History
Hudson Austin was a member of the New Jewel Movement in Grenada. He was an early member of the military wing of the party and received military training in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. He participated in the 1979 revolution which established the People's Revolutionary Government with Maurice Bishop at its head. After the revolution, Austin was in charge of the military forces of Grenada.
In October 1983, factional political issues within the government led deputy prime minister Bernard Coard to place Maurice Bishop under house arrest and to take control of the government. Austin supported the action. Popular demonstrations afterward broke out against the detention of Bishop. In the course of one demonstration, Bishop was freed from house arrest. Bishop was eventually executed by army soldiers along with many civilians.
After the execution of Bishop, Austin disbanded the existing government and formed a revolutionary military council with himself as chairman to rule the country. He made a radio announcement in which he stated: "The Revolutionary Armed Forces were forced to storm the fort, and in the process the following persons were killed: Maurice Bishop, Unison Whiteman, Vincent Noel, Jacqueline Creft, Norris Bain and Fitzroy Bain among others." He then announced a four-day total curfew stating that "No one is to leave their house. Anyone violating this curfew will be shot on sight."
The military government lasted for six days, until the United States invaded Grenada on October 25, 1983. Austin was arrested, along with all of those in the government and army who were alleged to have either participated in the decision to kill Bishop or were in the army chain of command that carried out the orders. He was sentenced to death along with Coard and the other coup leaders in 1986, but their sentences were later commuted to life in prison.
In mitigation pleas made in 2007, while he sought to be released from prison he made no attempt to deny his responsibility for what happened in 1983. In the plea it was said that he "understand(s) the need to satisfy action for loss and suffering and the trauma of the Grenadian people."
Austin was released from prison on December 18, 2008, together with Colville McBarnett and John Ventour.
Read more about this topic: Hudson Austin
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)