The Secret War on Barbuda: Unearthing the History of Barbudan Secession
Since the launch of Clash!, we have elevated the struggle to defend communal land ownership in Barbuda as exemplary of the struggle for the Caribbean at large. Indeed, the enclosure of the Barbudan commons reveals the symbiosis of climate disaster, multinational capital, and a postcolonial political class.
While postcolonial rulers like Antiguan Prime Minister Gaston Browne petition for climate financing and reparations for foundational crime of slavery in the Caribbean, they pursue the dispossession of ordinary people with reckless abandon. The devastation of Barbuda by Hurricane Irma in September 2017 provided this decrepit class of leaders with a pretext to evacuate Barbuda under the guise of safety and protection. Barbudan refugees on the larger island of Antigua were prevented from returning home on their own authority. Construction of a new airport to expand commercial airline and private jet travel to Barbuda began without the approval of the Barbuda Council or the consultation of Barbudans themselves.
The communal land tenure system in Barbuda was legally enshrined in the Barbuda Land Act of 2007. As Prime Minister, Browne rubbished the communal land tenure system as a “myth” and declared the 2007 Act unconstitutional. Legal protections for Barbudans have proved technically effective at staving off the land grabs sponsored by Browne’s Government and its private sector partners including American actor Robert De Niro and billionaire financiers Steve Anderson and Jean-Paul DeJoria. In Ferbuary 2024, the UK Privy Council (Antigua and Barbuda’s highest court of appeal) ruled in favor of Barbudan plaintiffs John Mussington and Jacklyn Frank in their dispute over the airport development. The ruling arrived belatedly, however, with the airport already nearing completion. In other words, Browne and his associates are content to trample on Barbudan land rights and field legal challenges in turn.
Hurricane Irma was not the first act in the “secret war” on Barbuda. After the collapse of the West Indies Federation, Antigua and Barbuda enjoyed internal self-government as an associated state of the UK beginning in February 1967. In this period of associated statehood prior to political independence in 1981, Barbudans mobilized to preserve their hard-won autonomy at a moment of transition from colonial to postcolonial overlords. Flag independence for Antigua and Barbuda would not protect the Barbudan commons from mercenary politicians and developers in St. John’s and beyond.
Barbudans themselves sounded the alarm by leading a campaign for secession from the larger island of Antigua. In December 1967, a delegation from Barbuda led by McChesney George set off for London to demand separate associated statehood for Barbuda. George declared Barbudans to be “100 per cent behind secession from Antigua.”
In response, the Empire closed ranks. Declassified memos between Downing Street and British Government representatives in the Caribbean reveal the full contours of the response to George and the movement for Barbudan secession. On December 12, 1967, a despatch from the UK Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) reported the deployment of “police reinforcements…from Antigua as a precautionary measure” in response to the threat of secession. This modest display of the capacity for state violence was deemed enough to maintain the subordination of Barbuda to St. John’s. Yet the memo makes clear that any efforts by Barbudans to assert their desire for autonomy would be met with the full arsenal of the British military: “The Premier [V.C. Bird] regards this development as an internal political problem and does not consider that assistance from Britain is needed at the moment. The police force is, however, not a strong or efficient one and if a political compromise is not reached locally it is conceivable that external reinforcements could be asked for at a later stage.”
As observers of the present clash between Barbudans and the Antiguan Government, what can we gather from this communique? First, it should be clear that as V.C. Bird and his compatriots embarked on a new era of internal self-government and political independence in the English-speaking Caribbean, they maintained backchannel communications with Downing Street and UK Intelligence. This, of course, is not surprising or unusual. What this reveals, however, is the fraud perpetrated by a model of independence that consolidates power in the hands of political elites at the expense of the working people of the Caribbean.
While Bird considered Antiguan police up to the task of subduing Barbudans, it remained “conceivable” that the British Empire could rise again at any moment to lend “external reinforcements” to the cause of Antiguan hegemony over its sister isle. This presages the condition of independent Caribbean states in the present, where the sovereign authority of postcolonial elites in Kingston, Port of Spain, St. John’s, and Georgetown is dictated by remote from Washington and London. Where this is often invoked to demonstrate the subordination of Caribbean politicians to US and British interests, this despatch reveals that Bird and his brethren maintained intimate allegiances with agents of empire who stood ready to intervene on their behalf. Imperialism persists in Barbuda and across the Caribbean at the invitation of its political classes.
