Grenada '83: Tragedy of Miseducation

18, Oct 1999
'In the course of all this organisational growth, individuals involved were forced to face untold brutality from Gairy's Mongoose Gang...'

'Coard did everything by the book. Creativity and flexibility was outside of his realm as he was a creature of learned behaviour.'

It is extremely difficult for us and people like us to accede to the call by some Grenadians for the general pardoning of Bernard Coard and his 16 accomplices who last week accepted responsibility for the historic and horrendous debacle that took place in Grenada on October 19, 1983.

We had watched that progressive movement grow in Grenada from its earliest strivings, much as one would watch the neighbour's child next door take its first steps of uncertainty.

From the early Forum Group that held meetings in the market square exposing the harsh realities of existence under the institutionalised evil that was Gairyism, to the formation of MAP, the Movement for the Assemblies of the People, led by Maurice Bishop, Louison, Creft and others, and later the emergence of the more rural based Jewel, led by Unison Whiteman and others, then finally onto the merger of MAP and Jewel to produce the powerful social force called the New Jewel Movement.

In the course of all this organisational growth, individuals involved were forced to face untold brutality from Gairy's Mongoose Gang and T&T, next door, became the safe haven to which people fled to literally patch their wounds and from where they sought to address the world about Grenada's grave social and political problems.

The biggest battle was to get people to stop seeing Gairy as a mere buffoon interested in UFOs and to understand that Gairy was an outright bloody and brutal dictator who possessed a peasant, small farmer-class base, owing to his particular history, and whom at that point could still rally huge support among the people of this class and use them against the progressive forces.

Significantly, Gairy's government was the only one in the English-speaking Caribbean that supported the Pinochet regime and had begun sending military personnel to Chile for specific training. And as was typical of Pinochet's Chile, Gairy's opponents began likewise to suddenly "disappear". We watched all this and empathised with the Grenadian progressives assisting in every way possible.

Interestingly, Coard was not part of these early developments. We first met Coard lecturing to UWI, St Augustine. He had come there from London where had done research on the issue of blacks within the British educational system, and had his findings published in booklet form.

His analyses, we recall, were rather scholarly and straightforward. Nary a hint therein of any Stalinist-type orthodoxy or perspective in his view of the world.

Coard's stint at St Augustine was short-lived owing to conflict with the administrative authorities and he moved on to Mona, Jamaica, where he was to come under the influence of Trevor Munroe and others of that ilk.

From Jamaica he returned to Grenada to play a key role in the NJM. We here in T&T were able to chart from then on the change in emphasis of the NJM and the move away from the "Assemblies of the People" as the be-all and end-all of all party activity and programmes.

From our very early moments we took great pains to indicate to all and sundry, involved and interested in political affairs of people universally, that each and every struggle of people wherever they may find themselves, moreso in the Caribbean, represents just another coherent step in their quest for greater and greater democratic institutions.

From our burning quest for freedom on the slave plantations to our most modern political expressions of the 20th century, there is a direct correlation to a democratic instinct and tradition.

The political party formation we indicated was therefore only one of the strategic tools to be used in the struggle to guarantee the democratic institutions of the people, in fact the party is a "means" to an "end" and therefore must never be seen as and "end" in itself.

Coard, functioning as general secretary of the NJM, worked with missionary zeal to turn the key elements away from such a view and he was well supported by other old-school Marxists throughout the region. Coard's was a mission to miseducate.

As all such political elements in history, he worked harder than anybody else, obsessed with his mission and a sense of personal power.

Malik, the bad poet, was the first person to say of him that even in their childhood days, Coard played second-fiddle to no one, in the boy scout troop he had to be the leader or nothing. The Stalinist ideology had once again found the perfect personality in which to breed.

Coard did everything by the book. Creativity and flexibility was outside of his realm as he was a creature of learned behaviour. Don Rojas, who functioned as Maurice Bishop's press secretary and edited the Free West Indian, said after the American invasion: "Perhaps the biggest historical irony is that the man considered the most developed, best ideologue in the Grenada revolution, a brilliant man, through a fundamental error of judgment and personal ambition, in the end gave the Grenadian revolution on a platter to the USA with all the trimmings." Once again one of our "brightest", highly "intellectual" Caribbean sons had undone the work of people like Garvey and Butler who went before.

When the NJM proved able to wrestle state power away from Gairy on March 13, 1979, Maurice Bishop was the popular leader. That was so from since the days of the Forum Group.

He had paid his dues in the struggle, even the ultimate price in terms of the murder of his father, Rupert, by Gairy's criminal thugs.

Maurice was undoubtedly the people's leader, warm, articulate, imaginative, never predisposed and instinctively democratic, while the brooding Coard had worked himself into an unassailable position as the ideological leader of the NJM political cadres and most committed soldiers. It was a recipe for disaster.

We read it clear from T&T but we hoped that the closeness of the brothers, the fact that they all grew up together, that Maurice's mother was Coard's "nanny" and vice-versa, that the differences could be worked out amicably. That was not to be.
(To be continued)