Reagan gets the election results he wanted The Grenadan elections have produced a result satisfactory to the Reagan administration. In the poll, conducted on December 3, the New National Party (NNP) led by Herbert Blaize gained 23,984 votes (59 per cent) to win 14 places in the 15-seat house of representatives.
The Grenada United Labour Party (GULP) - still under the personal control of ex-dictator Eric Gairy - received 14,677 votes (39 per cent) but only won one seat. The Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement (MBPM), while experiencing a late upswing in support did not win any seats, finishing with 2,022 votes (5 per cent) in the 13 constituencies where they stood.
Ronald Reagan speaking on the day the results were announced said they marked 'the first time that a Marxist-Leninist government has been succeeded by a government that received its authority by a free election.
Nothing was left to chance by the American government in securing this result. Three hundred troops, the remainder of the force which invaded the island on October 25, 1983, and a specially increased force of alliance soon after it was formed, eventually receiving a derisory 105 votes in the election.
Alexis is notorious for the alacrity with which he offered his services as prime minister 24 hours after the US invasion. At that time he was connected with a group in opposition to the Bishop government based in Barbados with strong US connections. Brizan previously supported the People's Alliance, which was an alliance of opposition parties including the New Jewel Movement in 1976. He worked with the PRG administration that took power in March 1979. But he supported the US invasion and calls for US troops to stay on.
Blaize's own party was the chief alternative party to the GULP during the 1950s and 1960s. Blaize last formed a government in 1967. His party then represented the interests of the old plantocracy and those sections of the business class in opposition to Gairy.
The coalition he leads today essentially still represents the latter category, the influence of the landowners, however, having much diminished in the intervening period. The government Ra mi fem
500 Jamaican and Barbadan soldiers Steve ROBERTS
MBPM leader Kendrick Radix, the former industry minister in the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Maurice Bishop, complained of deportations of sympathetic journalists, mail interception and phone tapping. Much of this activity is sponsored by the island's Barbadan police chief, Mervyn Holder.
Complaints about the behaviour of the Barbadan security personnel, also came from Roy Chasteau, who was the election's supervisor before he was sacked by the island's governor general, Sir Paul Scoon. Chasteau accused the authorities of having secretly printed extra ballot papers and objected to entrusting ballot papers and objected to entrusting foreign troops with the task of collecting the ballot boxes.
Large amounts of money were channelled into Grenada to influence the election result in the direction of the NNP. The National Republican Institute for International Affairs, a grouping linked to the US• Republican Party, sent 20,000 US dollars to a body called the Grenada Civic Awareness Group. The money was spent on literature, stickers, posters and other material designed to push the elections. The major fear of the NNP was that the electorate would remain indifferent.
Another American-based body, the Free Trade Union Institute, which is backed by the AFL-CIO trade-union federation, allocated more than 80,000 US dollars to what they claimed was the 'central labour movement' in Grenada 'to encourage discussion on the country's future. The money was directed through the American Institute for Labour Development — a body widely regarded as being a front for the Central Intelli20 watched over the electoral process. gence Agency operations in the international trade-union movement.
More direct help came from exReagan election campaign worker Morton C. Blackwell, an 'expert' on turning out the youth vote, who organised a privately financed team of operatives to help the NNP.
The NNP was launched in August 1984, as the product of an alliance between the Grenadan Democratic Movement of Francis Alexis, the National Democratic Party of George Brizan and Blaize's old Grenadan National Party. Another grouping headed by Winston Whyte, the Christian Democratic Labour Party, split away from the
Blaize will form will be the image of the majority of other eastern Caribbean governments, a project marked by the presence of Tom Adams of Barbados, James Mitchell of St. Vincent and John Compton on Saint Lucia at the launching of the party.
All were determined to ensure that Gairy did not make a comeback to run the country again. They considered the Gairy regime largely responsible for the ease with which the New Jewel Movement was able to take power in 1979.
For similar reasons Gairy faced opposition from the US authorities themselves. US officials hinted that the 57 million dollar aid package to the island would be suspended if Gairy won and a US industrialist who had begun to set up production in Grenada threatened to
People outside the meeting of October 19, 1984 (DR)
International Viewpoint 14 January 1985
close down his plant.
This was despite the lavish praise heaped on the American government by Gairy and his promise to name the still uncompleted international airport after President Reagan! Gairy overreached himself though when he claimed Reagan had personally advocated that Grenadans vote for the GULP. The US representatives on the island issued an immediate and indignant denial.
Gairy has now induced his sole victorious GULP candidate to resign alleging electoral fraud and he himself may stand in the by-election.
The MBPM apparently hoped for more than the 5 per cent support they eventually received. They objected to the early closure of the electoral registration list before they had decided to run in the elections and called for its reopening as many of their supporters were excluded. This was refused. As a result, only 48,000 of the island's 110,000 population were able to vote, some 15,000 less than in 1976.
