Grenadan team set to take shape

Press, 10 November 1983, Page 8

Grenadan team set to take shape

NZPA-Reuter St George’s The Grenadan GovernorGeneral, Sir Paul Scoon, the country’s sole legal authority since the United Statesled invasion, today names a civilian team to run the island until elections are arranged.

Sir Paul has said that the interim Administration will contain no politicians and comprise only technocrats, presumably meaning individuals drawn from academic, professional and business life.

The Governor-General has given no clue as to whom he will name to the new team, but is expected to draw on distinguished Grenadans now filling posts abroad in the academic and international agency fields.

His decision to exclude politicians means those in office in the years between independence from Britain in 1974 and the rise to power of the Leftist leader Maurice Bishop in 1979 will be excluded. Sir Paul said he wants the interim team’s term to be brief, and would like fresh elections on the island within six months to a year.

But many people in St George’s say that, after more than four years of single-party rule by the

New Jewel Movement, that is too short a time for the organisation of new parties and the emergence of fresh political leaders.

Sir Paul has thrown out the constitution drawn up by Mr Bishop’s Government, and has reverted to the original constitution of independence. Based on powers contained in that original constitution, he declared a state of emergency shortly after the Americans routed defenders of the N.J.M. faction that had seized power on October 19.

American troops are still hunting lingering resistance fighters, according to the commander of American forces, Major-General Jack Farris.

He said that up to 50 Cuban defenders, and possibly some members of the disbanded People’s Revolutionary Army, were still in the bush sniping or moving in small groups.

An American forces’ graves registration team has started digging up a shallow grave which they believed could contain the remains of four people, including Mr Bishop. The last group of Cubans captured in Grenada have left for' their homeland, along with a group of Cuban Embassy personnel.

Lino Guitierrez of the American Foreign Service’s Cuban liaison office told reporters that 101 Cuban prisoners and eight women and three children from the Cuban Embassy were placed aboard transport planes and flown to Barbados, where they would board a Cuban commercial airliner for the trip home.

In the wake of the invasion, President Ronald Reagan’s popularity rating has increased to its highest level in two years, the “Washington Post” Newspaper reports. The “Post”-A.B.C. news public opinion poll also showed that for the first time since April, Mr Reagan had edged ahead of the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination—Walter Mondale and John Glenn.

Meanwhile, British Tory back-benchers have delivered a sharp rebuke to the Prime. Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, for criticising the United States in public. A private meeting of the Conservative foreign affairs committee attended by 40 members of Parliament was angry that Mrs Thatcher had distanced herself from the invasion of Grenada and had warned Mr Reagan not to retaliate in Lebanon.