Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — January to March 2011

Published: 2 April 2011 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• Japan earthquake and tsunami: the diaspora community responds: The M9.0 earthquake that struck off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku on 11 March 2011, generating a tsunami that killed nearly 16,000 people and triggering the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster — the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl — prompted an immediate humanitarian response from diaspora communities across North America and the United Kingdom. While Japan’s diaspora in Jamaica is small, the sheer scale of the catastrophe and the nuclear dimension — which raised questions about nuclear energy policy among Jamaica’s own energy planners — engaged diaspora community organisations that had built broad humanitarian response capacity after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. The pattern of rapid diaspora charitable mobilisation, first developed in response to Haiti, was applied again.
• Arab Spring: Egypt’s revolution and Libya’s war: The Arab Spring’s Q1 2011 acceleration produced two of its defining moments: the fall of President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February, after 18 days of sustained protest in Tahrir Square, and the beginning of NATO’s military campaign against Muammar Gaddafi’s government on 19 March, authorised by UN Security Council Resolution 1973. For Caribbean diaspora communities, Egypt’s peaceful revolution was a source of inspiration and validation of the power of democratic protest. Libya’s slide into civil war and NATO intervention was more complicated: the coalition’s military action was supported by some and viewed with scepticism by others in Caribbean communities with a historical distrust of Western military intervention.
• The Dudus affair: Golding’s crisis deepens: Prime Minister Bruce Golding entered 2011 with the Dudus extradition crisis unresolved and politically toxic. Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, sought by US authorities on drug trafficking and firearms charges, remained at large. The Tivoli Incursion of May 2010, in which more than 70 civilians died in the security forces’ operation to apprehend him, had generated a Western Kingston Commission of Enquiry whose hearings were now proceeding through Q1 2011, keeping the affair in daily headlines. Golding’s political position remained precarious, with internal JLP dissatisfaction growing and opposition PNP polls widening.
• UK austerity: the January–March reckoning: The first quarter of 2011 brought the sharpest early impacts of the Cameron-Clegg coalition’s Comprehensive Spending Review into lived experience. University tuition fee increases to up to £9,000 per year — which had triggered student protests in November and December 2010 — were now confirmed legislation. Housing benefit caps, affecting the urban constituencies where British-Caribbean families were disproportionately concentrated, were approaching implementation. For British-Jamaican communities whose social mobility had been built partly on NHS employment and public sector career pathways, the public sector pay freeze and job reduction targets were directly felt.
• Diaspora returnee programme: 4th Biennial’s nine-month mark: Nine months after the 4th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference of June 2010 had placed returnee facilitation at the centre of its agenda, the MFAFT’s returnee support services were processing enquiries at an elevated level. The political instability of the post-Tivoli period had not suppressed enquiry volumes as severely as some analysts had predicted, suggesting that the push factors driving return consideration — UK austerity and US economic stagnation among them — outweighed the pull-factor dampening of Jamaica’s governance difficulties.
• Remittances: Q1 2011 maintaining trajectory: Bank of Jamaica data for Q1 2011 suggested remittances were maintaining the approximately US$2.0 billion annual pace. Easter transfers in Q1 added a seasonal spike to the quarter’s totals. The structural resilience of diaspora remittances — their persistence through economic pressure, political crisis, and natural disaster — continued to validate the Bank of Jamaica’s treatment of remittances as a reliable macroeconomic variable rather than a cyclical one.

Introduction: World Crisis, Caribbean Resilience

Q1 2011 opened with the Arab world’s transformation accelerating and closed with Japan reeling from its worst natural and nuclear disaster in modern history. For the Jamaican diaspora, a year that began with Haiti’s earthquake one year anniversary became a year of cascading global crises and the continuing weight of Jamaica’s own domestic political storm. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 31 March 2011.

Japan: The Diaspora’s Humanitarian Reflex

The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011 was, by any measure, among the worst natural disasters in recorded history. The M9.0 earthquake generated a tsunami with waves reaching 40 metres in height in some locations, inundating entire coastal towns and killing close to 16,000 people. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s three reactor meltdowns added a nuclear catastrophe to the natural one, producing the largest nuclear incident since Chernobyl and a global debate about nuclear energy’s safety that had direct relevance to Jamaica’s ongoing energy diversification discussions.

Caribbean diaspora communities in North America and the UK, whose humanitarian mobilisation capacity had been built and tested by Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, responded rapidly to Japan’s crisis. The pattern — community organisations channelling donations through established international humanitarian agencies, Caribbean-American churches organising relief collections, diaspora professional networks raising funds through their members — was by now well-practised. The Haiti experience had, in effect, institutionalised a diaspora humanitarian response infrastructure that could be activated for non-Caribbean disasters as well.

Egypt, Libya, and the Arab Spring’s Diaspora Resonance

Mubarak’s fall on 11 February — eleven days after he had appeared on Egyptian state television to announce he would not stand for re-election, only to be forced from office hours later by the scale of the Tahrir Square protests — was celebrated in diaspora communities that had followed the Arab Spring’s progression since Tunisia’s Ben Ali fled on 14 January. The television images of Tahrir Square — the crowds, the chants, the collective will that had moved an entrenched authoritarian government — resonated across communities with their own histories of resistance and collective action.

Libya’s trajectory was less celebratory. NATO’s intervention on 19 March — the first Western military action in an Arab country since the 2003 Iraq invasion — divided diaspora opinion along lines that partly reflected the Caribbean’s own historical experience of Western intervention. The CARICOM community’s silence on Libya, as distinct from its solidarity with Egypt, was itself a political signal.

The Dudus Affair: Golding’s Persistent Crisis

The Western Kingston Commission of Enquiry into the May 2010 Tivoli Incursion was, through Q1 2011, producing daily testimony about the security operation in which official figures acknowledged 73 civilian deaths. Witnesses described the character of the operation, the circumstances of deaths, and the relationship between the security forces and the Tivoli Gardens community. For diaspora Jamaicans — many of whom had family connections to West Kingston and had been following the affair since the extradition request’s first revelation in 2009 — the commission’s hearings were disturbing reading.

Christopher Coke himself remained at large, having evaded the security forces’ May 2010 operation and disappeared. US pressure for Jamaica to execute the extradition remained intense. The political cost to Golding was accumulating: internal JLP polling showed discomfort with his leadership, and opposition PNP leader Portia Simpson Miller was consistently ahead in personal approval ratings.

We report next from 2 July 2011, by which time the Dudus extradition saga — whether resolved or continuing — will have defined another quarter of Jamaican political life.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 April 2011.

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