Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

Back in No­vem­ber this col­umn de­scribed and il­lus­trat­ed the creep­ing mil­i­tarism of every­day life in the Caribbean. From com­put­er games and fash­ion to the war on drugs and for­eign mil­i­tary aid it showed how the Caribbean and in par­tic­u­lar our own so­ci­ety is mov­ing in one di­rec­tion: in­creased mil­i­tari­sa­tion with all the at­ten­dant dan­gers to our free­doms, safe­ty, and every­day lives that this in­volves.

One con­cern about in­creased mil­i­tarism in the Caribbean was what it meant for law en­force­ment in T&T and the blur­ring of the bound­ary be­tween polic­ing and mil­i­tary op­er­a­tions. Most specif­i­cal­ly, when a State be­comes more mil­i­tarised so do those it deems crim­i­nals, not to men­tion the wider cul­ture of the so­ci­ety it­self.

There is no bet­ter ex­am­ple of this than the US where some­thing aca­d­e­mics call the "per­ma­nent war econ­o­my" seeps in­to every­thing, in­clud­ing the ma­jor­i­ty of pub­lic- and pri­vate­ly-fund­ed sci­en­tif­ic re­search, tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ment, en­ter­tain­ment and polic­ing. Fur­ther­more, lob­by­ists con­nect­ed with the arms in­dus­try and its lim­it­less sub­sidiaries now dri­ve much po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sion-mak­ing.

Nowhere is this bet­ter doc­u­ment­ed than in An­drew Fe­in­stein's for­mi­da­ble book, The Shad­ow World: In­side the Glob­al Arms Trade. For more than ten years now the US has been em­broiled in the war on ter­ror. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma's mil­i­tary drones rain down mis­siles on sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists dai­ly.

And so it has come to pass that sim­i­lar drones to those used in the war on ter­ror are be­ing test­ed and pro­posed as tools for lo­cal polic­ing at home. The Or­wellian dystopia of the fu­ture is al­ready knock­ing at the door. All this brings us to our own sit­u­a­tion. Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er has a port­fo­lio to at­tend to. Tack­ling our crime sit­u­a­tion is ob­vi­ous­ly a dif­fi­cult job and reme­dies are des­per­ate­ly need­ed.

How­ev­er, the sug­ges­tions that the mil­i­tary should–out­side of ex­cep­tion­al cir­cum­stances–be giv­en the same ar­rest pow­ers as the po­lice smells of short-ter­mism and a lack of con­cern for the long-term con­se­quences to wider lo­cal cul­ture and so­ci­ety. A mil­i­tary with po­lice pow­ers is not a long-term fix. The cyn­ic might sug­gest it is a short-term push to low­er crime fig­ures in a quest for re-elec­tion.

Here is a sim­ple list of some ob­jec­tions to the min­is­ter's pro­pos­al.

1) The mil­i­tary is trained in the use of dead­ly force, and to re­spond to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters; they are not trained in deal­ing with every­day, nor­mal sit­u­a­tions, the law, or crim­i­nal ev­i­dence.

2) It cre­ates op­por­tu­ni­ties for those in po­lit­i­cal pow­er to use the mil­i­tary against their op­po­nents.

3) It un­der­mines any con­fi­dence the pub­lic has in the po­lice force and could pro­duce dis­con­tent be­tween the po­lice and the army.

4) There is no body or com­mis­sion the pub­lic can turn to should mil­i­tary per­son­nel abuse their new pow­ers.

5) There are mas­sive le­gal im­pli­ca­tions.

An­oth­er is­sue the min­is­ter's pro­pos­al ob­scures–yet again–are the high lev­els of cor­rup­tion that plague our na­tion and which con­tribute great­ly to gen­er­al law­less­ness. If those with the mon­ey, con­nec­tions, and po­lit­i­cal sway get away with break­ing the law, it is no sur­prise that those with lit­tle mon­ey, con­nec­tions, and po­lit­i­cal sway see law-break­ing as a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy for get­ting what they might deem is theirs. Gang­ster­ism, af­ter all, knows no class bound­aries.

Will the min­is­ter's army of 1,000 al­so be go­ing af­ter those high­er-class mem­bers of so­ci­ety who break the law or is the pro­posed of­fen­sive on­ly aimed at low in­come mem­bers of our so­ci­ety who in many sit­u­a­tions could point to his­tor­i­cal and cu­mu­la­tive dis­ad­van­tages against cer­tain ar­eas and so­cial groups?

Neo-colo­nial­ism isn't some fan­cy aca­d­e­m­ic term; it is the re­al­i­ty of our mod­ern na­tion. It is the lega­cy be­queathed to us from our colo­nial past, and the struc­tur­al re­al­i­ty of racism, clas­sism, cor­rup­tion and nepo­tism that abounds.

Our econ­o­my, so­cial struc­ture, and po­lit­i­cal set-up are all rem­nants of the sys­tem set up and left by oth­ers. It has al­ways been up to us to re­make that but the Caribbean coun­tries were sad­ly left di­vid­ed by race, class and eth­nic­i­ty, and tied to the in­evitable con­se­quences of that.

To dis­con­nect our crime prob­lem from the larg­er his­tor­i­cal process and claim we can fix the prob­lem by putting the mil­i­tary per­ma­nent­ly on the streets will not make our so­ci­ety bet­ter or even safer in the long term. Rather, it will stretch the al­ready ex­ist­ing di­vi­sions be­tween rich and poor, mak­ing our so­ci­ety more dan­ger­ous, and un­der­mine our democ­ra­cy it­self.

�2 Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI, St Au­gus­tine.