Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (17 page)

"Her
Majesty's Government have therefore taken the necessary measures to appoint Mr.
Lee as Her Majesty's Commissioner so that there can be peace, stability and
progress in the
Island
. He comes as your friend . .

—The
Invasion Leaflet

"Unimportant, of course> I meant" the King hastily said,
and went on to himself in an undertone, "important—unimportant—unimportant—important—as
if he were trying which word sounded best.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice
's Adventures in Wonderland

The Anguillans, their rebellion
already being fought on two fronts—the
Caribbean
and
San
Francisco
—now opened a third front: the United
Nations. This campaign didn't get into full swing until August, after Lord
Shepherd had given up at the Jamaica Conference, but its first shot had been
fired U.N.-ward back at the very beginning, two days after the Kittitian police
were sent packing, when Peter Adams had gone to Puerto Rico and sent a telegram
to U Thant. It had said, among other things, "Anguillans prefer death to
the oppression of St. Kitts."
Adams
sent Thant a
few more telegrams during his tenure, but Thant never replied.

In the middle of July, when Adams
and Jerry Gumbs had traveled up to
New York
,
Adams
had announced his intention of going to the U.N.,
but the San Francisco Group had come along at that point with Howard Gossage's
butterfly net and whisked the Anguillans away to be controlled in
San
Francisco
. Then in August came the first real
onslaught at the U.N.

Jerry Gumbs traveled to New York on
August 5 (while the peacekeeping-force idea was still alive back in the
Caribbean) intending to breach the U.N. and demand international assistance in
his homeland's quest for freedom; he had been spending a lot of time with the
San Francisco Group recently and was therefore full of heady talk about
independence. At first he got only as far as a telephone interview with a
reporte
r from
The New York Times
, but he made the
most of it. "I have been asked by the people of
Anguilla
to tell Secretary General Thant that they desire to be free," he
announced. "After three hundred years of neglect as a British colony, the
people feel they are able to take care of their own affairs, and that all they
need to prosper is to be independent." He also made a pitch for the San
Francisco Group's Anguilla Liberty Dollar while he was on the phone and
explained just how independence was going to make
Anguilla
prosperous: "There are a lot of things a little island can do to raise
money if it is free. We can sell flags."

Personal contact works better than
telegrams with the U.N. Jerry Gumbs managed to set up an appointment with a
U.N. official, Issoufou Djermakoye, Under-Secretary for Trusteeship and
Non-Self-Governing Territories Affairs. They met on
August 7, 1967
. (This was the same date the
Statement
was being published on
Anguilla
.) Gumbs
asked Djermakoye to ask Thant to send a fact-finding mission to
Anguilla
.
Djermakoye said Thant couldn't do that without authorization from a
"competent organ."

It turned out that a competent
organ was a committee. In this case it was the Special Committee on
Colonialism. This Committee was just then looking into the whole business of
Associated States anyway; the Committee was under the impression that an
Associated State was a colony and therefore the Committee's business, while
Great Britain claimed it was an independent nation and therefore out of the
Committee's jurisdiction.

Anguilla
, by
now, had become news. On the same day Jerry Gumbs was talking to Issoufou
Djermakoye at the U.N. and the
Statement
was being published by the
Peacekeeping Committee on
Anguilla
,
The New York
Times
ran the first of the four editorials it would publish on the subject
of
Anguilla
over the next two years. Under the heading
"The Ins and Outs of Anguilla" ran copy that looked as though it had
been written by Lord Shepherd. "The erratic procedure of recent
days," said the third paragraph, "shows that there is no truly
representative government to speak for the island. The man who was President
until a week ago, Peter Adams, had a mandate to negotiate for
Anguilla
.
When he did so and signed a pact that seemed fair to him and to delegations
from a number of the islands and
Britain
,
Mr. Adams was ousted." Compare that with Larry Wade's account of Peter
Adams' feeling at
Barbados
that he was "on top of a mountain with guns pointing at hini from every
side."

