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Lee Kuan Yew’s Caribbean Rescue in the Commonwealth (Expanded version)



The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs (June 2015, London)  This is an expanded version of an earlier newspaper commentary.

Lee Kuan Yew was a remarkable man who is best remembered for courageous leadership that converted a tiny island with virtually no natural resources into one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

This article recalls a particular role that he played on the Caribbean’s behalf, saving the leaders of five Eastern Caribbean countries,(1) Barbados and Jamaica from disdain and condemnation at the November 1983 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in India over their invitation to the United States of America to invade Grenada a month before.
 
But, first, it has to be recalled that Lee Kuan Yew commanded international respect, even envy, for making tiny Singapore an economic powerhouse in global terms. He tended to tolerate nothing that would be likely to disrupt the march towards progress of his tiny country. Small states in the Caribbean and elsewhere are often directed to the‘Singapore Model’ as a design they should seek to emulate. That, however, is easier said than done. Cultural and other differences—not least Lee’s strict style of governance—cannot be replicated in the Caribbean where slavery and later exploitative labour practices were overturned by strong trade unions and worker agitation.
 
Nonetheless, it is worth recalling the ingredients Lee utilised to develop his country. A principal and overriding factor was a dominant role for the state—something which international   financial   institutors   and   Western   developed   nations discourage in Caribbean countries, indeed, across the Third World. Even while maintaining a dominant role for the state, Lee actively encouraged foreign investment, recognising, in the beginning, that Singapore lacked the capital and know-how to create industries. That is not the situation today, but it was his attitude to social democracy that improved health, public housing and, vitally, education. The wages and salaries of public servants today match payments in the private sector, resulting in public servants whose capacity is every bit as good as the best in the private sector.
 
It is important to register the accomplishments of Lee Kuan Yew in the development and prosperity of his own country, and the respect it earned him in the global community, because, along with his sharp intellect, they explain why he was able to play an influential role in rescuing Caribbean countries at the 1983 Commonwealth Summit.
 
The story of the US-led invasion of Grenada is sufficiently well known not to warrant detailed elaboration here. Suffice to say that on 16 October the army, along with a faction of the ruling party that had itself come to power by a bloodless coup d’état in 1979, established a military government in the wake of the killing of the prime minister, Maurice Bishop, and others. This was sufficient to horrify neighbouring Caribbean islands, especially those in   the seven-nation Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS),(2)   closest to Grenada. But while the governments of these small nations felt threatened by the military coup, it was the presence of Cubans in Grenada that was the US government’s focus of concern even though, for the most part, the majority of the Cubans were workers involved in the construction of an airstrip cap- able of accommodating commercial jet aircraft—long an ambition of Grenada’s tourism industry. Cuba, at the time, was providing troops and other military support to Angola to resist an invasion by the apartheid South African government that the administration of US President Ronald Reagan regarded as an ally in its fight against communism.
 
The Commonwealth Caribbean countries were divided over the issue. The heads of government of what was then the 13-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) were barely talking to each other.(3) Four of them—the leaders of The Bahamas, Belize, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago (4) - eschewed the label ‘intervention’ for the term ‘invasion’ as the appropriate description of what had occurred in Grenada when the US landed troops on the island on 25 October. They harboured great umbrage for the leaders of the other seven Caribbean countries who had encouraged the US invasion and were represented at the summit,(5) particularly because they had all met formally in Port- of-Spain (the Trinidad and Tobago capital) on 22 and 23 October and had left the meeting with no inkling that a US-led invasion would take place. The leaders of Belize and Guyana, whose countries had border problems with larger and more powerful countries Guatemala and Venezuela, respectively, were adamantly against any form of military invasion for fear of the precedent it would set.
 
I was privileged to be an Antigua and Barbuda delegate, under the leadership of then Foreign Minister Lester Bird, to that 1983 Commonwealth Summit. The temper of the meeting, particularly from the leaders of African states, was profound annoyance with the countries of the Eastern Caribbean, Barbados and Jamaica that had participated with the US in giving ‘cover’ to the Grenada invasion.
 