The reasons for the low vote for the MBPM do not lie merely in the electoral manipulations of the US imperialists and their local puppets. They lie, above all, in the bloody and disastrous ending of the People's Revolutionary Government by Bernard Coard's military coup. This coup - which resulted in the execution of Maurice Bishop and his most prominent supporters in the NJM, and the murderous supression of the mass uprising against it — opened the way for the US invasion of the island. According to MBPM supporters, the attitude towards Coard supporters among the population at large is of uncontainable hatred. It is under these circumstances that the majority also looked on the US invasion as a deliverance from the violence of the new Revolutionary Military Council.
The show trial of the Coard faction by the authorities, is being used to try to discredit all the previous supporters of the New Jewel Movement. It is for this reason that some supporters of the MBPM have called for the Coardites to be tried by a people's tribunal of the Grenadan people. However, others are giving evidence to the court. The trial itself has been postponed from its original starting date. Blaize has already promised his new seven person cabinet will crack down on the left, and the trial will remain one of the principal justifications of the repression against the whole of the left.
The votes amassed by the MBPM are a reminder, albeit that of a small minority, that the gains of the revolution still remain a reality for a vanguard on the island. This was also reflected in the memorial meeting organised by the MBPM before the election on October 19 and an election rally on November 18 which, according to the organisers, 2,000 people attended.
Many former Bishop supporters voted for the NNP to keep Gairy out. Given the obstacles put in their way and the International Viewpoint 14 January 1985
A bust of Maurice Bishop unvelled on October 19, 1984(DR) bitter heritage of the Coard coup which brought about the internal collapse of the revolution, it is significant that so many Grenadans gave their support to the platform of the MBPM. This support, moreover, is not just at the level of the ballot box. The active resistance of trade unionists to the attempts of the authorities to liquidate the gains is another obstacle for Blaize in his normalisation programme (see IV, No 64, November 26, 1984). However, no one is under any illusions that the process of rebuilding a revolutionary movement in Grenada will be anything other than lengthy and arduous.
The defeat of the revolution and the re-establishment of the capitalist social order also represents a grave setback for the revolutionary movement in the area. The responses of some figures in this movement, however, have been at variance with the programme and trajectory of the Maurice Bishop supporters in Grenada.
Three important conferences took place in 1984 to assess the defeat of the revolution and draw out the lessons. The first such meeting was held on the island of Marie-Galante in the Antilles.
Present were the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement, the Dominican United Labour Party and the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement, from anglophone Caribbean countries; and a number of French-speaking organisations, including the Groupe Revolutionnaire Socialiste, the Antilles section of the Fourth International.
The meeting, which was held to commemorate the life of Maurice Bishop, issued a statement denouncing Coard and his associates and supporting Cuba's stand during the crisis as expressed in the statement made by Fidel Castro the day oftay after the invasion (see TV, No 40, November 14 1983).
A different approach was taken : at another conference in Georgetown, Guyana, initiated by veteran leftist leader Cheddi Jaggan of the People's Progressive Party.
This meeting brought together, im the words of the organisers, representatives of the revolutionary and communist movement in the region including the Cuban Communist Party, the communist parties of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the Workers Party of Jamaica, the Workers Revolutionary Movement of Saint Lucia, the Dominican Liberation Move ment Alliance, the United Peoples Movement of Saint Vincent, the February 18 Movement and the Peoples Popular Movement of Trinidad, and the Movement for National Liberation of Barbados.
According to an account of the meeting in the October 1984 issue of Antilla, a left magazine published in the Frenchspeaking Antilles, all the parties that originated from the English-speaking Caribbean countries at this conference expressed their support for the Revolution. ary Military Council of Coard. According to the same report, Trevor Munroe, general secretary of the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ) and close collaborator of Coard in the final days of the Grenadan revolution, went on to accuse the Cuban CP of 'opening the door to the US invasion by their criticism of Coard and Austin's coup'.
In June 1984, the Cuban Communist Party called a conference that brought together nearly all the groups which had been present at the two previous meetings, along with delegates from the FLN of Nicaragua, the El Salvadoran FMLN, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Haiti, the United Peoples Movement of St. Vincent, the Workers Party of Guyana, the Vanguard and Nationalist and Socialist Farty of the Bahamas and a delegation from various left organisations in the Dominican Republic.
Again, according to Antilla:
"The final communique of this "first consultative meeting of the anti-imperialist organisations of the Caribbean and Central America" agreed on a denunciation of Washington's interventionist policy and appealed for the widest unity possible. The official text published from the meeting also confirmed the high esteem in which most of the organisations held Maurice Bishop, the leader of the Grenadan revolution.
'But', the magazine noted, 'this apparent unanimity could not mask the profound differences which had been displayed in the past. So when Trevor Munroe, took the opportunity to again accuse Maurice Bishop of being "petit bourgeois", his attack provoked under-
21
standable anger from a number of participants, in the first place Kendrick Radix....(
Munroe has pursued this line of approach, saying there is a class struggle inside the NJM, in a number of meetings which he has addressed since the defeat of the revolution. In particular he has accused Bishop of demonstrating softness in apparently opposing the closure of Torchlight, (the main opposition newspaper) by the People's Revolutionary Government in Grenada.
