ARE WE LOSING GRENADA AGAIN?

A year to the day after I had seen U.S. Tomcats whirl down the Point Salines peninsula, I watched the first commercial planes land on the runway originally rolled out by Cubans, where Colonel Hagler dropped his Rangers to rescue our island. At the ceremonies that completed what President Reagan had started, with a blessing by Monsignor Cyril Lamontagne and a hearty rendition of “Now Thank We All Our God,” I asked myself what had happened in the year gone by. I was again touched by the American lives given on our behalf and happy that a permanent memorial to those men, most of them from the 82nd Airborne, is to be created on the campus of the St. George’s University School of Medicine. Alas, however, my question had to be answered mainly by what has not been done since the intervention.

First, the self-styled Vanguard Leninists who killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, his pregnant mistress, and most of his ministers have not been brought to book. The so-called Coardites, the faction led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard and his Jamaican wife, have contrived from their prison cells, even without the offered assistance of Ramsey Clark, so to delay proceedings that nothing has happened to them by way of justice. Gruesome stories of the savagery on October 19, 1983, abound, some mothers claiming that their wounded children were taken from their hospital beds and buried alive to quash evidence of the massacre. The protection of the accused (after an initial assault as they entered a courtroom) has been such that even with a pass I had to go through six checkpoints to get into the original court of inquiry appointed by the governor-general. The present procrastination is such that the Grenada High Court is being challenged to prove itself the Grenada High Court. I hardly have to emphasize how frustrating this delay seems to West Indians.

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A year to the day after I had seen U.S. Tomcats whirl down the Point Salines peninsula, I watched the first commercial planes land on the runway originally rolled out by Cubans, where Colonel Hagler dropped his Rangers to rescue our island. At the ceremonies that completed what President Reagan had started, with a blessing by Monsignor Cyril Lamontagne and a hearty rendition of “Now Thank We All Our God,” I asked myself what had happened in the year gone by. I was again touched by the American lives given on our behalf and happy that a permanent memorial to those men, most of them from the 82nd Airborne, is to be created on the campus of the St. George’s University School of Medicine. Alas, however, my question had to be answered mainly by what has not been done since the intervention.

First, the self-styled Vanguard Leninists who killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, his pregnant mistress, and most of his ministers have not been brought to book. The so-called Coardites, the faction led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard and his Jamaican wife, have contrived from their prison cells, even without the offered assistance of Ramsey Clark, so to delay proceedings that nothing has happened to them by way of justice. Gruesome stories of the savagery on October 19, 1983, abound, some mothers claiming that their wounded children were taken from their hospital beds and buried alive to quash evidence of the massacre. The protection of the accused (after an initial assault as they entered a courtroom) has been such that even with a pass I had to go through six checkpoints to get into the original court of inquiry appointed by the governor-general. The present procrastination is such that the Grenada High Court is being challenged to prove itself the Grenada High Court. I hardly have to emphasize how frustrating this delay seems to West Indians.