Jerry Gumbs thanked Issoufou
Djermakoye for his time and went in search of the Special Committee on
Colonialism. Unfortunately, the Special Committee on Colonialism was in recess,
but it had a Third Subcommittee that was sitting and that gave Gumbs an
appointment for the next day.

A brief reminder here.
Anguilla
did
not
rebel against colonial rule;
Anguilla
rebelled against independence. After 317 years of neglect and mismanagement as
a colony,
Anguilla
rebelled three months after being set
free. Now of course this runs absolutely counter to the flow of contemporary
history, and it was very hard for anybody to believe that a tiny group of six
thousand people was fighting
against
independence and
for
colonialism.

In fact, it was sometimes hard for
the Anguillans themselves to keep it straight. Revolutionary rhetoric is all
geared in one direction, and it's hard to make yourself understood if you're
trying to go the other way. What
Anguilla
wanted to
be—with side trips into other possibilities—was a British colony. The statement
of complaint given to Peter Johnston four months before the rebellion included
this: "
England
would be bound to keep
Anguilla
as a colony since
Anguilla
was unwilling to associate with St. Kitts in Statehood." And when the
first reporter reached
Anguilla
after the beginning of
the rebellion, Peter Adams told him, "We would like to return to Crown
Colony rule."

That's what
Anguilla
wanted. What the Third Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Colonialism
wanted was freedom, baby; freedom
now.
The full Special Committee is
weighted heavily toward anti-colonialism, with a majority of its twenty-four
members coming from recently free nations, mostly in
Africa
and
Asia
. A few months earlier, when the Committee had
started looking into these things called Associated States, Lord Caradon had
reproached it with the following soaring sentence: "Are we to assume that
the sponsors of this resolution wish to stipulate that all the remaining
colonial territories, however small, poor or isolated, must be required to
abandon their own freely expressed aims, and that they should be forced to walk
the plank into independent isolation whether they wish it or not?" Or, as
the London
Times
said in reporting Lord Caradon's address, "So far,
there is no indication that Lord Caradon's arguments will carry conviction with
the majority of the 24 committee members, who have in the past delighted in
flogging the dead horse of colonialism. The committee has a built-in majority
in favour of ideological extremism."

So on the one side we have
Anguilla
,
which is independent and wants to be a colony, and on the other side we have
the Third Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Colonialism, which wants
every colony in the world set free by sundown.

Jerry Gumbs went to talk to the
seven-member Subcommittee on August 8 and started off right away talking
independence: "The desire of the people of
Anguilla
is to improve their situation, and all they need to do this is
self-government." The Subcommittee listened attentively to Gumbs's rundown
of
Anguilla
's run-down condition—the roads, the schools,
the phones, the electricity. The only sour note of the day was sounded by a
minority of one on the Subcommittee, Pedro Berro of
Uruguay
,
who asked mildly whether an independent
Anguilla
would
be economically viable, and suggested
Anguilla
might go
directly from British colonialism to "neocolonialism under foreign
capital." Still, despite Berro's interpolation, the day was generally
considered satisfactory all around, and Gumbs was asked to come back the next
day.

He did, bringing Roger Fisher, who
had just come up from
Anguilla
with a copy of the
Statement
and who also wanted to speak to the Subcommittee.

The Subcommittee wasn't sure about
that. Jerry Gumbs had presented himself to them as an Anguillan, representing
the people of his home island. But Roger Fisher was an American, a professor of
international law, and—according to the British—an agent of the Mafia. The
Subcommittee wasn't sure it wanted to make the same accommodation of its rules
for Fisher that it had made for Gumbs.

So, for the second day, Jerry Gumbs
alone spoke to the Subcommittee, first reading them the
Statement
. Since
this was by far the most moderate declaration by anybody so far, full of
reassurances that the
Barbados
proposals hadn't been rejected out of hand, the Subcommittee found its vision
of
Anguilla
blurring a bit around the edges. Pedro Berro
was probably speaking for everybody when he asked "who now is really
authorized to speak for
Anguilla
." He assured Jerry
Gumbs he wasn't questioning his good faith, but inquired, "When he says
'the people of
Anguilla
' have authorized him, how do we
know what it means?"

