Legal narratives of the invasion of Grenada, 1983

This blog post was written as a companion to the current exhibition in the IALS Library, ‘Legal colonialism and constitutional roads to independence: Jamaica and Grenada’. This will be on display at the entrance of the IALS Library until 29th November 2024.

Grenada gained its independence in 1974 and, like many other Caribbean Commonwealth nations, adopted a Westminster-style constitution. The first government of this parliamentary system under Prime Minister Eric Gairy, however, had by 1983 become “a corrupt administration” characterised by cronyism and brutality.[1]

One of the many Grenadians who suffered at the hands of the administration’s semi-secret police force was Maurice Bishop, who had been beaten by Gairy’s ‘Mongoose Gang’ and whose father was later killed at an anti-Gairy demonstration.[2] Bishop had returned to Grenada in 1970 after studying at the University of London, where he co-founded a Marxist-Leninist opposition, the New Jewel Movement, after merging local resistance groups.[3] After serving as Leader of the Opposition from 1976-1979, Bishop led the New Jewel Movement in a near-bloodless coup against the government while Gairy was abroad, addressing the United Nations.  

The People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada (PRG) made its ‘Proclamation of the Revolution’ on 13th March 1979 and established the first of the People’s Laws of Grenada. These first legal acts, among other points, suspended the existing Constitution of Grenada and established  an independent Grenadian Supreme Court. Although the British monarch was removed as the head of state, the PRG retained the existing Governor-General Paul Scoon.[4]

The PRG held power in Grenada for only four years. In October 1983, a power struggle within the PRG leadership culminated in the killing of Bishop and seven of his allies by the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC), a faction within the party led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard and General Hudson Austin. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and Governor-General Scoon called on the United States to provide military assistance to remove the RMC from office.[5] 

President Ronald Reagan’s government had been wary of Grenada since 1979 given the PRG’s close ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Reagan approved military action and on 25th October 1983 the US military landed on Grenada alongside a small OECS task force. At the time of the invasion, several hundred Cubans were living in Grenada to work on the construction of a new airport – a justification which the administration did not trust, with Reagan describing Grenada as “a Soviet-Cuban colony.” [6]

After the military intervention concluded, legislative elections were held in December 1983 and Herbert Blaize, a former minister and part of Bishop’s anti-Gairy coalition in the 1970s, was elected Prime Minister.

In the aftermath of Bishop’s government, the legality of the US invasion was hotly contested in Grenada and internationally, and efforts to build a coherent legal narrative around the coup quickly emerged. The US-OECS coalition justified its intervention on three principal grounds: 

1. That the military action was lawful under Article 8 of the OECS’s founding treaty;
2. That US involvement was justified by a need to protect its nationals living in Grenada;
3. That the use of force had been invited by Scoon, Grenada’s Head of State.[7] 

H. A. Fraser, editor of the West Indies Law Journal, sketches a history of the PRG and the coup in the Journal’s Winter 1983 edition and expands on the coalition’s first justification. His argument focuses on the provision in Article 8 the OECS treaty for member states to undertake “individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations,” including “measures to combat the activities of mercenaries.” While Fraser acknowledges that the legality of anticipatory self-defence was far from a settled issue, he argues that Cuban workers in Grenada met the definition of mercenaries.[8] 

Sidney Hook takes a similar line of argument in his introduction to the overtly pro-US The Grenada Papers, where he argues that the coalition’s discovery of “materials and signs in Spanish showed that the Cubans were in charge.” Hook also argues that the OECS members “unanimously approved of the request [for U.S. military assistance] as being in accord with treaty specifications.”[9] The Grenada Papers is representative of pro-US sources on the conflict: in the context of the Cold War, it was important to defend the invasion as both legal and anti-Soviet.  

The defence of the pro-US legal argument became particularly pressing after the military action was condemned by a UN resolution motioned by Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, which passed by 108-9 with 27 abstentions. The votes against were the US, six of the participating OECS states, and two US-allied governments in Israel and El Salvador.[10] Despite the material success of the US-OECS invasion, the legal defence of the action was supported by only a small minority of the international community. 

This emerged due to serious flaws in each of the US-OECS’s central legal justifications. Mohamed Shahabuddeen, writing while the Vice-President of Guyana, argues that the OECS treaty made no provision for “collective [military] action by some of its members against another member,” as was the case in the 1983 invasion. This is evidenced by the treaty requiring unanimity to approve any military action, which becomes “patent nonsense” when applied to the possibility of action against an OECS member.[11] William C. Gilmore’s analysis of the invasion criticises both the US and the OECS for failing to offer nonmilitary options to Grenada. He finds no evidence that any “action was taken, or threatened, against any group of foreign nationals by the RMC [nor] at the hands of private parties,” and argues that the US did not make a serious attempt to evacuate its citizens or to limit its activities to “the necessity of extracting its citizens from danger.”[12] 

Beyond the failure to explore other options, Shahabuddeen points to the “total want of evidence to support President Reagan’s assertion that ‘a Cuban occupation of the island had been planned’,” which in his view contradicts any justification of collective self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter.[13] Shahabuddeen also responds directly to Fraser’s characterisation of the Cuban nationals in Grenada as mercenaries. He argues that “their presence in Grenada with the consent of the PRG could not constitute external aggression against Grenada,” and that the issue of mercenaries was discussed in several CARICOM and OECS meetings from 1979-83, and in none of meetings “was it suggested that Cubans in Grenada were mercenaries.”[14] 

The final substantive justification of the invasion was the legality of Governor-General Scoon’s invitation. Shahabuddeen, in reviewing the documentation and testimonies given by various OECS leaders and Scoon himself, concludes that the letter requesting military assistance was “signed and delivered after the invasion was an accomplished fact” and with the solicitation of OECS states.[15] Gilmore argues that regardless of whether it was solicited by the OECS or received independently, this invitation was “beyond his proper constitutional powers and hence of no effect in the internal law of Grenada,” either under the Independence constitution of 1974 or the PRG constitution of 1979.[16]  

Gilmore concludes that “little attention appears to have been paid to considerations of international law in advance of the decision to resort to armed force,” and ends by quoting Louis Henkin’s reflection on principles of non-intervention: that although “governments continue to accept this principle as law, […] there is no indication that [this has] much relation to the conduct of nations.”[17] His and Shahabuddeen’s conclusion – that the invasion’s justification under international law was both questionable and post hoc – paints the deployment of international law as a point of narrative. 

The impact of this narrative conflict is still felt in contemporary Grenada. The historian Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe describes the US operation as an “intervasion” to capture “the complex and shifting associations […] of contemporary perspectives on the Revolution among Grenadians.”[18] After years of relative silence, a cultural reassessment of the PRG period has been underway in the 21st century: Grenada’s international airport was renamed after Bishop in 2009, the Grenada Revolution Memorial Foundation was founded in 2015, and in 2022 a national holiday was introduced to commemorate Bishop’s death and the end of the Revolutionary Government.[19] Brooks-Smith-Lowe’s sociological research into perceptions of the Revolutionary Government concludes by echoing narrative conflict in contemporary responses to the 1983 invasion. Through curricula and public commemoration, “the narrative of US salvation is being reinforced as history, as cultural memory […] that form of collective memory which is institutionalized, cultivated and formalized,” and neglects to commemorate the “emancipatory project” that preceded the invasion.[20]