’You are a distinguished journalist of the highest standing and the only reason I am doing this interview is because I have the highest respect for you. You are the only Caribbean journalist I am prepared to talk to.’
A week after the Sunday Express interview was published, Coard gave an hour-long interview to Grenadian journalist Odette Campbell for the Grenada Broadcasting Network.
Maybe he meant that he would not talk to journalists outside of Grenada.
The media did not enjoy favour with Bishop and Coard during the four and a half year rule of the People’s Revolutionary Government. It was a period when all media were outlawed - when people were imprisoned, without charge or trial, for daring to oppose this clampdown on press freedom and for putting out alternative media.
These included people like Lloyd Noel, the first Attorney General under the PRG. Noel had undertaken a tour of several cities in North America, including Toronto where I lived at the time, selling the ’revo’ to West Indian communities in those early days after the so called ’bloodless coup’ against Eric Gairy in March 1979. He had run afoul of the regime, and he had been publicly critical of some of their actions.
There were, too, Leslie Pierre, the owner/publisher of the Grenadian Voice and Tillman Thomas, at the time young lawyer who opposed the shutting down of independent, opposing voices to the Bishop/Coard model of government.
It is ironic that Thomas, as current Prime Minister of Grenada, heads the government that obeyed a court ruling to free Coard and the other six accused who had remained jailed for the murders of Bishop and the others when the revolution devoured itself.
Asked to comment on Coard’s statement about how wrong Caribbean journalists ’consistently got it’ regarding the events behind the Grenadian iron curtain of the revolution, Pierre said last week that ’people could only have written and reported what they knew, or what they knew about.’
Afraid to sneeze
The period leading up to October, 1983 marked a time when Grenadians were afraid of sneezing, literally, fearful that this might be interpreted as either being indifferent to, or even against the regime. It was a time when sons took sides against mothers and fathers, when brothers had drawn swords against their sisters. Families were torn apart. One Grenadian friend and colleague in Toronto related a story about security forces arresting some youths for ’steupsing’ at a meeting at which Bishop was seeking to make converts for the cause.
In 1982, when they felt they had begun to consolidate their hold on power, the PRG made a film called ’Is Revolution We Makin’. In this film, the protagonists boasted that they had an air-tight grip on the country and that they were sure the revolution could not be destroyed.
The PRG also conducted a massive propaganda campaign, branding anyone with a different point of view as ’counter’, the anglicised term for what their Sandinista friends in Nicaragua were then declaring as ’contra’ to brand those opposed to their socialist redirectioning.
By the time the revolution’s murderous collapse came, the events which Coard now says were the result of spontaneous ’revenge’ and ’vengeance’ in the face of Bishop recalcitrance and vacillation on the question of ’joint leadership’, there were some 114 young
Grenadian men and women in prison without charge or trial. Among these men and women, being referred to as counter-revolutionaries, were those who had been filtering out information about what was taking place inside the central committee of the PRG/NJM.
This was part of the story told to me at the VG Bird International Airport in Antigua, by
Jimmy Emmanuel and Don Rojas, on September 20, 1983. It was the day after Independence celebrations in St. Kitt’s. I was there to cover it for the Express. Emmanuel and Rojas were there as representatives of the revolutionary government in Grenada, Emmanuel was then Grenada’s envoy to Caricom. Prior to that he had been an ambassador at large, visiting Toronto on an earlier diplomatic mission on behalf of the regime. Rojas was Bishop’s Press Secretary.
When I spoke with Rojas and Emmanuel, the rumours were already thick and furious - the regime had developed severe internal problems; Coard had moved to seize power from Bishop; the leadership was becoming progressively unpopular. But both men denied it all, dismissing it as the work of enemies of the regime, agents in the region, who they said were working in the service of outside interests.
Almost one month later, on the night of October 15, I was in Grenada. I found Rojas in his cottage at Grand Anse, huddled with his wife and young children, expecting, at any moment, that the armed security forces led by Coard, would invade his home and drag himself and his family out.