ANGUILLA TAKES THE LEAD
We should recall, too, that Barbuda was not alone in its desires for secession at this moment. In July 1967, Anguilla held a referendum on secession from the associated state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla that passed with 1,813 votes in favor and only 5 against. After a second referendum in February 1969 again passed overwhelmingly, Anguilla declared itself an independent republic. Efforts to preserve the federated state with St. Kitts by British envoy William Whitlock failed when he was expelled by armed Anguillan insurgents who represented the popular will of both referenda. On March 19, 1969, British Royal Marines and London Metropolitan Police arrived in Anguilla under the mandate to restore order on the island. “Operation Sheepskin” ended with a whimper. Anguilla did successfully extract itself from the political federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. It did not remain an independent, self-governing territory, however. Instead, Anguilla was restored to its prior status as a British Crown Colony and remains a British Overseas Territory today.
The Anguillan case clarifies much for Barbuda as well. That the people of Barbuda absurdly find greater justice in the Privy Council than they do “at home” in St. John’s should tell us to pursue the fault lines of Caribbean independence more closely. Why would Anguillan rebels prefer British dependency to independence? Quite simply, domination by postcolonial elites in Basseterre did not resemble freedom or independence for the people of Anguilla. The perils posed by political independence for the smallest islands of the Caribbean imposed a false choice the endurance of colonial rule or subordination by the postcolonial state. Neither Anguilla and its fellow British Overseas Territories nor Barbuda in its federated incorporation have enjoyed genuine independence. And neither can they do so alone. But anyone who spouts the language of decolonization must first evangelize the right of ordinary Anguillans and Barbudans to govern themselves independent of foreign rulers in Britain or Antigua. And in exercising this right, they invite the people of the entire region to throw the Government Boots off their necks.
IT’S A BIG CLUB…
A final confidential memo reveals the close collaboration between an ascendant class of postcolonial leaders in their efforts to subordinate dissidents and eradicate opposition to their schemes for the accumulation of foreign capital. V.C. Bird was not the only premier vexed by Barbudan secessionists. A despatch from Georgetown to the Commonwealth Office in London, reported that Prime Minister of newly independent Guyana, Forbes Burham, and Foreign Affairs Minister Shridath Ramphal were “concerned about recent developments and Ramphal has just left for Antigua for a quick week-end visit to both inform himself of the situation and to give Bird any assistance that might be necessary.” More insidiously, copies of the memo were addressed to Barbados, St. Lucia, the British Royal Navy’s Senior Naval Officer West Indies (SNOWI), and Washington.
The prospect of Barbudan secession, an island of 62 square miles with a population of only 1,200 in 1967, elicited concern from the politicians and premiers across the Caribbean. Why did this class of elites and strong men fear the power of the Barbudan people? If Barbuda were to succeed (and, in turn, secede), what then would become of their own satellite regions and territories? In other words, the struggle for Barbuda invites the people of Bequia, Union Island, Tobago, Carriacou, and Nevis to launch their own campaigns for autonomy independent of the bureaucrats that view them only as economic backwaters to be raided and transformed by multinational capital and predatory development. As Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement veteran and Clash! comrade Alvette Jeffers observed in one of our earliest commentaries, “Barbudans will, nevertheless, write their own history, and the Antiguan working class and everyday people will help them when they too fulfill the dreams of their ancestors by becoming the true masters of their own land.”
There is much for a contemporary political class composed of Gaston Browne, Mia Mottley, Andrew Holness, and Irfaan Ali to fear from Barbuda much as Bird, Burnham, and Barrow, did more than a half-century ago. Barbuda unveils the farce of independence when placed in the hands of petty opportunists who rule over vicious police states and condemn the communal traditions of our nations as “myths” that stand in the way of their mercenary designs. The struggle for Barbuda is the struggle for the Caribbean — a struggle for the true independence of workers and peasants from imperial overlords and the postcolonial rulers who have conspired for decades to defeat them.
