Unhealed Caribbean wounds

The year was 1999 and then prime minister Keith Mitchell was coasting to a memorable 15-0 victory at the polls in Grenada. The campaigning was intense.

Fabian Horsford, 18, was with his father and the family cattle in a rural pasture in Petit Calivigny.

Suddenly, off ran one cow … and Fabian … toward some bushes, with Dad trailing exhaustingly behind.

Some distance away, just as Fabian was on the verge of declaring a winning race, there was an explosion. The youngster fell in the bushy overgrowth bleeding and in pain. He subsequently died - a victim of previously unexploded munitions from the events of 1983.

I was in Grenada at the time and wrote the story. The IPS headline was: “The Invasion that Will Not Go Away.” The fields of past battles, you see, aren’t easily cleared.

As the country observed a rainy Heroes Day – 42 years since the October 19 slaughter of Maurice Bishop and members of his People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), and the subsequent US invasion of the island – I could not get Fabian out of my mind.

As the headline in 1999 suggested, history has a way of lingering. It also has a way of influencing the senses and emotions. Wounds stick around much longer than we care to believe.

That boy, you see, represented the most vulnerable of the vulnerable – victimised by the decision-making of the powerful … near and far.

It had been no metaphorical overreach to conclude then, as I do now, that Fabian’s demise signified the durable, tragic impacts not only of the 1983 violence, but of the circumstances set in train in 1979.

Many who participated in the revolution now acknowledge fatal errors and those who have stopped romanticising about what occurred may now regret several things – engaging the Cold War trap included.

Amidst the rubble of collateral damage of the era were strained Caricom relations – 10 years into the process and younger than Fabian. Though Grenada remained active within the grouping, things were not about to immediately return to the heady days of 1973 and the fresh signatures on the Treaty of Chaguaramas or when Grenada itself came on board in 1974.

The PRG years remained, arguably, the most challenging period in the history of Caricom. Yes, Bishop hosted the July 1979 Summit and missed just one such meeting, but the murmurings and divisions were pronounced, and the country was about to become increasingly estranged from an already unsteady grouping over those four years.

When the 1983 assassinations and subsequent US invasion (Operation Urgent Fury) occurred, T&T, Guyana, and Belize – at that time (and now ironically) citing “international law” - set an effective distance from those who had unreservedly endorsed the “intervention” (one contentious descriptor).

Immediately after, T&T imposed a visa restriction on Grenadians entering the country out of fear that surviving militants could enter and stir up some of the trouble T&T had sought to avoid.

Up to that time, there had been nothing to prepare the regional grouping for what had transpired barely a decade since its inauguration.

Since then, there have been good reasons to be concerned that the claws of geo-politics would re-enter the fray more visibly to test regional foundations.

As with other integration movements, there has since been an extensive list of challenges, highlighted most recently by the situation in Venezuela but including a solution to Haiti, several skirmishes linked to free market conditions, and occasional scuffles over international candidatures.

Sadly, T&T’s independent posturing and decision-making in international relations, which held firm in 1983, is now marked by unconditional sycophantic support for actions widely declared to be in clear breach of international law and due process when addressing alleged criminal behaviour.

Alignments reminiscent of the events of 1983 - with T&T representing a significant shift in independent posture together with Guyana and others (wait on Grenada) - are emerging to once again test the sturdiness of Caricom’s solidarity doctrine.

If you do not pull all of this together, it would be difficult to come to terms with last Friday’s terse communique on the “security build up in the region” and which included a note that T&T had “reserved its position.”

The statement virtually takes us back to the heady years of Grenada’s revolution and the deep discomfort of (largely) polite discord. But there are potentially deadly consequences.

We may well find in the coming years scattered, unexploded munitions awaiting the arrival of more Fabians if we aren’t careful.