Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  Personal contact works better than telegrams with the U.N. Jerry Gumbs managed to set up an appointment with a U.N. official, Issoufou Djermakoye, Under-Secretary for Trusteeship and Non-Self-Governing Territories Affairs. They met on August 7, 1967. (This was the same date the Statement was being published on Anguilla.) Gumbs asked Djermakoye to ask Thant to send a fact-finding mission to Anguilla. Djermakoye said Thant couldn't do that without authorization from a "competent organ."

  It turned out that a competent organ was a committee. In this case it was the Special Committee on Colonialism. This Committee was just then looking into the whole business of Associated States anyway; the Committee was under the impression that an Associated State was a colony and therefore the Committee's business, while Great Britain claimed it was an independent nation and therefore out of the Committee's jurisdiction.

  Anguilla, by now, had become news. On the same day Jerry Gumbs was talking to Issoufou Djermakoye at the U.N. and the Statement was being published by the Peacekeeping Committee on Anguilla, The New York Times ran the first of the four editorials it would publish on the subject of Anguilla over the next two years. Under the heading "The Ins and Outs of Anguilla" ran copy that looked as though it had been written by Lord Shepherd. "The erratic procedure of recent days," said the third paragraph, "shows that there is no truly representative government to speak for the island. The man who was President until a week ago, Peter Adams, had a mandate to negotiate for Anguilla. When he did so and signed a pact that seemed fair to him and to delegations from a number of the islands and Britain, Mr. Adams was ousted." Compare that with Larry Wade's account of Peter Adams' feeling at Barbados that he was "on top of a mountain with guns pointing at hini from every side."

  Jerry Gumbs thanked Issoufou Djermakoye for his time and went in search of the Special Committee on Colonialism. Unfortunately, the Special Committee on Colonialism was in recess, but it had a Third Subcommittee that was sitting and that gave Gumbs an appointment for the next day.

  A brief reminder here. Anguilla did not rebel against colonial rule; Anguilla rebelled against independence. After 317 years of neglect and mismanagement as a colony, Anguilla rebelled three months after being set free. Now of course this runs absolutely counter to the flow of contemporary history, and it was very hard for anybody to believe that a tiny group of six thousand people was fighting against independence and for colonialism.

  In fact, it was sometimes hard for the Anguillans themselves to keep it straight. Revolutionary rhetoric is all geared in one direction, and it's hard to make yourself understood if you're trying to go the other way. What Anguilla wanted to be—with side trips into other possibilities—was a British colony. The statement of complaint given to Peter Johnston four months before the rebellion included this: "England would be bound to keep Anguilla as a colony since Anguilla was unwilling to associate with St. Kitts in Statehood." And when the first reporter reached Anguilla after the beginning of the rebellion, Peter Adams told him, "We would like to return to Crown Colony rule."

  That's what Anguilla wanted. What the Third Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Colonialism wanted was freedom, baby; freedom now. The full Special Committee is weighted heavily toward anti-colonialism, with a majority of its twenty-four members coming from recently free nations, mostly in Africa and Asia. A few months earlier, when the Committee had started looking into these things called Associated States, Lord Caradon had reproached it with the following soaring sentence: "Are we to assume that the sponsors of this resolution wish to stipulate that all the remaining colonial territories, however small, poor or isolated, must be required to abandon their own freely expressed aims, and that they should be forced to walk the plank into independent isolation whether they wish it or not?" Or, as the London Times said in reporting Lord Caradon's address, "So far, there is no indication that Lord Caradon's arguments will carry conviction with the majority of the 24 committee members, who have in the past delighted in flogging the dead horse of colonialism. The committee has a built-in majority in favour of ideological extremism."

  So on the one side we have Anguilla, which is independent and wants to be a colony, and on the other side we have the Third Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Colonialism, which wants every colony in the world set free by sundown.