The Africans vented their distress at Caribbean participation with the US. Disapproving statements were made by Presidents Robert Mugabe, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda of Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Zambia, respectively. Their governments—and the majority of governments of Commonwealth developing countries—had voted just weeks before at the United Nations General Assembly to condemn the US-led intervention. President Nyerere stated that the US wanted to expel Cuba from Angola in support of the apartheid South African regime and Mugabe condemned the Caribbean countries, saying that by their sanctioning of the invasion of Grenada ‘African member countries were entitled to regard them as acting against African interests’. Julius Nyerere called on the Commonwealth to ‘express its anger’. And so it might have done were it not for Lee Kuan Yew.
 
He explained that Singapore had voted at the United Nations (UN) against the US because its intervention in Grenada had broken a rule and breaking that rule could have ‘horrendous consequences’. But, he said he had listened to four Caribbean leaders who had spoken before him asking for understanding of their position. Those leaders were Lester Bird of Antigua and Barbuda, Kennedy Simmonds of St Kitts-Nevis, Eugenia Charles of Dominica and J. M. G. ‘Tom’ Adams of Barbados.6 Bird had said ‘when a regime murdered a Prime Minister and was terrorizing its own people, the governments of neighbouring countries with which there was an enduring relationship had a responsibility to act’.
 
Lee Kuan Yew told the conference that despite his condemnation of the US at the  UN, which he would do again, ‘Commonwealth leaders were presented with a paradox’. He described the paradox for his government in the following way:
‘Singapore voted against the American invasion because of the resulting dangers; it was nonetheless grateful that it took place because there were 110,000 happy Grenadians’. He said ‘One could talk about principles and define, redefine and refine them to sophistry’, but each leader knew in his heart ‘that the Eastern Caribbean States’ response was right’. He went on to observe that ‘it would have been much more convenient’ if the Caribbean countries had the resources to intervene on their own. The matter, he said, would not have been raised at the Commonwealth Summit ‘nor would their action have caused great objections in the United Nations’, which ‘would have seen it as an example of the Third World resolving its own problems’.
 
He concluded that Commonwealth leaders had not gathered ‘to put their partners from the Eastern Caribbean in the dock’. ‘It was necessary to condemn the action in the United Nations because of the dangerous precedents it could create’, but he wanted the meeting to turn away from recrimination and to come out positively with a proposal  to achieve security for island states, and so make a contribution ‘to international stability and security’.
 
Not all of the heads of government at the Commonwealth Summit would have welcomed Lee Kuan Yew’s practical and pragmatic intervention, but they recognised the wisdom in it.
 
Lee Kuan Yew received a respectful and careful hearing to what was a thoughtful and defining intervention—one that Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal developed into a forward-looking statement from the summit that focused ‘on the early return by Commonwealth Caribbean countries to the spirit of fraternity’ and to the undertaking of ‘a study of the special needs of small states consonant with the right to sovereignty and territorial integrity’.
 
Several positive consequences flowed from Lee Kuan Yew’s statement at the summit: it helped to bridge the divide that had occurred between Caribbean countries that had participated with the US in the Grenada intervention and Commonwealth countries that had opposed; it led to the first definitive study of the challenges confronting small states;(7) and it confirmed the value of Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings attended by heads themselves speaking frankly and constructively to each other.
 
Notes
 
1. Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
2. The member states of the OECS were: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Montserrat.
3. One of the member countries was Montserrat, a British colony with no status to attend a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
4. The Bahamas, Linden Pindling; Belize, George Price; Guyana, Forbes Burnham; and Trinidad and Tobago, George Chambers.
5. Jamaica’s prime minister, Edward Seaga, an architect of the invasion, did not attend. Jamaica was represented by its foreign minister, Hugh Shearer. With no government in place, Grenada was not represented at the summit.
6. The other OECS leader at the summit was John Compton, prime minister of St Lucia.
7. ‘Vulnerability: Small States in the Global Society’, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1985.

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