Island in the sun…Mahir Ali
BY 1983, it had been eight years since US troops had finally departed from Indochina. Much to the consternation of some in the military-industrial-political hierarchy, the so-called Vietnam syndrome the psychological repercussions of a superpower being defeated by a small Asian country militated against the idea of dispatching combat troops to distant lands.
The Beirut deployment of 1982 in the wake of Israels invasion of Lebanon was technically a peacekeeping mission, alongside France and Italy. (None intervened to pre-empt or halt the Sabra-Shatila massacre later that year.) But when a suicide bomber drove a truck into US military barracks near Beirut airport on Oct 23, 1983, the 241 fatalities added up to the worst single-day toll for US forces since the first day of the 1968 Tet Offensive.
The Beirut attack was blamed on Hezbollah. Two days later, the US was prepared to demonstrate it remained the big boss. So, 40 years ago last week, the Reagan administration achieved a long-desired objective by invading a Caribbean island that measures no more than 350 square miles, with a population of 98,000.
Grenada had been on Americas radar since the March 1979 New Jewel Movement (NJM) revolution, which had overthrown the repressive government of Sir Eric Gairy, who straddled the islands 1974 hop from a British colony to an independent neocolonial outpost on the southern fringes of the Caribbean, close to Venezuela but fairly distant from the US.
Grenada briefly stood out as a shining example.
The NJM was inspired by the civil rights movement in the US and liberation struggles in Africa as much as by the Cuban revolution, but its revolution was more or less peaceful. Its dozens of poorly armed cadres took the army by surprise while Gairy was out of the country possibly having left behind instructions that the NJM, by then the main opposition party, be eliminated.
It wasnt the fact of power changing hands that bothered the US as much as what came next. The Peoples Revolutionary Government (PRG), as the new regime styled itself, lost little time in making amends for the centuries of colonial exploitation and years of postcolonial continuity. In the four-and-a-half years it was in power, unemployment fell from 49pc to 14pc. A mass literacy programme took just a year to reduce national illiteracy to 2pc. Secondary education became free, and university education almost free. Healthcare improved, as did GNP.
Equal rights and pay for women were introduced, alongside paid maternity leave. Womens, youth and workers organisations were set up; these were consultative rather than decision-making bodies, but the boast of participatory democracy wasnt an empty one. The ruling NJM, however, remained restricted to 100 or so members, and there were growing tensions between its central committee and the PRG. The prime minister, Maurice Bishop, was not only popular among Grenadians but also established an international presence disproportionate to the size of his nation.
The direction of his administration meant that his overtures to Washington went unrewarded, and the usual sources of international credit dried up. Grenadas closeness to Havana and friendly ties with Moscow led the US to claim, with no evidence, that an airport being built with Cuban help would serve as a Soviet base. But it was game-planning an invasion for a different reason: Grenadas successes, however modest, offered an inspiring alternative to the typical neo-imperialist model. Thats why Nicaragua was simultaneously being destabilised and the Allende experiment in Chile had been aborted a decade earlier. Fidel Castro remained the biggest thorn in Uncle Sams side, but invading Cuba would not have been a Grenada-style slam dunk.
It wasnt the US invasion, though, that killed off the NJM experiment, but ructions within the party on seemingly ridiculous grounds that pitted the pragmatic Bishop against the majority of his central committee comrades. After he was placed under house arrest, a popular uprising on Oct 19, 1983, managed to liberate him, but just hours later, he and some of his colleagues were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned to death. His NJM rivals accused him of being insufficiently Leninist. They, in turn, were referred to by Castro as hyenas and the Pol Pot group.
Suffice it to say that by the time the US marines and their token Jamaican and Barbadian cohorts landed at the incomplete airport the Americans had objected to, they were effectively vultures feeding off the corpse of what the locals idealised as a revo.
The same airport today bears Bishops name, and this year Grenada for the first time marked his anniversary as National Heroes Day. Its all very well to memorialise that remarkable revo, but the main lesson must be about what even the tiniest nation can achieve under appropriate guidance.
Courtesy Dawn