http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20050306/focus/focus3.html
Published: Sunday | March 6, 2005

IN NOVEMBER 2003 tens of thousands of Georgians demonstrated for weeks against tainted election results until President Edward Shevardnadze resigned in what was called the 'rose' revolution. A year on similar scenes in Ukraine brought new elections and a new regime in the 'orange' revolution. This week mass marches sparked by former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination swept the Syrian-backed Lebanese government from power in what is being dubbed the 'cedar' revolution.

Last year Afghanistan held its first election in more than 50 years. So did Iraq in January. And this week, Egypt's President Mubarak asked parliament to allow multiple candidates in presidential polls ­ meaning that for the first time since the days of the Pharaohs, the Egyptian people will choose their ruler.

Might we be witnessing a historic period of peaceful democratic revolution? Let's hope so. The older I get the less certain I am of anything. But this much I know ­ democracy is good and the more democracy the better.

It is amazing how quickly long-held conventional wisdom can become unthinkable. For instance, all parties assumed for years that a large Syrian army presence was needed to keep Lebanon stable. Suddenly Lebanese are demanding with their feet that Syria leave, and it looks increasingly likely that it will soon do so. As Victor Hugo said, no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.

GOLDING INSPIRES HOPE

Here in little old Jamaica some people are wondering if we might not soon be experiencing our own 'golden' revolution. For many feel that if he acts boldly and wisely, Bruce Golding can be the man who makes the idea of 'garrison' politics in this county as unimaginable in a few years as the idea of a Berlin wall is in Germany today.

Mr. Golding has already presided over a revolution of sorts. For he has become the second most powerful politician in the land despite relentlessly ­ at least in his post-1995 reincarnation ­ espousing ideas and taking an approach which pundits said could never succeed in Jamaica's corrupted political system. When as NDM president he kept condemning the entire concept of entrenched partisanship, many political 'experts' derided him as 'naïve'. Some commentators who boast of 'knowing the score' taunted him for being 'afraid to lose his virginity'.

Admittedly, Mr. Golding at times appeared a foolish Don Quixote tilting against the windmills of political reality. Shortly after he resigned as NDM leader I saw him at a function where he mostly stood by himself, seemingly weary and bowed.

'Another dreamer chewed up and spat out by the system' was the thought that occurred to me. Clearly those who asserted that he would have been wiser to do a Gorbachev and act the sheep in wolf's clothing while trying to change the beast from within had been proven right.

THE JLP'S GOLDEN EGG

Back then even he must have seen himself as finished politically. But even more than the brave, fortune favours the persistent. Mr. Golding stayed in the public radar via a radio talk show where he astutely stayed on message while delivering statesmanlike prognostications. And somehow the fates conspired to bear him up from radio land limbo and back into the political spotlight without him having to do much more than say 'yes' to becoming a JLP executive during the 2002 general election.

Since then a seemingly irresistible tide of popular opinion has inexorably pushed him forward until he now finds himself the de facto Leader of the Opposition. For all the talk of behind the scenes Machiavellian machinations, all Mr. Golding really had to do was to wait, keep saying the right thing, and not do anything stupid. For the polls were massively in his favour, and what the people want they eventually get.

Surely, he must sometimes marvel at the seeming inevitability with which the present situation has unfolded. Indeed, right now the JLP probably needs him more than he needs the JLP. For while he's never given the impression of having a will to power at any cost, it is difficult to see the public considering any other Labourite as a potential prime minister in the next general election. If Mr. Golding walked away today the PNP would be a virtual certainty to win a fifth straight term, no matter who takes over from P.J. Patterson. And everyone in his party knows it.

Not that Mr. Golding has laid to rest all doubts. As a friend said, she couldn't trust him again after seeing him go back to the Labour Party he disparaged so vehemently as NDM leader (though she still considered him the best of our bad bunch of politicians). And there has been much speculation, a lot of it from his predecessor, about the income source of some of his prominent supporters.

But in politics as in life, you can't please all the people all the time. And the reality is that circumstances have granted Mr. Golding the greatest opportunity of any Jamaican politician since Michael Manley to break completely with the past and remake his party completely in his own vision.

JAMAICANS FED UP

Successful revolutions need both the right conditions and the right leaders ­ 'cometh the hour, cometh the man'. Perhaps I'm reading too much into things, but it is my feeling that our horrific murder rate ­ now the world's highest ­ has made Jamaicans more fed up than ever before of the ties between politicians and criminals and the 'garrisons' that create and make these bonds necessary.

It is a sad but unavoidable fact that all the persons likely to run for Prime Minister in the next election ­ Bruce Golding, Peter Phillips, Portia Simpson and Omar Davis ­ are in constituencies where the perception is that people are not free to vote as they wish. The world-weary view has always been that undesirable as this situation is, our leaders are powerless to do anything about what is a culturally ingrained problem. Yet, for 10 years Mr. Golding has insisted that if given political power he would prove it does not have to be thus.

Well, he has the power now. And Jamaicans are waiting to see if he is a man of his word. Will he declare to his constituents that he will not associate with or attend the funerals of any known criminals? Will he be willing to give the names of any wanted men he becomes aware of to the police? Will he keep reiterating his call to P.J. and Omar and Peter and Portia to walk hand in hand with him through Tivoli and Rema and Arnett and Jungle and all those other places whose names elicit such fear from ordinary Jamaicans?

Cynics will pre-emptively dismiss all of this as 'mere symbolism'. But as the rose and orange and cedar revolutions have shown, symbolism backed by popular sentiment can result in massive mindset changes. The great question is if ordinary Jamaicans want to take back our society and political system from the probably no more than 5,000 or so 'bad men' who hold such large swathes of this country to ransom at gunpoint.

On a much bigger stage Ronald Reagan once famously declared "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." I would like to hear Bruce Golding say "Mr. Patterson, let us tear down those invisible walls dividing our people."