That night, as he waited in fear, Rojas told me that almost everything he and Emmanuel had denied during our meeting at the airport in Antigua had been, in fact, true. They were peddling lies and half truths back then, he admitted.
Earlier that day, Kenrick Radix led a demonstration through the streets of St George’s, finally breaking the news to the Grenadian people that Maurice Bishop had been under house arrest for a full two weeks. Radix had been a member of the Cabinet and was by then clearly on Bishop’s side in the severely divided regime.
Luck and the journalist
Raoul Pantin, who was news editor at the Express, was responsible for my being in Grenada. On his instructions, I was hustled from covering Parliament in T&T on October 14, to Barbados that night, taking the first morning flight from Grantley Adams International, landing in Grenada the next day, a Saturday. The late Emery Robley and a TTT crew managed to make it to Grenada’s Pearl’s Airport on a later flight from Piarco.
They never got into St George’s though; their transport was intercepted on the way and they were turned back.
As a non-Grenadian journalist on the ground in St George’s that mid-October day, luck was on my side. The sub-machine gun-toting youths who were randomly plucking people out of the mass march, passed me by, picking up instead the man to my left, the late Dwight Wylie, a Jamaican-Canadian broadcaster.
Wylie had been in Grenada for almost a year, training staff at Radio Free Grenada. The PRG had, of course, seized the station and transformed it as a matter of ideological priority, but the youths armed with sub-machine guns of the Coard-led security forces didn’t know who Wylie was. They picked on him, I imagined, because he was walking with his huge tape recorder.
Albert Branford of the Caribbean News Agency, was to my right; he too was picked up, questioned and expelled that same day from the island. Untouched by the security forces, for the next 24 hours, I had a window into what was happening in Grenada - witnessing the beginning of the implosion of the revolution as it were. I was picked up the following day and expelled from the island.
Jeremiah mad
By late afternoon on October 15 when there was a lull in the St George’s mass demonstration, messages on the radio from those then in control sought to justify what had taken place. The man the people knew and accepted as Prime Minister was being held hostage by his own comrades-in-arms.
The messages also appeared to be preparing listeners for the news that was still to come.
’No one man is above the revolution,’ the voice on the radio kept telling listeners. It was cryptic in its coded substance. Maurice Bishop had been deemed dispensable, and those in charge now were seeking a way to put him down. It would turn out to be not so gently.
The people had loved Bishop despite their fears about what he was leading them into; a substantial amount of the people, at any rate.
On jukeboxes in recreation clubs and snackettes in parts of the city that night, a tune by Vincentian soca master Beckett, ’Jeremiah mad’, was on heavy rotation. Its lyrics described a village favourite who had somehow run afoul of public opinion around him and some of those who once loved and revered him were now speculating about his sanity.
The implications were ominous. Cadres loyal to the PRG/NJM Central Committee, whose members, by then, had been organised into the Organisation for Revolutionary Liberation and Education, were firmly in charge. Bishop had been isolated and alienated. Coard was the leader of this group which had staged the ’Palace Coup’, the headline on the front page story in the Express of Monday, October 17, 1983 I had written it from the CANA office in Bridgetown after being expelled from Grenada the previous day.
Two days later, Bishop would be killed, in events which Coard, 26 years later three weeks ago, would tell Pantin were the result of things getting ’out of hand’ but admitting in the next breath that this was ’putting it mildly.’
Fateful days
In Pantin’s interview, referring to the events of those fateful days of October 1983, Coard speaks in the first person, plural:
’And the fools that we were, we put him under house arrest,’ he says about what happened when Bishop reneged on the plan for joint leadership.
’When we realised that weapons were being distributed, we sent armoured cars to recapture the fort. The armoured cars were meant as a show of force. There was no intention to use force.’ He is talking here about what happened when supporters freed Bishop from house arrest and he led them to the fort which was the army headquarters at the time.
Nowhere in this interview does Coard ever declare any action or instruction to have come directly from him. Neither does he volunteer any information about where exactly was he during those crucial hours leading to the execution of Bishop and eight other people, just as he is yet to explain where he was in the days leading up to the murders -beginning from the
Saturday when the truth finally began hitting the streets of St George’s.
