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From The Publisher

PublisherFrom The Publisher
On New Year’s night forty years ago, a group calling itself the “Ad Hoc Committee for the truth about Vietnam” began several nights of demonstration outside the Eden Theater on North Front Street in Belize City. The group was protesting against an American war propaganda movie called “The Green Berets.”
 
The Ad Hoc Committee was led by Assad Shoman and Said Musa, and included university graduates such as the economist Lionel del Valle (deceased), the attorney Derek Courtenay, and myself. Other notables included the late Ronald Clarke (a senior government public officer), the late Maclovio Alamilla, and William “Silky” Stuart.
 
Myself, I only demonstrated on the first night, New Year’s, because I was diverted that very night by the late Robert “Rasta” Livingston, then general secretary of the UNIA branch in Belize, into the Liberty Hall process which led to the establishment of UBAD five weeks later.
 
I find it quite interesting that Shoman and Musa, at the time known only as young lawyers of Palestinian paternity, chose not to mark the anniversary of the Ad Hoc Committee in any way, not even with the issuing of a release. Notables from that era – then Premier George Price; 1969 PUP Cabinet Ministers Hector Silva, Fred Hunter, Florencio Marin, and Harry Courtenay; then National Independence Party officials such as Dean Lindo and Governor General Sir Colville Young – nobody has said anything. 
 
But the Ad Hoc Committee was really a major and unprecedented event 40 years ago. It meant the coming of 1968 to Belize, in the sense that the issues which had created turmoil in the rest of the world in 1968, most notably the Vietnam War, had come to Belize. And it was also the first time that the university graduates of Belize had taken to the streets. Remember, in 1969 there were only 25 or 30 Belizean university graduates in the whole country. (Today, there are thousands.)
 
As I look back today with the benefit of 40 years of experience, I suspect that the Ad Hoc Committee was simply Belize’s tiny version of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” In other words, it was a process which was orchestrated by the government, a government totally controlled by the People’s United Party at that time. While it may be argued that Shoman and Musa were later forced out of government employment because of their political activities (so what?), how else can one explain the involvement of Ronald Clarke and Derek Courtenay if the Ad Hoc was not a PUP experiment? How else can you explain Premier Price’s offering Ad Hoc leaders candidacies on the PUP slate for the City Council elections just two months after Ad Hoc? Yes, there were right wingers in the PUP Cabinet who were definitely hostile to the leftist opinions of Shoman and Musa, but the two were young men who soon became Mr. Price’s personal favorites during the 1970’s.
 
As far as I know, Lionel Clarke is still alive in New York City. An elder brother of the abovementioned Ronald Clarke, Lionel Clarke was the first president of UBAD. He resigned after about five weeks as UBAD prez, went to New York and has never been seen or heard of since in Belize.
 
I did not pay enough attention to the fraternal ties between Lionel and Ronald Clarke in November of 1968. The Clarkes were a brilliant Belizean family whose father had migrated from Barbados. (An older brother, the late Branstan, was considered a world class intellectual who lived for decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts – the home of Harvard.) In 1968, Lionel Clarke was the chief warden of the Princess Royal Youth Hostel in Belize City.
 
As far as I remember, just before I was invited to the Ad Hoc meetings of late November 1968, Silky Stuart, accompanied by one George Flowers, came to the Belize Technical College where I was teaching, and took me to meet Lionel Clarke. The views Mr. Clarke expressed sounded like those of a black cultural nationalist. Clarke was not in Ad Hoc, but younger brother, Ronald, was.
 
As soon as the Liberty Hall lectures began in early January of 1969, Lionel Clarke appeared at Liberty. An impressive figure, he was elected UBAD president at the organization’s establishment on February 9, 1969. Within a month, reports began to surface of problems Lionel Clarke was having at the Hostel. It appears, in retrospect, that a deal of some kind must have been cut. In return for the supposedly scandalous matters being hushed up, the first UBAD president was allowed to go into exile in New York. As a consequence of this, in mid-March of 1969 all the UBAD responsibilities fell on me, first vice-president. I was 21. That was a long time ago.
 
In the light of how things played out for Assad Shoman and Said Musa after the Ad Hoc Committee, it just seems obvious that they knew what they were doing and where they were going much more than I did. They had been traveling magistrates working the districts of Belize in 1967 and 1968. They had established contact with progressive young intellectuals and trade union leaders across the country. They had an understanding of how the PUP worked at high government levels. 
 
Ad Hoc, then, was not an accident. It was not isolated. It may even be considered part of a conspiracy. 
 
Ad Hoc contributed to the independence of Belize. By 1974, both Shoman and Musa were PUP general election candidates, and Shoman in particular, between 1975 and 1979, led the diplomatic initiative to gain regional and international support for Belize’s independence. If Ad Hoc was, for argument’s sake, really Premier Price’s baby, then the Hon. Premier advanced Belize’s case before the United Nations by moving to the left. At that time, anti-colonial passion dominated the majority of the countries in the United Nations.
 
On the domestic front, however, it being the case that every action has a reaction, Ad Hoc made some people at Landivar become concerned. This led to the board room formation of the Liberal Party, which became a part of the UDP coalition in 1973. The Liberal Party represented the first serious Roman Catholic disagreement with Mr. Price’s PUP. 
 
Ad Hoc’s core issue, the Vietnam War, was the defining issue of our generation in the 1960’s. On the one hand, those who were actually fighting the war were expressing a manhood the rest of us were not. On the other hand, the manifest injustice of the world’s most powerful nation abusing, to put it mildly, a small Southeast Asian nation because Washington wished to control the destiny of its people, surely cried out for redress.
 
As a contemporary, and sometime compatriot, I would like for the Shoman-Musa combine to reflect on these historical realities and tell the people of Belize what they believe history’s verdict should be.
 
All power to the people.

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