Others, in the same vein, have said that Bishop's proposal to speed up the work of the Constitutional Commission set up by the revolutionary government and therefore bring forward elections in Grenada was a symptom of 'right opportunism' and capitulation to the pressures of the bourgeoisie.
Bishop's supporters have furiously rejected these charges of 'opportunism' At the Havana conference Kendrick Radix declared:
"Munroe talks of a class struggle (to justify the battle inside the NJM), but which class benefits from this madness? In whose interest were the actions taken by guys so drunk on ideology, so constipated by ideology, that they were not even capable of seeing it would lead to the destruction of our revolution?'
Bishop's supporters are, however, also critical of collective errors made during the period. For example, George Louison in the November 1984 issue of National Geographic magazine posed the problem:
*If we had gone to the public with our internal differences, it would have damaged our image, our credibility. Of course we were wrong on that... (But) elections don't guarantee open government. You get out there and engage in bribery and slander. Elections breed political tribalism and violence.'
Such statements, sometimes of contradictory nature, from Bishop supporters are part of a more general discussion which draws not only on the balance sheet of the defeat of the Grenadan revolution but also on the victories of Nicaragua. In particular the Sandinistas have shown that the process of political pluralism does not cut across or contradict the development of the mass organisations or the organs of popular power.
On the contrary, the electoral process in Nicaragua has aided the development of workers' democracy through the systematic education process entailed.
This consideration was perhaps even more important in the Grenadan context given the relatively lower level of mobilisation of the masses before the March 1979 revolution. Such considerations also apply to the question of the freedom of the press. The type of debate conducted between La Prensa, the bourgeois paper in Nicaragua, and the pro-Sandinista press, has likewise aided the process of mass politicisation and education rather than retarding it. The way in which the FSLN have handled this problem contrasts to the way in which Torchlight, the mouthpiece of bourgeois op22
MBPM leaders listen to the Grenada hymn at the beginning of October 19, 1984 meeting (DR)
position to the PRG, was silenced.
The encouragement of pluralism outside the party is obviously linked to the issue of pluralism within. The absence of democratic guarantees within the New Jewel Movement has been sharply underlined by Don Rojas, Maurice Bishop's former press secretary, in an interview with Pierre Rousset in Croissance des Jeunes Nations (September 1984), a radical christian journal on the problems of the third world. Leaders and led
Asked to describe the state of internal party relations and how the domination of Coard was achieved, Rojas replied:
"The relations between the leadership and the membership of the party were essentially relations between leaders and led. The leadership gave directives which the militants carried out unquestioningly, without debate or dispute.
"The rank and file were not able to bring pressure to bear on the leadership because of the absence of internal party structures which would allow democratic flow from the top to the bottom.
*As to the Central Committee it stayed as it had been before the 1979 revolution (not counting two members who were expelled). There was no party congress for the four and a half years of the revolution. For many of us this absence of a congress was a fundamental error.
*The authority of the party was never established. The Central Committee became the supreme authority. But it was never accountable to the base. It was cut off from it. In fact the functioning of the mass organisations was more democratic than that of the party.
*One can easily understand the weight of Bernard Coard's faction in this context. They were a majority before the revolution in a Central Committee which was not changed afterwards?
It is true that these types of judgements by Bishop supporters are in the light of experience. Very little of this type of debate figures in the reports of NJM Central Committee meetings in the years of the revolution. Nevertheless it was the necessity of renewing the links between the leadership and the masses that Bishop insisted was the precondition for solving the problems that the revolution ran into in its fourth year. As against, this prescription Coard's supporters developed their model of the administratively efficient party nucleus, with its backbone of young staff officers of the People's Revolutionary Army.
Bishop's sensibility to the necessity of continuously being in contact with the masses was not a symptom of weakness in the face of imperialism. On the contrary, the greater the level of ties between the masses and the government, the greater the possibility of the masses defending the revolution.
The more a government imposes itself on the people — such as in the way that the Revolutionary Military Council after the overthrow of the PRG did - the easier it is for imperialism to overthrow such a regime.
It was due to the collapse of workers' democracy in Grenada that the imperialists were able to achieve the overthrow of this, in Reagan's words, 'Marxist-Leninist' government.
In Grenada today, the defenders of Bishop's tradition, the defenders of the memory of the greatest black revolutionary produced in the Caribbean since the overthrow of slavery, now face a new period of repression and harassment by the Blaize government.
Defence of the democratic rights of all Grenadan people and supporting the efforts of the MBPM is the way in which the lessons of the Grenadan revolution can be most effectively capitalised on. •
International Viewpoint 14 January 1985
VICOO AMIA
YUGOSLAVIA.