Early programme drafts of the 2009 Media and Communications Conference had promoted the event as one in which “freedom of expression issues usually dominate.” The conference, annually coinciding with May 2 World Press Freedom Day, actually took place on May 14 and 15 in Grenada. Last week, however, more “press freedom” issues appeared to boil in the belly of the host country than ever ignited inside the climate-controlled conference room of the Flamboyant Hotel. The blood-stained history of Grenadian conflicts over “freedom” came to life immediately upon our arrival.

Giant blue lettering proclaimed the “Maurice Bishop International Airport,” renamed after the late Prime Minister and head of the 1979-1983 People’s Revolutionary Government. “Is Freedom We Making” was the title of a 1982 revolutionary propaganda paperback. The revolution had commandeered the word “free,” applying it to the name of the monopoly, state-owned newspaper, Free West Indian, and radio station, Radio Free Grenada. No single person, said the revolution, should be entitled to publish a newspaper giving priority to his own views. A 1981 decree forbade any individual from owning more than four per cent of a newspaper enterprise. Observing the letter of that law, 26 Grenadians invested in launching the Grenadian Voice. The spirit of revolutionary law prevailed. After one issue, soldiers shut down the paper and detained its main promoters without trial.

Prime Minister Bishop damned and blasted the new paper’s owners: “They are trying to pretend that they are struggling for the freedom of the press. But what they are speaking of is a press in which they would have the freedom to allow their ideas alone to dominate, and to prevent the ideas of the real people from being disseminated.” In the ears of journalists and media-related people today, such sentiments could sound vaguely dated and aggravatingly overstated. Back-in-times Bishop doctrine appears to seek a rejoining of battles long thought to have been fought and won. Classic free-press principles have prevailed. Formerly voiceless citizens may possess the means, and assume the right, to blog or text-message his or her political views, or just their preferences for Soca Monarch.

Defenders of progressively untrammelled free expression have attained a critical mass. Despite Reagan administration hostility to the idea, Bishop had successfully campaigned for broad support, across social and economic sectors, for the new airport. This I saw, visiting Grenada during the “Revo” days of 1981, to interview the owners of the Torchlight, another newspaper the regime had shut down. Maurice Bishop, then, whose regime shut down newspapers, detained hundreds without trial, and was eventually himself destroyed by the repressive system he operated, has been forgiven his trespasses. The country’s main airport, for which, under his rule, private land had been appropriated without due process, now carries his name.

Unfinished business from his period, long seething in a low-intensity way, has bubbled to the surface. The weekly Grenada Today on Friday queried why the Maurice Bishop sign had been unveiled at the airport weeks before the ceremonial renaming. The paper said debate had reopened “between pro and anti-Bishop forces on the governance of the country during the ill-fated revolution.” In another paper, Grenada Informer, a commentator concluded that “the many positive gains under the PRG can in no way outstrip the evil, the horror and the misery that the Grenadian people were forced to endure under Bishop.” Building that airport represented fist-in-the-air defiance of belligerent President Reagan.

His administration saw in the 5,000-foot runway and related installations, built with Cuban supplies and labour, a suspicious infrastructure oversupply for little Grenada. Washington’s Cold Warriors charged that the project was designed as a strategic facility for Soviet Communist aggression or subversion. The revolution ended with the up-against-the-wall, flash executions of Bishop and his allies. The government, by October 1983, had split into ferociously contending factions. US forces, with Caribbean (minus Trinidad and Tobago) support, invaded. Planted on a Grand Anse beachhead, the Stars and Stripes marked the end of Cuban and Soviet aid. The airport was eventually completed, and named after Point Salines.

By next week’s ceremony, it will have taken 26 years for the name change, or anything to be officially dedicated to the memory of Maurice Bishop. Forgiveness, forgetfulness, and incurious ignorance among the young, appear to summarise the attitudes of Grenadians to their “revo” period. Prime Minister Tillman Thomas must count among the forgiving.  A young civil rights lawyer in 1981, he spent two years without trial in Bishop’s political prison, for being a backer of the Grenadian Voice start-up. That makes him the only Caribbean Prime Minister who suffered loss of his own liberty for seeking liberty of the press.

At the opening ceremony of last week’s conference, which Mr Thomas addressed, that distinction was mentioned, but as only the briefest of afterthoughts. Later, at a reception he held, I asked Mr Thomas about that experience. “You know the saddest thing,” he said, “when Bishop was himself under house arrest, he turned to the free press to get support.” By then, control of the government-owned Free West Indian had passed to his mortal enemies. Maurice Bishop, if he thus learned the value of real freedom of press and expression, was able neither to enjoy it, nor to pass it on.