Jamaican Vote Arrives With Eerie Calm

On the final day of campaigning for national elections that will determine the fate of one of the Caribbean’s oldest--and bloodiest--democracies, no one in this rural crossroads acknowledged that Jamaica’s opposition leader was about to arrive in town ahead of today’s voting.

In the anarchy of the marketplace, where street peddlers hawk everything from boxer shorts to Barbie dolls, most warned a stranger not to even speak about politics.

At Willy’s Bar and Restaurant near the town square, beneath a Bob Marley clock and “No Ganja Smoking” signs, an elderly patron explained.

“In the United States, you have the Democratic and Republican parties. In Britain, you have the Conservative and Labor parties,” the retired teacher, who identified himself only as Gordon, replied when asked why so simple an event as a campaign rally is secret here.

“Here, it’s different. It’s a bit rough. You’ve got to be a diplomat. You don’t take sides. You don’t talk politics. You mark your ballot. You go home and lock your doors.”

Behind that fear are nearly two decades of election violence and fraud that have claimed hundreds of lives, tainted a trend toward peaceful democracy in the Caribbean and pushed this island nation to what former President Jimmy Carter, leading a 55-member team of international election observers, on Tuesday labeled “a watershed” in Jamaica’s half-century-old democratic system.

“The people are just sick and tired of the violence,” said Horace Dalley, a ruling-party candidate for Parliament in central Jamaica.

With the latest opinion polls published Wednesday showing Prime Minister P.J. Patterson and his ruling People’s National Party maintaining a comfortable lead over his chief rival, conservative Edward Seaga and his Jamaica Labor Party, analysts have said the greatest drama lies not in who wins and loses but how peacefully they do so.

Against the backdrop of clashes during past elections between Seaga’s well-armed supporters and equally fortified ruling-party factions that left hundreds dead in urban districts so embattled they are called “garrison constituencies,” a Carter aide said: “The key question is: Is there a way to stop this downward spiral of violence?”

“Jamaica has become a curious paradox,” added Robert Pastor, the chief strategist for the Carter Center delegation. “On the one hand it has one of the oldest, deepest democratic cultures and on the other there’s the presence of these armed political gangs that are the antithesis to the democratic process.”

Despite a remarkably calm week in advance of today’s polls, Kingston-area hospitals announced Tuesday that they have stocked up on blood, intravenous fluid and bandages, bracing for a possible election day influx of gunshot and machete wounds.

Jamaica’s national police, backed by the army, have deployed 6,500 regular officers and 12,000 election day deputies and will inaugurate today a high-tech, computerized command center and rapid-response force that will be monitored by South Pasadena Police Chief Michael Berkow, a member of the Carter Center delegation.

Carter’s delegation also includes retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, and boxer Evander Holyfield.

On Wednesday, Carter and Powell attended what amounted to a peace conference between Seaga, Patterson and Bruce Golding, the leader of a new third party, the National Democratic Movement. One by one, the three Jamaican leaders took the podium to commit their parties to free, fair and peaceful polls.

“Peace and the freedom from fear are the essential elements of the democracy we are trying to build and sustain,” Patterson declared.

Seaga, who served two terms as prime minister in the 1980s and campaigned this fall to the “Mission Impossible” theme song, warned: “If we cannot have fair and free elections, there will be a buildup of frustration . . . that can be expressed in so many ways.”

“Most of us cling to the hope that the politicians in the traditional parties will be able to restrain their marauding troops,” Stephen Vasciannie, the National Democratic Movement’s spokesman, wrote in a published commentary this week. But, he added, the question remains: “Will we ever have peaceful, democratic elections in Jamaica again?”

That fear, which has mobilized a new citizens election-watchdog group for the first time this year, dates to Jamaica’s carnage of 1980, an election year that witnessed an estimated 600 political slayings. The elections since have been disrupted by fraud, violence and boycotts.

Already, nearly 1,000 people have been slain in Jamaica this year, although police officials and analysts here say a majority of the killings appear to be related more to escalating street crime, drug trafficking and a deteriorating social fabric than to politics.

But leaders of the new, independent Jamaican poll-watching group, formed in part by the Roman Catholic Church, and other social activists warn that the lull in election violence may be deceiving.

“We’re an armed camp,” said Msgr. Richard Albert, a New York-born Catholic priest who has worked with the poor in Kingston, the capital, for 22 years and now serves on the governing council of Citizens Action for Free and Fair Elections. “Even though it appears somewhat calm and tranquil now, at any moment gunmen can take over an entire section of the capital city of this country at will.”

Albert and other social activists said the fear of violence has overshadowed critical social issues for most of the hundreds of thousands of Jamaican voters who today will select a new 60-member lower house of Parliament.

Citing government statistics, he said 20% of the Jamaican people hold 80% of the island’s wealth--a sharp increase over four years ago. He added that 94% of all births in Kingston are out of wedlock, 60% of primary school graduates can neither read nor write and 70% of the population has never seen a dentist.

Faced with choosing from among 199 candidates in the two major parties and three new independent ones--including one party of Jamaica’s home-grown Rastafarian religious followers and another whose manifesto is based on transcendental meditation--many Jamaicans privately said it wasn’t worth the risk of going out in the streets to reach the polls.

But others, such as Jamaican poll watcher Fabian Brown, said they viewed today’s vote as their last line of defense against the gunmen who have terrorized them and perverted Jamaica’s political process.

“Our message has been simple,” said Brown, executive director of a social foundation whose citizens group has mobilized more than 1,000 poll watchers to monitor today’s elections. “It is absolutely essential to get out and vote. This is the only way to fight back.”