Grenada '83: deadly clash of ideas

By Bukka Rennie
October 29, 2003

In 1999, on the anniversary of the American invasion of Grenada, we wrote the following piece and because once again there is a rising clamour for closure, this piece, we feel, still stands in 2003 to be quite appropriate.

...What were the objective and subjective conditions that provided the basis for the Bishop/Coard conflict which resulted in the murderous debacle in October1983?

We watched the developments from T&T and hoped that the fact that they all grew up together, that Bishop's mother was Coard's "nenny" and vice-versa, that the differences could be worked out amicably.

However, the fact that our hopes were dashed indicates the extent of the bitterness that existed and how much and how rapidly the situation and the relationships deteriorated. The question is why?

When the NJM came to power in March 1979, we wrote them a letter discussing the question of consolidation and transformation. We said then:

"How to consolidate is an historic question of great import. It is the question over which revolutionaries disagree the most. You have to chart your own course, for you know best your situation. The path to consolidation and transformation differs in each case. There are universal fundamentals but just as well there are particularities that define the uniqueness of each situation.

"Pretty soon, we may hear lots of intellectual argument and abstract analyses about a Grenadian model. It happens all the time, it cannot be expected to be otherwise. The point is that with you lies tremendous responsibility. To shirk it or to try to bear it alone in the Caribbean will definitely be suicidal. We all have to hammer a clear way or else...

"There are two things that maybe we should say. First of all, many people have argued that in the process of consolidation and transformation when capital and capitalist relations are predominant and on the offensive, the process of democratisation cannot be facilitated, that instead the revolutionary party with the use of the inherited State must consolidate itself and its realms of power. We disagree. In any case the situation is usually more complicated than that.

"In our view the only basis upon which consolidation is possible is in fact the broadening of the democratisation process. The party must be strengthened and consolidated but the involvement of the whole people in all social activity, which is the key question, demands permanent, popular democratic forms and institutions that eventually provide the base structure for the transformation of the State.

"How to wield simultaneously old and new forms that are extremely opposite in nature is the problem. But that is the dialectics of consolidation and transformation. No blueprints exist. It is swim or sink!

"We are pleased to hear that the old Constitution has been dispensed with and the people are to be convened to decide. The point is that the very forms in which they gather to decide can be made to be the very forms that are institutionalised as the democratic structures of the new State. And elections?

"Who says, we are telling people in T&T, that elections must be about warring parties only representing specific group interests and elitist cliques trying to get into a bourgeois-type Parliament? Why can't it be elections to people's committees, councils and assemblies organised at local, area and national levels? In other words democratic expression in the widest sense.

"NJM must be the strong, advanced elements to pose these things boldly and to influence the population in some direction of this nature. Once the population agrees in their national convocation, you will have the only kind of constitutional legitimacy that really matters..."

Of course, Coard and his clique would plug for the supremacy of the party over everything and everyone. They could not understand the delicate relationship between the organised vanguard (ie the NJM party) and the mass forms of democracy (such as the parish councils) that had begun to function all over Grenada.

We kept telling the Grenadian activists and interested people in T&T as well as students of history that the relationship between these "opposites" was fundamental to success, and that if the NJM did not harmonise these opposites then sooner than later they will end up shooting down people in the streets. We were called "anti-party" revisionists all over the Caribbean.

Bishop understood and began to veer away from the early exuberances and excesses of the NJM and on the Caribbean front he began to do the necessary damage-control and many of the then Caribbean leaders began to warm to him.

Interestingly, the USA did everything at this point to stall Bishop's outreach programme, deeming him a "dangerous demagogue" and "dictator" and friend of Fidel Castro, but no sooner had Bishop been put under house arrest by Coard, the USA conveniently changed their tune to suit their invasion plans. Bishop became then to the Americans the nice, well-loved moderate and hero of the Grenadian people.

Coard, on the other hand, seeing the road that Bishop as the popular leader of the people was bent on charting, felt, because of his own political miseducation, that party supremacy, and therefore the revolution, was under threat and in his weird logic made his move.

The issue of "sharing leadership" was a non-issue and a "red herring" geared to disguise the real intention. Coard was already Deputy Prime Minister and the foremost ideological leader of the party, what else was there to share? The people's love and respect that Bishop had earned over years could not be shared. No one but Coard could help Coard in this regard.

Once Bishop was arrested, it was all over. "No Bishop, no work, no revo," replied the people en masse. It was all a miscalculation on the part of Coard and his Central Committee cohorts.

In their apology statement last week, Coard, Layne, Cornwall and Strachan claimed that the people released Bishop and took him to Fort Rupert, "the headquarters of the army," and the "armoury was seized" and therefore to their minds "civil war was evidently at the door."

That is a blatant lie. Fort Rupert was basically an administrative army post, the full-fledged armoury was at Fort Frederick where the Central Committee was based. From there Layne and company moved with three armoured personnel carriers to attack basically unarmed people at Fort Rupert. That is the reality.

The people at Fort Rupert had no choice but to surrender after coming under fire. It was then that Bishop, Jackie Creft, Whiteman, Noel and the two Bains were lined up and assassinated. The US invasion was then executed.

They had already done military exercises in the Caribbean, including a "mock invasion of Amber and the Amberdines" and it was clear they were merely awaiting some signal, some event, some happening, before they moved in.

Obviously the US, through their covert elements, had a lot to do with the intensification of the conflict. We will never know who did what to help trigger things in Grenada. But we are well aware in T&T after the experiences of 1970 and 1990, that once such social explosions become imminent, local sons and daughters serving in the US military institutions suddenly come back home for no apparent reason. They are usually the "moles" who do the dirty work for Uncle Sam...

It is never wise to shirk from principle. Only the people of Grenada themselves must decide whether to pardon anybody. Let all the issues be brought before the people, and of course the people will want to know what was done with the bodies, and why after the surrender at Fort Rupert did not the Central Committee at Fort Frederick, in that famous 15 minutes lapse, not appeal for peace and reconciliation, rather than let the executions take place.

Let all the information be put on the table, then let the people, maybe in their parish councils, deliberate and decide. It is the only way.

The greatest shame was for Caribbean people to witness these big, bad, so-called revolutionaries in their drawers hiding under their beds when the Americans landed to squash Grenada's sovereignty. If they had died there defending Grenada, at least they would have deserved some respect...