FLASHBACK: Protesters killed in Dennery

Twenty seven years ago, two men, Julius Joseph and Randy Joseph were killed during a protest in Dennery. The following is taken from Rick Wayne’s Lapses & Infelicities (available at STAR Publishing):

The date was 7 October 1993, for most Saint Lucians, older banana producers in particular, an unforgettable Thursday.

Around three in the afternoon, with angry protesters and curious onlookers, including women and children, filling the road, the hated Special Services Unit slowly approached the scene, some aboard their truck, others walking alongside. At first sight of the armed and notoriously trigger-happy contingent, all attired like US Army soldiers on the battlefield, the crowd quickly dispersed, then regrouped a few hundred yards from the main road. Stones were thrown at the SSU vehicle. Suddenly, the rat-tat-tat of sustained automatic gunfire mixed with the desperate screams of the panicked crowd. Some sixty people took bullets in their thighs, their buttocks, and their arms.

Julius was shot in the neck, Randy in the back. Both died where they fell.

Patrons at a nearby shop were also hit. The mini-mart was riddled with bullets that left in its concrete front wall holes three inches wide. An inner wall provided further evidence of the SSU’s indiscriminate shooting.

Shattered glass and merchandise littered the floor. The proprietor later told the press she and her three young children barely escaped getting killed by the SSU, and only because they had retreated to an upstairs floor and taken refuge under a large bed. There were many similar horror stories from the woman’s neighbors.

Less than three hours after the shooting, and without a reliable account of what had transpired at Grand Riviere, the prime minister addressed the nation via TV.

Referring to the deceased farm workers, he said, “The hooligans got what they deserved.”

He added that the police were “totally justified in defending themselves,” and reminded the nation that just two days earlier supporters of the Banana Salvation Committee had attacked him with sticks and stones as he drove from his plantation home on his way to work in Castries.

“The same people called me Daddy Compton because of all that I did for them,” he recalled. “These ungrateful people are now calling me a murderer and a thief.”

Knee-jerk defenders of the SSU said they believed the unit acted on orders from the prime minister, relayed to them via the Minister for Sports, Desmond Brathwaite. Said one police source, Brathwaite insisted that the prime minister wanted the road cleared “by any means necessary!”

An official inquiry into the Grand Riviere incident several months later uncovered a somewhat different picture. According to the officer in charge of the SSU contingent that blew away the young farmhands, before they opened fire one of his men was hit in the head by a rock. It was only then that the SSU officer contacted his superior at police headquarters in Castries and informed him by walkie-talkie that the platoon was under heavy attack by a large group of protesters determined to maintain their roadblock. He sought permission to use force, as the law required, and was granted permission to open fire on the protesters.