Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — Q2 1995

Quarterly Update | Q2 1995 | April–June 1995 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: Q2 1995 in Six Lines

• Oklahoma City bombing April 19 kills 168; domestic terrorism shatters American assumptions
• OJ Simpson trial dominates American media; race, justice and celebrity intertwined
• VE Day 50th anniversary May 8; Caribbean war service remembered alongside national celebration
• Bosnian war deepens; UN safe areas under Serbian attack as international will wavers
• Barings Bank collapse aftermath: lessons in risk and regulation being absorbed
• Jamaica property market: diaspora enquiries strong as Caribbean economy shows resilience

Oklahoma City: Terrorism from Within

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb parked outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, detonated at 9:02 in the morning, killing 168 people — including 19 children in the building’s day care centre — and injuring more than 680 others. The explosion destroyed the north half of the nine-storey building and damaged or destroyed 324 other buildings in a sixteen-block radius. It was, at that moment, the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil in history, and it was committed not by a foreign organisation but by an American citizen: Timothy McVeigh, a former US Army soldier motivated by a profound hostility to the federal government and inspired, in part, by the white nationalist militia movement that had been growing in the American heartland through the early 1990s.

The Oklahoma City bombing shattered the assumption, widespread in American public discourse before April 19, that terrorism was something that happened elsewhere or was perpetrated by foreign enemies. The threat had always existed within: in the extremist ideologies that had long circulated in the militia movement, in the violent anti-government sentiment that had been amplified by events like the Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992 and the Waco siege of 1993, in the willingness of a certain kind of aggrieved American to translate ideology into mass murder. McVeigh specifically chose April 19 as the second anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas — a grievance that the broader public found difficult to understand as a motive proportionate to the killing of 168 people including 19 children.

For the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora in the United States, Oklahoma City was experienced as it was experienced by every community in America: with horror, grief, and the particular anxiety of parents who had sent their children to day care that morning. The victims were not drawn from any single community — they were federal government workers, their families, and people who happened to be in the building on an ordinary Wednesday morning. The community’s response was the same communal response that characterised the broader American public: the rescue workers who came from across the country, the blood donations, the fundraising, the prayer. Terrorism, when it strikes civilians in their ordinary lives, creates a solidarity of the bereaved that transcends the usual community divisions.

The OJ Trial: A Nation Cannot Look Away

The murder trial of O.J. Simpson, which began in January 1995 and is now in its second quarter, shows no sign of diminishing its grip on American public attention. The trial — conducted in the Los Angeles courtroom of Judge Lance Ito, covered by a permanent television gallery that broadcasts proceedings live, and generating a daily commentary ecosystem of legal analysts, celebrity observers, and public commentators that is unlike anything that has preceded it in American legal history — has become the lens through which the country is examining questions of race, celebrity, wealth, gender, and criminal justice that have been unresolved in American public life for decades.

The specific legal issues of the case — whether the prosecution’s evidence is strong enough, whether the defence team’s challenges to that evidence are persuasive, whether the jury is assessing the case on its merits or through the prism of their own experiences of the criminal justice system — have been almost entirely subsumed by the broader cultural argument about what the case means. For the Caribbean diaspora in the United States, the trial is being followed with the specific engagement of a community that has its own extensive experience of the intersection between race and the criminal justice system, and whose reading of the evidence and the proceedings is shaped by that experience in ways that differ systematically from the reading of communities whose relationship with that system has been different.

VE Day at Fifty: Caribbean Service Remembered

May 8, 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day — the end of the Second World War in Europe — and the occasion was marked by commemorations across the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth that included, for the first time in significant numbers, an explicit recognition of the contribution of Caribbean servicemen and women to the Allied war effort. Tens of thousands of men from Jamaica and the other Caribbean colonies had volunteered to serve in the RAF, the army, and the navy, and many had died in the service of a country that would, in the post-war decades, welcome them as workers while treating them as second-class citizens.

The Caribbean community’s engagement with the VE Day commemorations was characterised by a mixture of genuine pride in the service of the war generation and a clear-eyed insistence on the full accounting of that service’s history. The community’s elder members who had served — or whose parents had served — deserved the recognition that the fiftieth anniversary began to provide. But that recognition needed to include the full story: not just the service but the treatment that followed, the discrimination in demobilisation, the barriers to advancement in post-war Britain, the Windrush generation’s arrival as the invited inheritors of a Commonwealth that had not fully prepared for what their arrival would mean. The fiftieth anniversary was an occasion for both commemoration and honest reckoning.

Bosnia: The Crisis Before the Storm

The Bosnian war, now in its fourth year, entered a new and more dangerous phase in the second quarter of 1995, with Bosnian Serb forces systematically attacking the UN “safe areas” — Srebrenica, Žepa, Gorazde, Bihac — that had been designated as civilian refuges but were, in practice, wholly inadequately protected by the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR). The credibility of the UN safe area system was under severe strain, and the international political will to enforce the protection of civilians was being tested in ways that were revealing deep divisions between the major powers on the appropriate response to Serbian aggression.

The situation in the safe areas — and particularly in Srebrenica, where General Mladic’s forces were closing in — will come to a head in the next quarter in the most terrible possible way. As we publish this edition, the full horror of what is about to happen in Srebrenica is not yet known. What is known is that the international community’s response to the Bosnian war has fallen far short of what the scale and systematic character of the violence required, and that the consequences of that failure are being borne by the Bosniak civilian population in ways that will define the reputation of the international institutions involved for years to come.

Jamaica and the Diaspora: Looking Forward

As the second quarter of 1995 draws to a close, Jamaica and its diaspora are navigating a moment of significant economic and social transition. The island’s economy continues to face the structural challenges that have constrained growth for much of the 1990s, but the tourism sector is showing genuine resilience and the remittance flows from the diaspora remain the most reliable and consistent component of the external income that sustains Jamaican household welfare. The relationship between the diaspora and the island — economic, cultural, familial, and increasingly political — is one of the defining features of Jamaican life at this stage of the island’s development, and the bulletins that this publication provides aim to serve and strengthen that relationship.

We are committed to covering the world as it affects the Jamaican diaspora and returnee community, and to covering Jamaica as it matters to the overseas Jamaican looking toward home. Every quarter brings its own events, its own crises, its own moments of pride and grief and solidarity, and we will be here to cover them — from the island, from the diaspora, and from the intersection of both that is the particular perspective this publication exists to serve.

Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Quarterly Update — covering April to June 1995. Published by Jamaica Homes News on 2 July 1995.

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