Was an order given to execute Grenada Prime Minister Maurice Bishop? If so, who issued that order and why? A new film attempts to unearth answers.
Paul Coleman reports.
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| Post-screening panel (left to right) Professor Gus John, director Bruce Paddington, and Michael La Rose (© London Intelligence) |
Who really shot the sherrif?
Would a low-ranking soldier shoot and execute
his Prime Minister without an order from a superior officer?
Admittedly, it’s not an everyday question.
But a man sat right behind me stood up to deny an
inference that he – as a high ranking officer - had given such an order to five
subordinates.
Defiantly
The man – Selwyn Strachan – had just seen himself
on the big screen at the National Film Theatre. Strachan’s cagey answers,
filmed in a documentary interview, suggest for some reason he knows more than
he is prepared to say.
In the film, Forward Ever: The Killing of a
Revolution (Director,
Bruce Paddington, 2013), Strachan is asked if he or his senior colleagues
issued an order on 19 October 1983 - to former army officer Callistus Bernard
and four other soldiers to line up against a fort yard wall Prime Minister
Maurice Bishop, his pregnant partner Jacqueline Creft, and other prominent
government figures - and execute them with machine gun fire.
Bishop’s last act was to reportedly to have
defiantly faced his executioners when they asked him to turn his back on them
and face the wall.
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| Selwyn Strachan, featured in Forward Ever, stands up in the audience and tries to explain his role in the chilling events in Grenada 1983 (© London Intelligence) |
Massacre
Dozens of other Bishop supporters were killed that
day at the fort that overlooks St George’s, the capital of Eastern Caribbean island, Grenada. Many died
jumping off high fort walls to try and escape being shot dead in cold blood.
In the interview, Strachan only goes as far to say
that someone must have been responsible – and as a senior army officer at the
time, it’s natural that investigators and historians look at his role.
Strachan was one of 17 people imprisoned for up to 26 years for their alleged role in the killing of Prime Minister Bishop, cabinet members, and the
massacre of civilians. The unknown exact toll of that bloody day is estimated
at 300 people.
Challenges
Strachan stands up and announces his presence in
the full house audience during a Question and Answer session after a special British Film
Institute Forward Ever screening
on London’s South Bank (17 May). He challenges director Dr Bruce Paddington, a University of the
West Indies lecturer, who is on stage to answer questions.
Documented
Strachan tells the audience that in October 1983
the Grenada people’s revolution – that included popular movements and zonal and
parish councils that fed directly into government decisions - was “breaking
down”.
“We had to take some fundamental decisions to
arrest this situation,” says Strachan.
“All of these decisions are documented,” adds
Strachan. “They can be read. Nothing was held in secret.”
Strachan denies that a hardline Marxist-Leninist clique in the People's Revolutionary Government had sought to oust the popular Bishop and hijack the revolution.
Revolution
Strachan claims Paddington’s film tries to “rewrite
history”.
“I was there and I know the scene,” says Strachan.
“I want you to know that what you presented was totally biased and untrue.”
Paddington says he stands by his film and that he
attempted to give full rein to different perspectives of the tragic events that
befell the revolution on this Caribbean island. Days later, 8,000 American troops invaded Grenada - an independent nation and a British Commonwealth country - on the orders of President Ronald Reagan - at no time a friend of the Grenada revolution that overthrow the tyrannical Eric Gairy regime in 1979.
Bizarrely
In the film, Callistus Bernard, in a chillingly
matter-of-fact interview, details how he organised the lining up of his former
colleagues before they used “any weapons we had at hand” to murder them.
Bishop’s body – and those of the others massacred –
have never been found.
Bizarrely, Bernard says in the film that after the
massacre they decided to “burn the bodies in order to preserve them”.
Forward Ever: The Killing of a Revolution, directed by Bruce Paddington, 2013,
was screened at the BFI on 17 May and was followed by a panel discussion with Professor Gus
John, George Padmore Institute chair Michael La Rose, and filmmaker Bruce
Paddington.
© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, May 2014
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