The Gulf War Ends and Thatcher Is Gone: A Community Greets a New Order

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 1991 | Period covered: January–June 1991

Key Developments at a Glance

• 28 February 1991: Gulf War ends; Operation Desert Storm liberates Kuwait in 100 hours of ground combat; Caribbean community reflects on the war’s political lessons.
• Post-war Kurdish refugee crisis: one million Kurds flee into Turkey and Iran as Saddam Hussein suppresses uprising the West encouraged.
• John Major’s first full year as PM; Caribbean community assesses whether his government will differ from Thatcher’s on race and equality.
• Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings in the US attract intense Caribbean community attention on race and institutional power.
• Michael Manley PM Jamaica; CARICOM nations press for recognition of Caribbean interests in post-Cold War international order.
• Police stops-and-search disproportionality documented again; community organisations press for enforcement of the PACE codes of practice.

The first half of 1991 is a period in which the world’s political architecture is being visibly remade, and in which the Caribbean community in Britain attempts to read what the changes mean for a community that has always had to navigate its interests through the structures of states and institutions that have not always acted with its welfare in mind. Operation Desert Storm — the military campaign to reverse Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait, authorised by the UN Security Council and executed primarily by the United States and its coalition partners — begins on 17 January with a massive air campaign and ends on 28 February 1991 with a hundred hours of ground combat and a ceasefire that restores Kuwait’s sovereignty while leaving Saddam Hussein’s regime in place. The Caribbean community’s response to the Gulf War is nuanced: the principle of collective security and the illegality of Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait are clear, but the speed and scale of international response to this instance of territorial aggression invites comparison with the international community’s slower responses to other crises where the strategic interests of the major powers were less immediately at stake.

The Gulf War and Its Aftermath

The Gulf War is won with a military efficiency that impresses and a political settlement that disturbs. Saddam Hussein remains in power. The Shi’a and Kurdish uprisings that George Bush encouraged in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire are suppressed by the Iraqi army with enormous brutality — using helicopter gunships that the ceasefire terms, as it turns out, do not prevent. More than a million Kurdish civilians flee to the Turkish and Iranian borders in a refugee crisis of extraordinary scale, and the international community’s belated response — safe havens, no-fly zones, Operation Provide Comfort — comes only after the full scale of the humanitarian disaster is visible to the world’s cameras. The Caribbean community’s political tradition, shaped by the experience of being encouraged by great powers to take positions that were then abandoned when those powers’ interests shifted, reads the Kurdish situation with a precision born of familiarity.

After Thatcher: Assessing Major’s First Months

John Major, who succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in November 1990 following her resignation after the first round of the Conservative leadership contest, has now been in office for more than half a year. The Caribbean community’s assessment of the new Prime Minister is provisional, careful, and not uncharitable: Major is not Thatcher, and in the specific register of political presentation — his manner, his willingness to acknowledge complexity, his apparent interest in social cohesion — there are differences that the community notes without overstating. His Citizen’s Charter programme, announced in July 1991, sets out standards of public service delivery that, at least in principle, apply to all citizens equally.

But the community’s concrete demands — on immigration reform, on police accountability, on the extension of race relations law, on equal opportunities in public employment and the professions — have not been addressed by Major’s first months. The government that took Britain into the Gulf War with a coalition mandate and an assertion of international law has not shown comparable willingness to apply legal principle to the treatment of its Black citizens at home. The community watches and waits for evidence that the change of leader means a change of direction.

Policing and the Community: The Persistent Gap

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and its Codes of Practice, which govern the use of stop-and-search powers and set procedural requirements for their exercise, have been in force for seven years. The Caribbean community’s assessment of their impact is sober: the disproportionate use of stop-and-search against Black people in British cities has not been significantly reduced by the PACE framework, and the monitoring mechanisms that were supposed to ensure accountability have not produced the change in practice that was their purpose. Community organisations document, again and again, the pattern of stops that do not produce arrests, that serve no investigative purpose, and that communicate to young Black men a message about their relationship with the state that the formal law does not intend but that policing practice delivers with consistency.

The community’s demands in this period are familiar and precise: independent oversight of the police with real investigative powers, monitoring of stop-and-search with ethnic data publicly reported, consequences for officers who breach the PACE codes, and engagement with community organisations in the development of policing strategy in the areas where the Caribbean community is most concentrated. These demands have been made since the Scarman Report of 1981; they have been acknowledged and not acted upon with sufficient seriousness. The community makes them again, with the patience of people who know they are right and the determination of people who do not intend to stop.

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.

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