Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (14 page)

Ronald Webster and the other
dissidents got home from
Barbados
a full day before Peter Adams and the other signers of the Conference
report. Webster called a public meeting to announce the
Conference decision. The enraged reaction was immediate and general and not
unexpected: Foreign policemen on Anguillan soil?
Back
to Bradshaw after
finally getting away from him, with practically nothing changed? No, No, six
thousand times No.

Bradshaw himself had also rushed
home before the Conference finished its closing formalities. He made a speech
over ZIZ in which he announced that
Anguilla
had
"surrendered." It sometimes seems Colonel Bradshaw must have an
Anguillan for a speech writer. He couldn't possibly make all those tactical and
tactless errors without help.

The four Anguillan signers stayed
till the end of the Conference, returned home, and found a group of very
irritable people waiting for them at the airport. Ronald Webster showed up
before tempers got too thoroughly frayed and explained that the signatures had
committed
Anguilla
to nothing but an agreement to look
the proposals over. Everybody went away to decide what to do next, and
gradually they came to the conclusion it was time for a change in leadership.

Up till then, there had been four
leaders in the island. Peter Adams had been in charge of external affairs,
maintaining contacts with the outside world. Walter Hodge had been in charge of
internal affairs, running the domestic side of government. And Ronald Webster
and Atlin Harrigan had together composed a kind of informal leadership of
activists, whose pushing and prodding had paved the way to rebellion, with
Webster thereafter in charge of island defenses.

Now both of the primary political
leaders, Peter Adams and Walter Hodge, had compromised themselves in the eyes
of the people by signing the report of the Barbados Conference. Harrigan was
too young, his fieriness not yet seasoned, and he had only been an observer at
Barbados
,
not a full-fledged delegate. That left Ronald Webster, whose gesture at
Barbados
had been the first signal of what the true Anguillan response to the proposals
was to be.

So now, two months after the
bloodless rebellion began, there came about a bloodless change of leadership.
In a very informal way, later ratified by the Peacekeeping Committee, the
overwhelming majority of Anguillans chose Ronald Webster to take over the
reins.

Their choice, as it turned out, was
a wise one; Ronald Webster was rich, he was dedicated, he was tireless, he was
uncompromised, he was determined, and he had guts.

The shifting of leadership was done
smoothly and with no unnecessary loss of face. While Ronald Webster became the
new Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee, Walter Hodge became Finance
Minister, a job he turned out to be very good at, and Peter Adams was appointed
Magistrate. (There had been no legal judiciary on the island since the
rebellion, and
Adams
couldn't sit for cases much more
complex than drunk-and-disorderly. He couldn't settle land disputes, for
example, without the strong possibility that his decision might someday be set
aside by a recognized court after
Anguilla
's secession
had come, one way or another, to an end. Still, so long as the rumshops were
open, even a magistrate with limited powers was a good idea, and Adams, a
careful and sympathetic man, was a good choice for the job.) Only Atlin
Har-rigan remained outside the political structure, as observer and critic, a
role that would crystallize the next month with the founding of the
Beacon.

Meanwhile,
Anguilla
was full of rumors and misunderstandings and apprehensions, all brought about
by the Barbados Conference. To calm things down and get everybody back to an
orderly condition, the Peacekeeping Committee published on August 7 a document
titled
Statement to the People of
Anguilla
by Their Government.
Roger Fisher, who had written the Declaration of
Independence, was back on the island at this time and probably had a hand or
two in the
Statement's
composition.

The
Statement
officially
announced the changes in the leadership and went on to speak very gently and
carefully about the Barbados Conference report. It explained that the report
wasn't binding on Anguilla, that the signers had simply "believed that
these were the best terms that could be obtained from that conference, and that
they should be brought home for serious study by the people," and that the
people hadn't had a chance to study them yet, so therefore couldn't be said yet
to have either accepted or rejected them. It described the report as "a
complex document of 21 pages with four appendices," and said that it "contains
intricate proposals concerning a Commonwealth peacekeeping force, economic aid,
local self-government and proposed legislation." It suggested that
everybody study the proposals and then, "if the people are unwilling to
accept them as they stand, we should come back with specific proposals of our
own designed to provide adequate self-government for the people of
Anguilla
."

Ronald Webster then went over to
St.
Martin
and phoned the Conference chairman on
Barbados
.
He said the Anguillans were thinking about the proposals, would be happy to
talk them over informally with anybody sent by
Barbados
or the other Governments involved, and that they definitely hadn't as yet come
to a decision one way or the other.

The Governments of Barbados,
Jamaica
,
Trinidad-Tobago and
Guyana
were having second thoughts themselves about this peacekeeping force they were
supposed to be sending to
Anguilla
. The Anguillans were
getting a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, and nobody likes to get a
bloody nose in somebody else's fight. There were newspaper reports about Ronald
Webster training a "defense force" of two hundred ten men, and the
Statement
had said that "a hasty use of force by any other island
would be most unwise"; in the context of-such a calm and rational
document, that warning seemed very tough indeed. The British had a frigate,
H.M.S.
Lynx
, waiting nearby to carry forty policemen from the four other
Governments over to
Anguilla
, but all at once no one was
in a hurry to go.

Instead, they called another
conference in
Barbados
,
this one on
August 12, 1967
.
It was attended only by those four Caribbean Governments that had been left
holding the baby. The stated purpose of the conference was to "iron out
certain snags in the plan to send a Peacekeeping force to
Anguilla
."

