ‘Dungle’ off Foreshore Road (now Marcus Garvey Drive).
Hutton noted that the JLP started ‘garrisonisation’, and the PNP followed suit in 1972.
Arnold Bertram, writing in The Sunday Gleaner on November 6, 2005, also refers to the Back O’ Wall and Dungle bulldozings. He said: “The concept of the garrison was first pioneered by D.C. Tavares in South West St Andrew, who, after the JLP victory of 1962, became the first minister of housing in independent Jamaica. His most successful protégé was Edward Seaga, on whose watch some 2,300 huts, which housed the most militant PNP supporters, were bulldozed between 1963 and 1966, and the occupants forced ‘to move and keep moving’.”