Tiananmen, Hillsborough, and a Jamaica Election: The World in a Season of Grief

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 1989 | Period covered: January–June 1989

Key Developments at a Glance

• 4 June 1989: Tiananmen Square massacre; Caribbean community condemns the crackdown and reflects on state violence against peaceful protest.
• 15 April 1989: Hillsborough disaster kills 96 Liverpool fans; Caribbean community joins national grief while watching official response with experienced scepticism.
• 9 February 1989: Michael Manley wins Jamaica general election after nine years; diaspora receives the result with hope and expectation.
• Exxon Valdez oil spill March 24, 1989; Caribbean community presses for stronger environmental protection for vulnerable island ecosystems.
• Lockerbie investigation continues; Caribbean community watches the international terrorism response.
• Race Relations Act enforcement persistent failures; community organisations press for strengthened race equality legislation ahead of anticipated election.

The first half of 1989 is defined by events that confront the Caribbean community’s political values directly and demand a response. In Beijing, students and workers have been occupying Tiananmen Square since mid-April, calling for democratic reform, freedom of the press, and an end to corruption. On 4 June 1989, the Chinese government orders the army to clear the square: tanks move through the night streets of Beijing, firing on those who do not move fast enough. The number of dead will not be known for certain even decades later; estimates range from hundreds to thousands. The image of a single man stepping in front of a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace becomes one of the defining images of the late twentieth century. In Liverpool, on 15 April 1989, ninety-six people who went to watch an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough stadium are dead by the end of the afternoon, crushed to death when a police decision to open a gate causes a fatal overcrowding in the terrace behind the goal. The immediate official response — including suggestions, from police and in the press, that Liverpool supporters were responsible for their own deaths — is a pattern of institutional cover-up that the Caribbean community recognises with a weariness that is not detachment but depth of experience.

Tiananmen and the Caribbean Community’s Political Values

The Caribbean community’s condemnation of the Tiananmen Square massacre is immediate and unqualified. The political tradition from which the community derives its values — the tradition of democratic struggle, of the assertion of human rights against state power, of non-violent protest as the legitimate means of political change — leaves no room for ambiguity about the use of military force against civilian protesters demanding democratic reform. The Caribbean community’s own history includes the use of state violence to suppress political organisation and protest, from the colonial period through the independence era, and it understands from that history what it costs communities to confront state violence with non-violent resistance.

The community also notes the specificity of the international response: the West’s condemnation of Tiananmen is swift and substantial, and the contrast with the international community’s response to state violence against Black protesters in South Africa — where the response has historically been more muted and where calls for sanctions were resisted by Thatcher’s government precisely during the period when such sanctions might have been most effective — is one that the community’s political analysts note with the consistency that marks their engagement with international affairs.

Hillsborough: Grief and the Familiar Architecture of Cover-Up

The Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989 kills ninety-six Liverpool supporters — men, women, and children who attended an FA Cup semi-final and did not come home. The Caribbean community in Britain, which includes significant Liverpool populations as well as football supporters across the country, shares in the grief that the disaster produces. The subsequent immediate response — in which South Yorkshire Police, the government, and the Sun newspaper collaborate in placing responsibility on the Liverpool supporters themselves, suggesting drunkenness, ticketlessness, and aggression as the causes of the disaster that a policing decision actually caused — is watched by the Caribbean community with a recognition that is painful and precise.

The architecture of the cover-up — the rapid construction of an alternative narrative, the suppression of evidence, the use of official authority to deflect accountability — is familiar to a community that has watched the same architecture deployed in cases of deaths in custody, of police violence against Black people, and of institutional failure that is followed not by accountability but by the systematic production of alternative accounts. The Hillsborough families’ campaign for justice, which will last decades, is a campaign that the Caribbean community understands and supports: not because its specifics are the same as their own campaigns, but because the principle — that official institutions must be held accountable for their failures — is one the community has pursued in its own contexts for as long as it has been in Britain.

Manley Returns: Jamaica Votes for Change

On 9 February 1989, the People’s National Party under Michael Manley wins the Jamaican general election, ending nine years of JLP government under Edward Seaga. The result — a clear PNP majority — is received by the Caribbean community in Britain with genuine pleasure: Manley, whose first two terms as Prime Minister from 1972 to 1980 shaped the political identity of a generation of Caribbean people in Britain and on the island, represents a politics of dignity, social investment, and Caribbean solidarity that the community has missed during the Seaga years. The Manley of 1989 is more pragmatic on economic policy than his earlier incarnation, accepting some IMF discipline that his 1970s government resisted; but his values, and his commitment to the people who have always been the PNP’s constituency, are unchanged.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard; Hillsborough Family Support Group.

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