Following right on the heels of the posting of the Albert Einstein insanity comment on Facebook, General Secretary of the People's National Party (PNP) Peter Bunting has acknowledged, by implication, that his party still retains ties with criminal gunmen, as does the other one, the main target of his broadside in Parliament as he contributed to the Sectoral Debate.

Bunting is in an excellent position to know. Not only is he general secretary of the PNP, he is the Opposition's shadow spokesperson on national security in the Parliament. I hope the security forces are in the practice of briefing the Opposition and its national security spokesperson on crime intelligence. And if not, they should start now.

Confession and appeal

Even as Bunting was delivering his confession and appeal, there was a fresh outbreak of violence in the Mountain View Avenue area, an area which has been heavily worked - in inevitable futility - by the Peace Management Initiative.

The Gleaner ran a pre-election editorial some time ago which said: "Men who should be considered to be of high dignity too often appear in the company of persons known to be of evil reputation. The election is being conducted in some quarters as if it cannot be won without the support of criminals." This was not 1989. This was not 1976, or even the dreadful 1980 election year. This is The Daily Gleaner editorial of November 11, 1949, a month before that year's election, which was only the second under Universal Adult Suffrage!

By that time, right near the dawn of our modern political history, candidates of the 11-year-old PNP and the six-year-old Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) were well-prepared for violent conflict during election campaigns. Strong-arm politics had already become an entrenched feature of political contest. [Amanda Sives on "The Historical Roots of Violence in Jamaica" in Anthony Harriott Understanding Crime in Jamaica.]

On July 6, 1949, a man was stoned, beaten and stabbed to death in Gordon Town as an act of political violence during a closely fought by-election for a vacant Kingston and St Andrew Corporation seat, which the JLP candidate eventually won by a mere 42 votes. Within less than 48 hours of the incident, Governor John Huggins launched a commission of enquiry with Sir Hector Hearne as sole commissioner, with the brief to "nail responsibility to the mast of the party concerned".

The Hearne Report became the first of many reports on political violence and politics and crime. Sir Hector reported: "The organisation and instigation of violence must be placed at the door of the PNP." To which the party's president, Norman Manley responded that the report was "intemperate and unbalanced".

Striking fact

"One of the striking facts to emerge from the enquiry, particularly noticeable in the context of the peace pledges," Sives, researching out of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, noted, "was the key role of candidates as agents of conflict rather than peace."

"By 1949, [not the 1960s and connected to certain Kingston and St Andrew constituencies and leaders] both political parties were engaged in violence to achieve political goals: the JLP to keep the PNP off the streets of Kingston, and the PNP to force their way back, to campaign for their party and their union movement."

The relationship between the political parties and criminal gangs has undergone many changes, but has never disappeared. It constructed the garrisons, which now account for some 80 per cent of the murders in the country and which have exported violent criminality to the rest of the country.

The relationship, including electoral fraud, Jamaica's leading criminologist, Anthony Harriott, argues, represents a distinct case of elite mass criminality bringing together to perceived mutual advantage the powerful and the relatively powerless people from different locations in the social hierarchy, but with similar motivations, in organised criminality, openly and on a mass scale.

"This raises the issue of the political parties being criminal organisations," Harriott argues. And a point of deepest concern to us citizens is Harriott's explicit conclusion of the very obvious that, "these activities ... have profound implications for ordinary criminality, especially the normalisation of crime, which is reflected in the view that criminality has become conformist behaviour ... ."

Obika Gray traces the emergence and progress of the "Fateful Alliance" between politics and criminality in his book, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica. Gray there noted that "as part of its effort to resist JLP violence, the PNP drew militant recruits from workplaces in Kingston. The party also mobilised its own gang of political activists, including a contingent at 69 Matthews Lane, a street with die-hard PNP adherents in Bustamante's West Kingston constituency.

New identities

The Matthews Lane 69ers figured prominently in the 1949 Gordon Town political violence as they were bussed there for supplying muscle. Reliable anecdotal stories suggest that heroic legal efforts were made to provide some 69ers with new identities to facilitate migration and escape prosecution for criminal offences.

"Thus, from the moment Jamaicans won the right to vote, and native politicians got the opportunity to become incumbents of state power, political violence ... became an organising feature of Jamaican politics," this Jamaican political scientist in the diaspora concludes.

The cost has been horrendous, not only in development opportunities lost, not only in the systematic destruction of homes and infrastructure reducing swathes of Kingston to urban ruinate, but most of the 30,000-plus lives lost to violence in the last 40 years and right up to now, can be linked to political violence in some way. The criminalisation of the political parties and the society at large may be the greatest cost of all.

And MP, party gen sec and national security spokesperson for the Opposition, Peter Bunting, will have us to understand that party ties to gunmen are alive and well.

As all the crime reports, including the MacMillan Road Map, have made clear, in concurrence with common sense and street knowledge, the crime problem cannot be seriously brought under control without cutting those ties. It was clear that Colonel Trevor MacMillan would not succeed as minister of national security, despite being the principal architect of the Road Map. When he called for the severing of ties, he could not have known then that he would be appointed minister of national security with the task of wielding the giant shears. MacMillan, the old soldier, becoming thoroughly the politician, quickly lost the taste for the fight.

Let's see if Dwight Nelson, the inheritor of the Road Map, will be first partyman, or statesman. Nobody in national security since the 1970s, when political violence, matured has been.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.