  Jerry Gumbs went to talk to the seven-member Subcommittee on August 8 and started off right away talking independence: "The desire of the people of Anguilla is to improve their situation, and all they need to do this is self-government." The Subcommittee listened attentively to Gumbs's rundown of Anguilla's run-down condition—the roads, the schools, the phones, the electricity. The only sour note of the day was sounded by a minority of one on the Subcommittee, Pedro Berro of Uruguay, who asked mildly whether an independent Anguilla would be economically viable, and suggested Anguilla might go directly from British colonialism to "neocolonialism under foreign capital." Still, despite Berro's interpolation, the day was generally considered satisfactory all around, and Gumbs was asked to come back the next day.

  He did, bringing Roger Fisher, who had just come up from Anguilla with a copy of the Statement and who also wanted to speak to the Subcommittee.

  The Subcommittee wasn't sure about that. Jerry Gumbs had presented himself to them as an Anguillan, representing the people of his home island. But Roger Fisher was an American, a professor of international law, and—according to the British—an agent of the Mafia. The Subcommittee wasn't sure it wanted to make the same accommodation of its rules for Fisher that it had made for Gumbs.

  So, for the second day, Jerry Gumbs alone spoke to the Subcommittee, first reading them the Statement. Since this was by far the most moderate declaration by anybody so far, full of reassurances that the Barbados proposals hadn't been rejected out of hand, the Subcommittee found its vision of Anguilla blurring a bit around the edges. Pedro Berro was probably speaking for everybody when he asked "who now is really authorized to speak for Anguilla." He assured Jerry Gumbs he wasn't questioning his good faith, but inquired, "When he says 'the people of Anguilla' have authorized him, how do we know what it means?"

  Roger Fisher finally got to talk to the Subcommittee nearly a week later, and apparently he too talked "independence." Throughout this whole affair, it was very difficult for people to talk about what they were doing without getting the words wrong.

  Whatever Fisher said, he said it at an informal meeting with Subcommittee members rather than at a formal session. As The New York Times explained, "Some committee members had objected that Mr. Fisher could not testify as a petitioner without clearance by a petitions subcommittee or the full Colonialism Committee." Nevertheless, he did get to talk to them, after which the Subcommittee retired to prepare a recommendation for the full Committee.

  But then Great Britain got miffed about the whole thing. Sir Leslie Glass, acting head of the British delegation in Lord Caradon's absence, sent a note to the Subcommittee warning that it had no right to think about this "purported secession" of Anguilla since it was the internal affair of a sovereign state: St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. It was a testy note, it also said Great Britain wouldn't "collaborate" with the full Committee any more in connection with the other Associated States, and it was pretty well guaranteed to raise hackles and to induce the Subcommittee to think about the purported secession twice as hard as before. Which they did.

  But the irritable memo from Sir Leslie Glass didn't portray the full spectrum of British opinion. On August 21 the London Times contributed the first of the eight editorials it would do on the subject over the following three years. Under the headline "Islanders in Revolt," it gave a much more comprehensive and compassionate summary of the Anguilla situation than its New York namesake had done two weeks earlier. After the mandatory brief mention of economic viability, it said, "But the principle for which they stand—the right not to be ruled by people they don't like, don't trust, and never agreed to live with—is no absurdity at all." This was followed by a nicely encapsu
lated history of events, finishing with, "Mr. Bradshaw's behaviour excuses the refusal of other states to use force on his behalf. He has rushed through dra-conian emergency legislation, gaoled his opponents, and adopted postures that worry everyone. An armed move against Anguilla is unlikely."

  Meanwhile, the Anguillan sally against the U.N. was changing its angle of attack slightly. On August 25, a week and a half after his first meeting with them, Roger Fisher went back before the Subcommittee again and suggested a new relationship between mini-states and the United Nations. Under Fishers scheme, the mini-state would retain its independence, would not be a member of the U.N., but would be able to call on the U.N. for whatever help it might need—expertise, medical care, financial help and so on. He suggested that everybody "drop nineteenth-century ideas of sovereignty that required total self-sufficiency" and consider the fact that these mini-states were going to keep coming along whether anybody liked it or not. Anguilla could be the first of these U.N. babies, but it wouldn't be the last.

