The spirit of Maurice Bishop and the CARICOM foreign ministers meeting in Grenada

By Michelle Nurse Last updated May 22, 2019

FLASHBACK: Maurice Bishop (standing, left) at a CARICOM Heads of Government Meeting

(Barbados Today Guest Column) In this 40th anniversary year of the 1979 Grenada Revolution, the fates smiled upon our Caribbean Community (CARICOM) when it was confirmed that the 22nd Regular Meeting of CARICOM’s Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) would be held in Grenada on the 13th and 14th of May 2019. This, thereby, ensured that the assembled Caribbean Foreign Ministers would find themselves in a space steeped in the spirit of Maurice Bishop – the great hero and martyr of the Grenada Revolution – and would therefore be impelled to take cognisance of Bishop’s signal contribution to the edifice of CARICOM’s collective Foreign Policy – the notion that our Caribbean region should be legally constituted in International Law and universally respected as a “Zone of Peace”!

It would do us well to recall that a mere seven months after Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) came to power in March 1979, Grenada attended the 9th Regular Session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) at La Paz in Bolivia, and secured the adoption by the OAS of Resolution 456 (1X-0/79) decreeing the Caribbean a “Zone of Peace”.

(Bishop was acting against the background of a 1978 United Nations General Assembly Resolution which resolved that the member nations of the UN should establish “zones of peace in various regions of the world under appropriate conditions to be clearly defined and determined by the States concerned in the zones, taking into account the characteristics of the zone and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.)