The hijacking of four civilian, passenger aircraft in order to carry out a series of coordinated terrorist attacks upon the United States of America on September 11th 2001 has been implanted indelibly in world opinion. Those tragic events launched two major wars, triggered the greatest manhunt in human history for the culprits and changed completely the legal framework for aviation security around the world. They also made the date ‘9/11’ an international byword for deadly terrorism.
Almost exactly a quarter of a century earlier on October 10th 1976, however, the Anglophone Caribbean provided the setting for a similar crime. At that time it became the theatre for the deadliest terrorist attack in the Western hemisphere. This was the Caribbean’s ‘10/6.’
It is arguable that if the international implications of the first attack on 10/6 had been understood the second attack on 9/11 might have been prevented. The Cubana de Aviación flight CU 455 had originated in Guyana, travelled to Trinidad and then to Barbados with the intention of heading to Jamaica before terminating in Cuba. It was no coincidence that these same four Anglophone Caribbean states only four years earlier, in December 1972, had made the courageous démarche of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. Did their diplomatic decision make them targets for terrorism?
It is a fact that a few minutes after take-off from Seawell Airport in Barbados on October 6, 1976, two bombs detonated bringing the Douglas DC-8 aircraft down and killing all 73 persons on board. Evidence has implicated several anti-Castro Cuban exiles in this crime but the international implications and political complications of that terrorist attack remain to be resolved. The United States administration so far has declined either to detain or to prosecute the prime suspect − Luis Posada Carriles − a Venezuelan citizen, on terrorism charges. The Venezuelan government has made repeated requests for the suspect’s extradition under a treaty between the two countries, but these have been ignored.
Caribbean Community and Cuba’s Heads of State and Government at the Second CARICOM-Cuba Summit in Barbados in December 2005 urged the government of the United States of America to consider favourably the request for the suspect’s extradition to Venezuela in order to ensure that he is brought to justice on charges of terrorism, in accordance with its obligations under international law and its national legislation.
The Barbados government, a decade ago, actually constructed a monument designed by Virgil Broodhagen, the son of Guyanese-born artist Karl Broodhagen. Every year, an official commemorative ceremony is held in Bridgetown. Here in Georgetown, it is left up to the Cuban Embassy and the Guyana-Cuba Friendship Association to organise a low-key wreath-laying ceremony at the Cuban Embassy.
The Guyana government is different. The Cubana atrocity of 10/6 has never been a significant date on this administration’s annual martyrs’ almanac although eleven Guyanese citizens were killed. Its approach has been casual in comparison to the celebratory atmosphere that surrounds the going and coming of Guyanese students enjoying Cuban scholarships. Last year, there was talk that a monument would be erected in memory of the victims of the atrocity but, shamefully, an unseemly hullabaloo between the central government and the city municipality marred the start last week of that project.
Back in September 2005, US president George Bush told the UN general assembly that “terrorists must know that, wherever they go, they cannot escape justice.” But, for the terrorists who carried out the 10/6 attack in the Caribbean, this has not been quite true. As Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez said after a US judge ruled against deporting the perpetrator of the crime, the US is protecting the “Osama bin Laden of Latin America.”
Official attitudes to this crime have seriously undermined the USA’s moral authority to convince the international community to cooperate in its war on terrorism. How can the USA persuade other states to prosecute or hand over terrorist suspects when it refuses to do so itself?
