Preface: Imprisoned Pasts?

On Friday, 4 September 2009, the minister of government responsible for the Advisory Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy under the Constitution of Grenada advised the governor general to effect the release from the Richmond Hill Prison of (among others) the last members of the Grenada 17—namely, Dave Bartholomew, Callistus Bernard, Bernard Coard, Leon Cornwall, Liam James, Ewart Layne, and Selwyn Strachan. They had been in prison for more than a quarter of a century for their alleged role in the deaths of then prime minister Maurice Bishop and his colleagues at Fort Rupert (now, again, Fort George) on 19 October 1983, undoubtedly the darkest day in modern Caribbean political history.

The release of these seven political prisoners brought to an end the long and difficult judicial battle of the Grenada 17 to have their 1986 murder convictions overturned. The Grenada 17 had always acknowledged their moral and political implication in the events that led to the deaths of 19 October but not their criminal responsibility. They had, moreover, long protested the gross irregularities of the ideologically motivated prosecutorial process that found them guilty of murder (the torture by which confessions were extracted, the unconstitutionality of the "court of necessity" in which they were tried, the withholding of documents needed to support their defense, the dependence on obviously flawed witnesses, and so on).¹ However, on 7 February 2007, at least one dimension of their fight to vindicate themselves was realized when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council impugned the constitutional validity of the original death sentences of the thirteen appellants named in the appeal and advised that they be resentenced by the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.² Their lordships pointedly observed, "For obvious reasons, the question of the appellants' fate is so politically charged that it is hardly reasonable to expect any Government of Grenada, even 23 years after the tragic events of October 1983, to take an objective view of the matter. In their Lordships' opinion that makes it all the more important that the determination of the appropriate sentence for the appellants, taking into account such progress as they have made in prison, should be the subject of a judicial determination."³

As the seven men emerged from the now-automated gates of the nineteenth-century prison nestled in the hills above St. George's, local and regional journalists were keen to know from them—and especially from Bernard Coard, supposedly the mastermind of the conflict that had led to the catastrophe of 19 October—what they had learned from their long incarceration, whether they had changed in their perception of their actions, whether they now had a different account to give of the terrible events that had brought them to this point. Was this questioning innocence or presumption? Was it the familiar elision and disavowal that so marks and mars modern Caribbean politics? For the real question, it seems to me, is what we—Caribbeans as a whole—have learned in the twenty-six years since the collapse of the Grenada Revolution and the US invasion that followed in its wake. How have we changed? Are we in a better position, today, with the blurring and weakening of the lines of cleavage and antagonism that characterized the Cold War, to appreciate what moral and political demand was answered by our desire to convict and punish the Grenada 17 on the clearly bogus evidence produced by the prosecution at their trial? Are we in a better position, today, to gauge in retrospect what regional anxiety, what wounded fantasy of sovereignty, was assuaged by so egregious a travesty of justice? Are we in a better position, today, to acknowledge the senses in which the Grenada 17 might really have been hostages to our own political hypocrisy and shallow opportunism, scapegoats, in effect, upon whom we projected the rage and resentment of our compromised will-to-power?

The collapse of the Grenada Revolution is among the most traumatic events in recent Caribbean political history. Who knows just how deep the scars. It may be obscure how or whether we—Caribbeans—will ever recover completely from its effects. But...