Roger Fisher finally got to talk to
the Subcommittee nearly a week later, and apparently he too talked
"independence." Throughout this whole affair, it was very difficult
for people to talk about what they were doing without getting the words wrong.

Whatever Fisher said, he said it at
an informal meeting with Subcommittee members rather than at a formal session.
As
The New York Times
explained, "Some committee members had
objected that Mr. Fisher could not testify as a petitioner without clearance by
a petitions subcommittee or the full Colonialism Committee." Nevertheless,
he did get to talk to them, after which the Subcommittee retired to prepare a
recommendation for the full Committee.

But then
Great
Britain
got miffed about the whole thing.
Sir Leslie Glass, acting head of the British delegation in Lord Caradon's
absence, sent a note to the Subcommittee warning that it had no right to think
about this "purported secession" of
Anguilla
since it was the internal affair of a sovereign state: St.
Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. It was a testy note, it also said
Great
Britain
wouldn't "collaborate"
with the full Committee any more in connection with the other Associated States,
and it was pretty well guaranteed to raise hackles and to induce the
Subcommittee to think about the purported secession twice as hard as before.
Which they did.

But the irritable memo from Sir
Leslie Glass didn't portray the full spectrum of British opinion. On August 21
the
London
Times
contributed
the first of the eight editorials it would do on the subject over the following
three years. Under the headline "
Islanders in Revolt
," it gave a much more comprehensive
and compassionate summary of the
Anguilla
situation than
its
New York
namesake had done
two weeks earlier. After the mandatory brief mention of economic viability, it
said, "But the principle for which they stand—the right not to be ruled by
people they don't like, don't trust, and never agreed to live with—is no
absurdity at all." This was followed by a nicely encapsulated history of
events, finishing with, "Mr. Bradshaw's behaviour excuses the refusal of
other states to use force on his behalf. He has rushed through dra-conian emergency
legislation, gaoled his opponents, and adopted postures that worry everyone. An
armed move against
Anguilla
is unlikely."

Meanwhile, the Anguillan sally
against the U.N. was changing its angle of attack slightly. On August 25, a
week and a half after his first meeting with them, Roger Fisher went back
before the Subcommittee again and suggested a new relationship between
mini-states and the United Nations. Under Fishers scheme, the mini-state would
retain its independence, would
not
be a member of the U.N., but would be
able to call on the U.N. for whatever help it might need—expertise, medical
care, financial help and so on. He suggested that everybody "drop
nineteenth-century ideas of sovereignty that required total
self-sufficiency" and consider the fact that these mini-states were going
to keep coming along whether anybody liked it or not.
Anguilla
could be the first of these U.N. babies, but it wouldn't be the last.

The chairman of the Subcommittee,
Mohsen Sadigt Esfan-diary of
Iran
,
was a little doubtful at first. He thought Fisher meant some sort of
trusteeship, which smacked of colonialism.

No, Fisher said, they'll be
independent, they'll just be under U.N.
protection.
Esfandiary agreed
the idea sounded interesting.

Apparently the Subcommittee's
interest had been very strongly aroused because three days later it asked
Great
Britain
to allow a mission from the U.N. to
visit
Anguilla
and check the situation out.
Unfortunately, the British were so annoyed with the Subcommittee, and so
obtusely determined that
Anguilla
wasn't really a
problem, that they said No.
Great Britain
's
refusal had a lot of bad effects. It ended, at least temporarily, serious
consideration of Roger Fisher's U.N. orphan idea, some variant of which just
might solve the problems of fragmentation. And it meant that
Great
Britain
's last opportunity to shift the
responsibility of the
Anguilla
mess had just been
missed.