Grenada PM says radar off the table in his country

DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­[email protected]

Grena­da’s Prime Min­is­ter Dick­on Mitchell says a pro­posed Unit­ed States radar in­stal­la­tion on the is­land is no longer un­der con­sid­er­a­tion, months af­ter a sim­i­lar sys­tem was in­stalled in neigh­bour­ing To­ba­go.

In ear­ly No­vem­ber, Mitchell's gov­ern­ment was asked to ac­com­mo­date the radar at Mau­rice Bish­op In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, the US-built air­port that be­came cen­tral to Wash­ing­ton’s 1983 in­va­sion of the is­land.

The pro­pos­al, Mitchell said, had been un­der re­view but nev­er fi­nalised.

Lat­er that month, a radar sys­tem was in­stalled in To­ba­go.

Speak­ing with re­porters on the eve of the close of the Cari­com Heads of Gov­ern­ment meet­ing yes­ter­day, Mitchell clar­i­fied that Grena­da would not be pro­ceed­ing.

“The of­fi­cial re­sponse ac­tu­al­ly, in a sense, has al­ways been what I said, which is it was un­der con­sid­er­a­tion. I don’t think the need for it, at least from the cor­re­spon­dence we’ve had, sug­gests that it is a re­quest that is still re­quired. So, in a sense, while there has been no of­fi­cial con­fir­ma­tion from that, giv­en that we were not able to get to a point where ... agree­ment, I would say for now the re­quest from Grena­da’s per­spec­tive is off the ta­ble.”