There is truth to Coard’s partial detailing of the joint leadership debacle. What was also true, however, and what Coard failed to deal with in his interview with Pantin was the swiftness with which the end-game resolution came - Bishop had attended the Caricom summit in Port of Spain that July and had gone on to Washington DC shortly thereafter.
In Port of Spain, with the summit at the Hilton under the chairmanship of the late George Chambers, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Bishop had made some promises to ’regularise’ his regime. He had promised to make arrangements to hold elections. He had announced as part of those arrangements that lawyers Frank Solomon and Allan Alexander would being work on drafting a new constitution.
He had been to Washington on the invitation of the lobby group, TransAfrica Forum, led then by Randall Robinson. And he had repeated some of those promises. Robinson is an African-American lawyer and activist who had founded the organisation and dedicated it to fostering better understanding of issues related to Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America among influential elites in the US capital.
These promises didn’t go down well back home in Grenada; they helped tightened the noose around Bishop’s neck.
Bishop had headed his country’s delegation to the St Kitts Independence Day celebrations. He had been booked to stay at the Royal St Kitt’s Hotel, the place reserved for delegates of prime ministerial standing. He switched accommodation arrangements with a member of his delegation and moved to the Fort Thomas Inn where I was staying. His entourage included eight or nine menacing looking, young bodyguards, walking in a ring around him. No one else. Even while Rojas and Emmanuel were denying the revolution was in trouble, Bishop knew that he needed serious protection.
Unresolved issues
Bernard Coard doesn’t say who crafted the statement that was played on the radio that Saturday afternoon, October 15.
He tells Pantin, however, that the NJM party congress had told Bishop ’his weaknesses’, even though they also told him ’we love you, we can’t do without you’. He does not say what those weaknesses were and what were Bishop’s own responses.
’We took moral and political responsibility for what happened,’ Coard says, 26 years later.
’We did so many things wrong. And we’ve apologised. We don’t apportion blame. We took collective responsibility for everything that went wrong. We accept full moral and political responsibility for all of it.’
On the day Pantin called to talk with him, Coard had first been unavailable. He was in a meeting, Pantin reported. When Pantin did talk to him later, Coard said he had been meeting ’with someone who helped to save my life.’
Ironically, Coard never appeared willing or prepared to lay down his own life for those whose lives were so viciously ended in an event in which he was a major participant.
Yet, 26 years after the fact, he is able to make profuse declarations of ’ full moral and political responsibility’.
Coard talks now of participating in chanting down the prosecutors at the trial, about the refusal by himself and others to participate in the trial, about how many things were wrong with the conduct of that trial and about the conditions under which he and his co-defenders were held.
He wouldn’t draw any strength, courage or shame from the attitude of Callistus Barnard, Imam Abdullah, the only co-defendant to testify that he accepted his share of the blame and he was prepared to face the consequences, whatever they were.
Missing from the narrative at this point also are questions about Coard’s whereabouts and actions during the six-day rule of the Revolutionary Military Council between the killings on October 19 and the US invasion on October 25. The Council had imposed a 24-hour curfew on the terrified population, with Hudson Austin declaring in the broadcast that evening that ’anyone found violating this coffu (curfew) would be shot on sight’.
In earlier times during the ’revo’, Austin had been named as Army Chief of Staff, but by October 19, 1983, his exact designation was uncertain. Nevertheless, he was among those who had turned against the man he had previously worshipped. As one story goes, after one violent clash between Gairy’s repressive government forces and its opponents, led by Maurice Bishop in 1974, Rupert Bishop, Maurice’s father, was badly beaten by members of Gairy’s ’Mongoose Gang’. Rupert Bishop is said to have died in Austin’s embrace.
Also missing from Coard’s narrative is what happened to the bodies of Bishop and the ten others who were unceremoniously lined up and slaughtered at the fort before the arrival of the Americans.
Please, tell us, Mr Coard, what happened to the bodies? Do you not know?
