“Any minority that has a block of votes that stick together is in a strategic position. Either way you go, that’s who gets it. You’re in a position to determine who go to the White House and who stay in the doghouse. You’re the one who has that power …”
– Malcolm X
– It is said that lightning does not strike the same place twice, but one has to wonder if Lord Ashcroft was not conceptualizing a repeat of his 1992 destruction of Freetown area representative, Hon. Derek Aikman, as early as 1994, with KREM Radio as the target.
Remember that there had already been two attacks on KREM Radio broadcast towers – Partridge Street in 1990 and Baldy Beacon in 1992. The Baldy Beacon attack was executed by British Army personnel. There would be a third attack. The February 1998 attack on the Partridge Street KREM tower was the most sinister and dangerous act in the history of industrial sabotage in Belize.
When Lord lightning demanded 10 percent of KREM Radio in 1994 as a condition for a loan to the radio station, his intention was hostile. That is clear now.
The Maritime Areas Act had been unprecedented in Belize where bipartisan support at the highest levels of the two major political parties was concerned. The cooperation between the ruling PUP and the Opposition UDP to introduce the Maritime Areas Act, which was essentially a concoction of the relevant oil companies, provoked a rebellion by UDP Albert area representative, Hon. Philip Goldson. Goldson was followed by UDP Freetown area representative, Hon. Derek Aikman; UDP Belize Rural North area representative, Hon. Samuel Rhaburn; Hubert Elrington; B.Q. Pitts; and other UDP stalwarts. Thus was the National Association for Belizean Rights (NABR) formed in 1991.
Aikman was the one of whom Ashcroft made an example. Rhaburn, Elrington and Pitts all “went home” to the UDP. Derek remained loyal to Goldson. Derek Aikman had powerful enemies in both the PUP and the UDP, and he had “exposed” himself with substantial loans from both the Belize Bank and the Atlantic Bank. One of the keys to the conspiracy to destroy Aikman politically by bankrupting him, was the fact that Dean Barrow had considered Aikman a leadership threat as far back as the December 1983 Belize City Council elections. The law firm, Barrow & Williams, which had been formed when Dean Barrow and Rodwell Williams left Dean Lindo’s Church Street chambers following the 1989 general elections, would lead the bankrupting charge against Derek Aikman on behalf of Ashcroft’s Belize Bank.
We noted with interest Lord Ashcroft’s front row seat at the LOVE FM book launching last month. LOVE FM began three and a half years after KREM Radio, but its rise to national monopoly power was so quick and smooth it was almost as if LOVE’s tracks were greased.
KREM Radio was not the first private radio station in Belize. That distinction belongs to the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), which began broadcasting from the Ladyville army garrison sometime during the first UDP administration (1984-1989). (It is possible that the British began broadcasting even before the UDP came to power. We’re not sure.) The British station was private, but it was not commercial. It was the existence of this foreign radio station on Belizean soil, just a few years after the much trumpeted Independence ceremonies of 1981, that prompted the Amandala publisher to challenge the UDP in the summer of 1989. Why should the British have a private radio station while Partridge Street was not licensed to broadcast?
Dean Barrow appeared to take the Partridge Street radio challenge in a personal way. Remember that just the year before, in 1988, he had supported UDP Leader Manuel Esquivel’s disenfranchisement of Rufus X in Belize Rural North. Mr. Barrow publicly rejected Radio Amandala, whereupon the PUP made it a big campaign issue to support the free radio concept.
We are trying to figure out why KREM Radio’s road has been so rocky. Why did Ashcroft initiate a process in 1994 to put himself in position to sabotage KREM? Why is the Barrow law firm leading the charge against KREM in a general election year? Why did a PUP Cabinet Minister travel with Lord Ashcroft to the Democratic Republic of the Congo just days ago? Is the plot against KREM Radio in 2007 as bipartisan as the Aikman bankruptcy conspiracy was in 1992? In the words of the late Harry Caray, there is danger here, cherie.
Power to the people.