Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (28 page)

The war is over.
Anguilla
won, in the first second of play, but it took the British two years to fall
down. They had more mistakes to make first.

Beginning with Tony Lee. He knew
from early in the Interim Agreement Year that nothing would ever reattach
Anguilla
to St. Kitts, yet he failed to communicate this awareness to his superiors.
Perhaps nobody could have broken through their complacence and their obtuse
determination to live theoretically, but the point is that Tony Lee didn't.

When the Interim Agreement Year
ended, Ronald Webster desperately wanted the connection with
Great
Britain
to be kept alive somehow, as long as
it could be done without it seeming to his people that he'd sold out. Tony Lee
knew that and must have told his superiors so, but not in any way that made
them listen or understand.

When Whitlock arrived on the island
in March, Tony Lee had been there for two days. He knew about the
motorcade-and-lunch arrangements Ronald Webster had made. There is no question
of that, because
Lee
had made no other arrangements for either transport
or lunch.

A great muffled silence seems to
hang around Tony Lee, through which messages have a great deal of trouble
traveling. It begins to seem he is simply a man who doesn't want to disturb his
bosses. He will tell them what he knows, but quietly, without a great deal of
emphasis, and if they fail to act on what he has told them,
he seems to let it go at that.

But the largest blunder involving
Tony Lee is yet to come.

The troops had invaded before
five-thirty in the morning; by
eight o'clock
,
Tony Lee was on the island. Had he come in two or three days later, he would
have been the islanders' old friend, come to rescue them from the paratroops.
But coming in
with
the paratroops, and with his name on the leaflets
fluttering down from the helicopters, he became—permanently and forever—the
Anguillans' enemy.

Ronald Webster told reporters,
"I don't trust Mr. Lee. I no longer trust the British." As usual,
what he said reflected the feelings of the people of the island.

Ronald Webster is not really a
leader. In a way, he is the ultimate follower. He senses which way the majority
of the people are going and then gets out front and shouts, "Follow
me!" He may be the world's first hesitant fanatic.

Webster had liked and admired Tony
Lee for a year and a half, but the British bungled with Lee, and the people of
Anguilla
turned against him. So Webster turned against him.

Jean Campbell of the
London
Evening Standard
reported this remark by an Anguillan named Charlie Gumbs,
referring to the Whitlock visit: "Of course, we blame Tony Lee for all
this, for he knew the island and was supposed to understand our feelings.
Whitlock was a stranger."

In the spring of 1971 I talked with
Ronald Webster. I mentioned the number of people whose careers or reputations
had been damaged in the four years of the rebellion. Neither of us named any
names, but Webster said, "Oh, yes," and explained to me that there
had always been a plan, every step through this maze had been part of the same
master plan, and that some people had been useful in the plan only up to a
point. When they began to steer a course away from the plan, he explained,
"We had to put them to one side." Seated in a chair, he gestured down
and back with both hands, as though pushing a bag of laundry around behind him.
"To one side, you see," he said.

Of course the British had the same
thing in mind for Webster. He would be treated as a "prominent
citizen," no more. As Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart told the House of
Commons, "We cannot, of course, treat him as the president of an
independent
Republic
of
Anguilla
... we can treat him as one would any other Anguillan." As Whitlock, for
instance, had treated him.

When Tony Lee arrived on the island
two and a half hours after the troops had landed, the job he had been given by
his superiors was to supplant Webster. Apparently, at the time, he thought it
was possible.

While Lee was setting up a
temporary headquarters in the schoolhouse, Webster was holding a press
conference, telling reporters, "I had ordered the Defence Force not to
resist. But we will not surrender. We will not accept Mr. Lee unless the people
decide they will have him." Very few leaders with no army behind them and
with their entire nation occupied by foreign troops would have the brass to
announce, "We will not surrender."

Ronald Webster has no previous
political experience and very little experience of the outside world. His own
speaking manner is stiff and awkward, and he tends to listen with perhaps too
much naive confidence to people who speak more fluently than he. He
contradicted himself dozens of times in those four years, partly because of the
contradictory shifts of mass opinion and partly because of his tendency to move
on the basis of whomever he has talked to last. Senior British diplomats were
complaining after a while that they had never had to deal with so erratic a
personality in their lives.

Webster himself sees no
contradictions in his performance. He started out with certain objectives in
view, he never doubted he would win them, and eventually he won them. In the
spring of 1971, with no consciousness of the extravagance of the statement,
Ronald Webster seriously told me that he had never been wrong.

Most Anguillans agree with him. In
the symbolic family surrounding the Anguilla affair, in which Bradshaw is the
stern father (Papa Bradshaw, run you run) and Great Britain the neglectful
mother (Seeking the choice of Mothers care), Ronald Webster is not exactly a
member of the family; he's the family priest. He moves always with the
assurance that God has judged his plans and found them good. And when Tony Lee
landed at Wall Blake Airport on Anguilla in the wake of the paratroops, one of
the signs being held by the inevitable crowd of demonstrators read, "God
first, R Webster after."

Lee, naturally, now assumes the
inadvertent role of Pontius Pilate. Originally, he had been Senior British
Official and his role was to advise the Island Council led by Webster. Now, he
was to be Commissioner and the Island Council was to advise
him.
In
fact, it would be called the Advisory Council.

Since Lee isn't the sort of man to
throw his weight around, this technical shift in power wouldn't have changed
much, but British officialdom decided to go farther. Apparently they had the
idea that Webster should be punished for what had been done to Whitlock. So
Lee, in addition to being Commissioner, would be Chairman of the Advisory
Council. In other words, he was to take Webster's job as well as his own.

