Golding Under Fire: Coke, Tivoli and a Community in Crisis

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2011 | Period covered: January–June 2011

---

Key Developments at a Glance

• Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke arrives in New York to face drug trafficking and racketeering charges after June 2010 extradition.
• Jamaica’s parliament debates the Tivoli Commission of Enquiry into the 2010 security operation that killed over 70 civilians.
• Prime Minister Bruce Golding faces sustained political pressure over his initial resistance to the Coke extradition request.
• UK coalition government’s austerity cuts fall disproportionately on public services in Caribbean-heritage communities.
• Deportation charter flights to Jamaica continue; Detention Action mounts legal challenges to specific flights.
• Diaspora remittances to Jamaica remain a critical economic lifeline as Kingston seeks to stabilise public finances.

---

The first half of 2011 has been defined, for the Jamaican political community and its diaspora, by the long and painful aftermath of the events of May 2010 — the Christopher “Dudus” Coke extradition and the Tivoli Gardens security operation that accompanied it. The repercussions continue to reshape Jamaican politics, to test the relationship between the state and garrison communities, and to generate uncomfortable questions about governance, accountability, and the rule of law that the diaspora in Britain is watching with close and sometimes anguished attention.

The Coke Affair: A Year On

Christopher Coke, the West Kingston don known as “Dudus” who led the Shower Posse crime network from the Tivoli Gardens garrison community in Kingston, was extradited to the United States in June 2010 following a months-long diplomatic crisis in which Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s government initially refused to honour the US extradition request, engaged a Washington lobbying firm to resist it, and eventually capitulated following overwhelming pressure from the US State Department and the Jamaican business community. Coke is now in federal custody in New York, facing drug trafficking and racketeering charges that are expected to result in a significant prison term.

The legacy of the affair is playing out in Jamaica through the first half of 2011 on multiple levels. The Tivoli Gardens security operation of 24–28 May 2010 — in which the Jamaica Defence Force and Jamaica Constabulary Force moved to dismantle the garrison and arrest Coke — resulted in the deaths of more than seventy civilians, according to multiple independent accounts. The government’s own figures acknowledge a significant number of fatalities, while community groups and human rights organisations have documented accounts of extrajudicial killings and summary executions that, if proved, would constitute grave human rights violations. A Commission of Enquiry has been announced, but its terms of reference and timeline have been the subject of intense negotiation and political dispute.

For the Jamaican diaspora in Britain, the Tivoli affair has been a source of deep distress that sits alongside, and complicates, the community’s pride in Jamaica and its aspirations for the island. The garrison system — the political patronage networks centred on politically affiliated communities in Kingston and other urban centres, which have been a feature of Jamaican political life for decades — has long been a source of concern for diaspora commentators who see it as a structural impediment to the rule of law and democratic accountability. The Coke affair has laid that system bare in a way that has generated frank and sometimes painful conversations within the community about what Jamaica needs to become.

Bruce Golding: A Weakened Premier

Prime Minister Bruce Golding enters the first half of 2011 severely weakened by the Coke affair and its fallout. His initial resistance to the extradition request, and the revelation that his government had engaged the Washington lobbying firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips to advise on resisting the US request, generated a scandal that has not fully dissipated. A parliamentary enquiry into the Manatt affair concluded in 2010 with findings that were critical of the government’s handling of the situation, though Golding survived a confidence vote. His political authority, however, has never fully recovered.

The JLP government’s economic programme has also been tested by the global economic downturn and the terms of an IMF agreement entered into in 2010. The structural adjustment requirements of the agreement — fiscal consolidation, public sector wage restraint, debt restructuring — have placed constraints on government expenditure that have reduced services and strained public confidence. Golding’s position as party leader and Prime Minister is increasingly questioned within JLP circles, and political commentators in Kingston are discussing the possibility of a leadership transition before the general election that must be held by late 2012.

Austerity Britain: Cuts That Cut Deepest in Caribbean Communities

In the United Kingdom, the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, elected in May 2010, is implementing a programme of public spending reductions whose effects are being felt with particular sharpness in the communities of the Caribbean diaspora. The cuts to local authority funding, to housing benefit, to Sure Start children’s centres, to legal aid, and to a range of community and voluntary sector services fall disproportionately on the urban areas — Lambeth, Hackney, Brent, Handsworth, Moss Side, Chapeltown — where Caribbean-heritage families are most concentrated and most dependent on the public services under threat.

Community organisations that have provided welfare, advice, advocacy, and cultural services to Caribbean-heritage residents for decades are facing funding reductions that threaten their viability. Legal aid cuts, in particular, are a source of deep concern for those working with Caribbean-born residents who need legal assistance to navigate immigration, employment, or housing issues. The organisations that help people understand and exercise their rights are among those most acutely affected by the squeeze on public funding.

Unemployment among young Black men — many of them second- or third-generation Jamaican British — remains significantly higher than the national average, a disparity that the austerity-era reduction in public sector employment is likely to worsen. The public sector has historically been an important route into stable employment for Black British workers, partly because its formal equal opportunities frameworks offer more protection against discrimination than the private sector in practice provides. As public sector jobs are cut, this protective effect is reduced, and the structural disadvantages facing young Black men in the labour market are intensified.

Deportation and Rights

Deportation charter flights to Jamaica have continued through the first half of 2011, and campaign groups including Detention Action, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, and Jamaican diaspora organisations in Britain have continued to challenge individual removals in the courts and to press for policy reform. The coalition government has maintained the mandatory deportation framework introduced by the previous Labour administration under the UK Borders Act 2007, and Home Secretary Theresa May has signalled that immigration enforcement will, if anything, be tightened rather than relaxed under the coalition.

The particular injustice of deporting individuals who arrived in Britain as young children and have no meaningful connection to Jamaica — who speak with British accents, whose families are here, who regard themselves as entirely British — has been documented in individual cases that have attracted public attention. Legal challenges on human rights grounds — arguing that deportation in such circumstances violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to private and family life) — have succeeded in some cases and failed in others. The law is unsettled and the human cost of its application in borderline cases is severe.

As the first half of 2011 closes, the Jamaican diaspora in Britain is navigating a landscape of reduced public services, continuing immigration uncertainty, and the emotional complexity of watching Jamaica itself go through a period of painful political self-examination. The community’s resilience — its capacity to sustain itself through economic hardship, to maintain its cultural vitality, and to continue pressing for justice and recognition — has been tested before and will be tested again. That resilience is not in doubt. But the conditions that demand it should not be allowed to become the permanent background of Caribbean life in Britain.

---

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; Detention Action; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; UK Parliament Hansard; Jamaica High Commission London; Runnymede Trust; Home Office (UK); IMF Jamaica Article IV consultation.

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomes Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com