Everybody agreed that things looked
a little trickier now than at the first Barbados Conference. It was decided to
take up Ronald Webster's offer, send a couple of Civil Servants to the island
to have a chat, and wait a while with the forty policemen.

Hugh Shearer, Prime Minister of
Jamaica, then announced that none of
his
police would be among the
forty. "I have never liked the idea," he said. And the day after
that, when two officials from
Jamaica
and
Barbados
did respond to Ronald Webster's invitation by going to
Anguilla
,
they found that things were not as calm there as the
Statement
had
suggested. Speaking of their visit, the Wooding Report says they "appear
to have been discomfited by a large and noisy crowd." They took their
discomfiture back to their respective Governments and suggested that
Great
Britain
be left to pull her own chestnuts
out of the fire.

Time for yet a third conference.
This one was held in
Kingston
,
Jamaica
,
with the four Caribbean Governments that were supposed to be doing the
peacekeeping, plus Lord Shepherd, who'd organized it all.

Lord Shepherd made a speech in
which he suggested gangsters had taken over in Anguilla—Colonel Bradshaw had
been the only one to make this kind of remark up till now— and that the
rebellion was supported by "hot money." He also talked about
"fragmentation," that awful bugaboo that seems to take the place in
official British minds that Communism does in official American minds; it
refers to countries and areas that break into pieces too small to survive
economically or politically or militarily on their own.

By this time, however,
Jamaica
was pretty much on An-guilla's side. The chief Jamaican delegate suggested
maybe
Anguilla
did have the unilateral right to secede
after all. He compared it to
Jamaica
's
own decision in 1961 to secede from the
West Indies Federation
,
which had also been done in conjunction with a referendum.

But Lord Shepherd wasn't of a mind
to listen to arguments that didn't aim at getting
Anguilla
back into the box where she belonged. And if
Anguilla
wouldn't go back, he threatened, then by thunder
Great
Britain
would cut off all aid! (Considering
the amount of aid that had been getting through to
Anguilla
when things were going good, this news didn't cause trembling in very many
boots. As the
Trinidad Guardian
said, it was "about the most empty
diplomatic threat in history.")

Colonel Bradshaw hadn't been
invited to this particular conference, but he sent a telegram, in which he said
that "gangster elements have taken charge in Auguilla" and that if
the other Caribbean Governments didn't get his island back for him it would
have "only the most shattering consequences for entire Leewards and
Windwards who watch with interest."

Jamaica
had been the first to say she wouldn't have anything to do with the
peacekeeping force.
Barbados
was second and Trinidad-Tobago third. Guyana, which with Antigua represented
about the only wholehearted support Colonel Bradshaw had in the Caribbean, said
it was perfectly willing to take
part
in a peacekeeping force, but it
wasn't about to
be
the peacekeeping force, and then there were none.

Lord Shepherd responded by
suggesting Great Britain might send in troops of her own, but only if the four
Governments made a formal request that she do it.
Great
Britain
didn't intend to invade any part of
the
Caribbean
without getting a commitment from the
Commonwealth Caribbean first.

The
Caribbean
delegates visualized what their political futures at home would look like once
it was learned they had asked a European colonial power to invade a brother
Caribbean
island. They chose not to take up Lord Shepherd's offer. Which meant that
Great
Britain
, for the time being, abandoned the
idea of invading
Anguilla
.

This third and final conference
broke up on
August 20, 1967
,
completely deadlocked. As the Wooding Report put it, "The Jamaica
Conference achieved nothing." And a British Commonwealth Office statement
explained that the idea of the peacekeeping force had "run up against
local tensions and disagreements, about which we would rather not say too
much."

Lord Shepherd didn't have quite the
same attitude. On his way home he amplified his earlier comments about
gangsters and hot money, saying that "outside organizations" were
going to use the island as a base for "gambling and drugs," which is
a nice combination and guaranteed to get a good response on both sides of the
Atlantic
.
(What Communism is to the American Government and what fragmentation is to the
British Government, the Mafia is to
both
Governments.)

It wasn't hard to believe, at that.
Prime Minister Eric Williams of Trinidad-Tobago spoke for practically everybody
when he said, "If the Mafia or any other sort of American crooks are not
already in
Anguilla
, they soon will be. They are
everywhere else in the
Caribbean
."

As it turns out, in this particular
case there's Mafia and there's Mafia. Professor Roger Fisher had been trying to
talk to Deputy Prime Minister Cameron Tudor of Barbados back in July, to ask
his help in mediating the dispute between Anguilla and St. Kitts, and he had
trouble reaching Tudor until he found out the British had warned Tudor that
Fisher
was from the Mafia and was a lawyer for gamblers in Miami. Fisher,
whose background in international law is so sound and extensive that he doesn't
even
need
to show pictures of himself with Hubert Humphrey, had no
trouble convincing Tudor that the British had been selling gold-mine stock. But
the same thing happened again a month later in
New York
,
at the United Nations. People Fisher tried to talk to there had been told—by
the British—that he was a dangerous man, a known agent of
"Mafia-type" gangsters.

None of which is to say the Mafia
is
not
in the
Caribbean
, only that it was not in
Anguilla
.
The fact is, Eric Williams is right; the Mafia is everywhere in the
Caribbean
.
Through either British indifference or British stupidity, the Mafia has taken
over gambling in the
Bahamas
,
for instance. And the American airline Pan Am, which owns three casinos on
three islands in the area, found, when looking for managers to run them, that
the Mafia were the people with the experience for the job. When Fidel Castro
threw the Mafia out of
Havana
after
the Cuban revolution, very few of the troops traveled all the way back to the
States.