Webster, unsurprisingly, told him
to go to hell. He announced to his people that he had been deposed and they
rallied round him at once.

Way back in 1967, on Statehood Day,
there had been an anti-independence demonstration in which a small coffin
draped in black had been carried around the island bearing a sign saying
"Anguilla Is Dead." Now that same coffin was brought out by the same
demonstrators, but with a new sign: "If Lee Don't Go
Anguilla
Dead."

The invasion had come on Wednesday.
On that same day

Webster and Lee had a couple of
cool meetings. Pro-Webster demonstrators accompanied Lee wherever he went. By
Thursday, Webster knew he still had a majority with him so he announced it was
impossible to negotiate with Lee. In fact, he said, it was impossible to
negotiate with
any
Englishman until the troops left. Then, on Friday,
Webster fled the island.

The flight had clear Biblical and
symbolic overtones. It was also good public relations; it's impossible to have
a triumphal return unless it's preceded by a flight. In addition, at the time,
Webster thought there were also more practical reasons for escape, since he
believed he was about to be arrested.

Two things had led him to this
impression. The first was a
London
Times
report that "
Britain
was determined not to negotiate with Mr. Webster." It went on: "What
is more, sources close to both Mr. Kerr and Mr. Cecil Greatorex, another senior
British official in the area, said that every effort will be made to discredit
Mr. Webster in the eyes of his people."

Just after reading that, Webster
was told
Commissioner Way
was looking for him. He didn't wait to find out what Way wanted. In fact nobody
seems to know what Way wanted.

Webster spent six days in the
wilderness of
Manhattan
. During
that time the Anguillans never ceased to bedevil Tony Lee. When he tried to
enter his office on the day after Webster's flight, a crowd of demonstrators
blocked his path.
The New York Times
reported:

Several
hundred angry Anguillans prevented the British Commissioner, Anthony Lee, from
entering his office here today . . . The tall phlegmatic representative of the
British Crown beat a quick retreat after receiving several blows. But he
refused to force the issue . . . This morning, about 400 persons gathered in
front of the building with signs demanding that Mr. Lee leave the island . . .
Although warned of the crowd, Mr. Lee appeared an hour later in a green
Volkswagen. The only security forces present were unarmed
London
policemen who could not prevent the crowd from
surrounding the car.

Mr.
Lee received some roughing up, but was uninjured. His car, however, was dented
on the hood and roof. Two policemen received slight injuries. One was hurt in
the hand when he attempted to wrest a bicycle pump from a woman who was beating
him with it.

Mr.
Lee went back to his little white house overlooking the sea ... He acknowledged
that the situation had deteriorated. Asked what he would do if the situation
did not calm down, Mr. Lee answered, "That of course is the obvious
question."

Another obvious question,
considering Lee's background with the island and the events of the preceding
three days, was how he could go on to what he said next: "Mr. Lee insisted
that the demonstrators did not represent majority opinion on the island and
that they had been goaded into action by a small group with extreme
views."

By Monday, Lee was getting
snappish. Ronald Webster and Jerry Gumbs had been getting a great deal of
publicity and sympathy at the United Nations, and on Monday Ronald Webster
became the second Anguillan in history to be "Man in the News" in
The New York Times.
The same paper also reported that back on
Anguilla
,
"Mr. Lee said he had seen 'with my own eyes' young men going around
exhorting people to demonstrate against him. He described them as
hoodlums."

And the same paper quoted a
"vehement" young Anguillan woman as saying, of Tony Lee, "He
just has to go. We won't eat him or shoot him. We have nothing to shoot him
with."

In
New York
,
Ronald Webster was saying, "We are depending on the United Nations as a
young child on its mother."

The next day, Tuesday, Lee took a
page from Ronald Webster's book and reversed his field. "I consider Mr.
Webster has done a great service for
Anguilla
," he
announced. "He has put the island on the map. He has given Anguillans
dignity. If people make enough noise something will happen."

Much will happen. Suddenly Lord
Caradon announced that he would go to
Anguilla
at once
to "make an assessment of the situation."

"I'm sure he will help
us," Ronald Webster said.

Lord Caradon later described his
involvement with
Anguilla
to me this way: "I'm the
only Permanent Representative of the United Nations who is not an ambassador. I
am a Minister of my Government, so I can go in that capacity. So I went down
there, and we had a couple of noisy days, and wrote out an agreement together
after a long discussion. And it was a perfectly sound agreement, the terms of
it are well known, and it's been an agreement which has in fact been worked
since then. What's the answer? That we should—the British and the Anguillans
should—work together; why not? And we want a period of constructive
cooperation. Oh, yeah? Okay. Well, then it went bad a bit after that, because
very shortly after that Mr. Ronald Webster denounced the agreement. I had to go
down a third time and we had these discussions with him and his remarkable
gathering of his committee, all of them men of outstanding—character. And we
had worked out together over these three meetings, as far as I'm concerned, an
understanding. That's all."

Actually, it was a bit more
complicated than that. But Lord Caradon's skill is to smooth complications,
which is why he was the one going down there in the first place. He told me,
"The great quality of the West Indians whom I know—I'm more of a West
Indian than an Englishman really, I spent about ten years of my life in
Jamaica, I was there as what they call Colonial Secretary, acted as Governor,
then went back for seven years as Governor of Jamaica—the great quality of the West
Indians is their individuality. You sit down with those fifteen or twenty
members of that committee, every one of them is a highly developed personality.
Each different. There's no uniformity amongst these chaps. They've got a
fascinating capacity to express themselves. I fell in love with the people of
Anguilla
.
I do it naturally, because I fell in love with any West Indians."