  The chairman of the Subcommittee, Mohsen Sadigt Esfan-diary of Iran, was a little doubtful at first. He thought Fisher meant some sort of trusteeship, which smacked of colonialism.

  No, Fisher said, they'll be independent, they'll just be under U.N. protection. Esfandiary agreed the idea sounded interesting.

  Apparently the Subcommittee's interest had been very strongly aroused because three days later it asked Great Britain to allow a mission from the U.N. to visit Anguilla and check the situation out. Unfortunately, the British were so annoyed with the Subcommittee, and so obtusely determined that Anguilla wasn't really a problem, that they said No. Great Britain's refusal had a lot of bad effects. It ended, at least temporarily, serious consideration of Roger Fisher's U.N. orphan idea, some variant of which just might solve the problems of fragmentation. And it meant that Great Britain's last opportunity to shift the responsibility of the Anguilla mess had just been missed.

  "Myself, I never believed in taking any man's dollars unless I gave him something for it— something in the way of rolled gold jewelry, garden seeds, lumbago lotion, stock certificates, stove polish or a crack on the head to show for his money/'

  —O. Henry, The Gentle Grafter

  12

  The San Francisco Group has been keeping busy, you can be sure of that. As Newhall says, "We were firmly attached to Leopold Kohr s theory of the small city-state. Over meals at San Francisco restaurants we talked about things they could do."

  The San Francisco members of the San Francisco Group are, if you will recall, a newspaper managing editor, an advertising executive, and a member of a magazine's board of directors. These three, having hitched their wagon to a fun star, having invented a nation and a flag and a people and letterhead stationery and cash money, are now looking for something to do next. What will they do next?

  They will run an ad.

  "Suddenly," Newhall says, "the whole matter of the advertisement became very pressing. On Wednesday, August 2, we heard that a British frigate was preparing to land on Anguilla the following week, or sooner, to force them to accept the Barbados agreement. We had no time to lose."

  Is the pen mightier than the sword? Can a full-page ad in The New York Times stop a frigate?

  Newhall: "Howard came bursting into the firehouse early Wednesday evening and said, I've got it! It's done! It's great!'"

  What Gossage had that was done and was great was the ad. It was called "(The Anguilla White Paper)," parentheses theirs, and it was done as a response to the August 2 editorial in The New York Times. It was signed by Ronald Webster, but Newhall says Gossage wrote it. A bit later, when a dispute came up about the accuracy of the ad, Gossage told the Times he'd written it but said he'd sent an associate to Anguilla to show a copy to Ronald Webster. This associate and his trip are not mentioned by any of the participants in the reminiscence in Scanlan's Monthly, and Webster told Times reporter Henry Giniger that he had only been shown parts of the final ad.

  Who's right? Well, let's look at some excerpts from the ad and see. We know, for instance, the Anguillan attitude about telephones; they'd had phones for forty years, Hurricane Donna knocked down the poles, Bradshaw took the cen-tral-office equipment away, and the Anguillans had been angry and telephoneless for seven years. The ad quoted the Times editorial as saying the islanders "lack such modern amenities as telephones," and replied, "This is a terrible indictment in New York eyes, we suppose, but do you know what one Anguillan does when he wants to telephone another Anguillan? He walks up the road and talks to him." The island is fifteen miles long. When you want to telephone somebody fifteen miles away, do you walk up the road and talk to him? If so, you'd better pack a lunch, because it will take you four hours to get there.

  Then there's terminology. Peter Adams had been upset when newspapers called him "President" because it struck him as foolish and demeaning to claim a title he didn't deserve. There was no Anguillan President. Ronald Webster retained the same attitude, and the ad is signed with his proper title, "Chairman, the Anguilla Island Council," but in the body of the ad there is this sentence: "We would not think it either good or polite that so many visitors should be on the island at once that they couldn't at least have lunch with the President." There are other things wrong with that sentence, but for now let us all put our heads together and try to figure out just who we're supposed to be having lunch with.

  As for the lunch itself, Ronald Webster was the leader of a rebellion, not the captain of a cruise ship; was he really planning to spend the rest of his days having lunch with schoolteachers from Boise, Idaho?

  Another thing wrong with that sentence is its implication about the number of visitors the island wants. The preceding sentence reads, "In the first place, we have only 30 guest rooms on the entire island at the moment, with no plans to expand." Well, Jerry Gumbs was even at that moment busily adding ten rooms to his Rendezvous Hotel, and another Anguillan was industriously building a brand-new ten-room hotel that would open in less than four months, with an ad in the Beacon boasting of "hot and cold running water."

  It was perfectly true, as the ad said, that the islanders didn't want their home to become the lobby of a new Hilton. But the notion that they didn't want to attract more tourists is just foolishness. And what of alien home builders? The Anguillans would love to see more Americans retire to Anguilla— a few already have—build themselves a house, move in, spend a little money; but there wasn't a word about this in the ad. In fact the ad would tend to discourage thinking along those lines by being so totally Anguilla-for-Anguillans.

  On the other hand, Ronald Webster was leading a rebellion and he did need money. It's possible he might have agreed to the ad no matter what Howard Gossage had put in it, since the San Francisco Group had assured him the thing would make a pot of money. I don't know if that's what happened, or if Webster saw only a part of the ad, or if he saw the whole ad but was thinking about something else at the time—Robert Bradshaw's armed forces, for instance—and didn't quite follow what the thing said, but whatever happened, the result was that the honeymoon was over. "(The Anguilla White Paper)" was at one and the same time the San Francisco Group's biggest caper and ultimate smashup.

  But here I've spent all this time talking about the ad and haven't even said what it was selling. Ads always do sell something, that's what they're for.

  This ad was selling Anguilla; it was a pitch for money, contributions, charity. But in the best traditions of American hucksterism, the customer doesn't go away empty-handed: "First off ... we had better send you an autographed picture of the Island Council, a facsimile of the original handwritten version of our national anthem, and a small Anguillan flag."

  But wait; there's more. "If you wish to help us with as much as $25.00, we'll also send you one of the Anguilla Liberty Dollars." Now, that one was a good deal. In January 1970 Jerry Gumbs told me, "The silver dollars are still being sold in Texas, by a man named Long; they're selling them for thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents."
That's a 60 per cent appreciation in less than three years; you don't hardly get a deal like that one.

  Or this one: "Those sending $100 or more will become Honorary Citizens of Anguilla. They will receive a document in the form of an Anguillan passport, identical to that which we are issuing to Anguillans, except that it will have an Anguillan Dollar inlaid as shown in the picture. While Americans should not expect to use this passport for foreign travel, it will be good for entering Anguilla. In fact, only holders of this passport will be able to visit Anguilla as guests."

  Yes, well, if you think the hundred-dollar deal is the one for you, take a tip: go for the twenty-five buck offer four times. The Honorary Citizen thing never had any reality outside Howard Gossage's head; there was no such legislation passed by the Island Council or drafted by the Island Council or even considered by the Island Council. As to the Anguillan passports, Anguillans much preferred to go on using their British passports. There are no Anguillan passports, except the mock-ups done for the ad in San Francisco. (Some others were made up later on to send to the people who sent in the money.) As to Anguilla's refusing admission to any tourist or other visitor who failed to have one of these passports, why don't you just think about that yourself for a minute?

  The ad was scheduled to be run in The New York Times on Monday, August 14. That was the day Roger Fisher, dweller in a more mundane world, was making his first appearance before the Colonialism Subcommittee at the U.N. Fisher heard about the ad the day before and apparently thought it might do him some damage before the Subcommittee—it would put him in the position, more or less, of asking the U.N. to grant independence to a Hula-Hoop factory—so he phoned Newhall to get the thing stopped. Newhall quotes the conversation: