Islanders Try To Oust Colonial Governor -- Recall Is Sought In Turks, Caicos

GRAND TURK, Turks and Caicos Islands - You'd think being the British governor of a tiny Caribbean island colony would give life a certain goofy glory.

Being called "Your Excellency" pays $84,000 a year, it turns out, and comes with a lovely old residence called Waterloo, local convicts to tend its shady gardens, and seascapes to break your heart.

Alas for Martin Bourke, the queen's man here, this paradise is turning into hell.

"Bourke Must Go" screamed headlines in the local paper.

Island lawmakers joined last week in a three-hour rhetorical thrashing of the 49-year-old foreign-service officer with whom they grudgingly share power. Speakers lashed Bourke as "incompetent," "high-handed," "a buffoon."

Until 1964, these flat, sandy islands off the south end of the Bahamas subsisted by raking sea salt. Some tourism followed, along with offshore banking and insurance, but not enough for 15,000 islanders, mostly descendants of slaves, to prosper.

By 1985, when then-Chief Minister Norman Saunders and other local leaders were convicted of drug-smuggling to the United States, it was clear islanders had found other ways to make ends meet. A shift to drug-smuggling via Mexico took the islands out of the narcotics mainstream, however, and the Saunders scandal led Britain to take back power over law enforcement, civil-service patronage and land use.

Islanders hardly noticed the rein-tightening because British governors until Bourke stayed in the background. Not Bourke, who arrived in July 1993. Younger and more casual than his predecessors, Gov. Bourke meant to govern. Against him were smart local politicians who'd governed their governors for decades.

Bourke shrank the civil service and took over control of patronage.

When a medium-to-large drug case came up last year, he ordered wiretaps and imported British investigators.

It's been all downhill from there.

Appalled by the wiretaps and unimpressed by Bourke's prosecutor, Grand Turk jurors last month rejected the drug case against locals Smoky Smith, Duck Ingham, Porky Robinson and Red Boy Saunders.

Far more damaging was a Bourke interview that appeared last month in Offshore Finance Annual, a prestigious directory in a business crucial to the islands' economy.

While other colonial governors sang their tax havens' praises, Bourke groused that drug-trafficking in the Turks and Caicos was "in a peak at the moment," and crime up 40 percent, so bad his own home had been burgled by a police guard. Bourke had dismissed the police commissioner, the article stated, and was encountering resistance to his reforms from local elected officials.

The problems: Waterloo's alleged burglar has not yet been tried, and it's against British law to publicly discuss his case, let alone convict him. The police commissioner retired voluntarily and is threatening to sue. The drug problem seems - to all but Bourke - to have abated. The crime rate increase - to a record two armed assaults last year, for example - still leaves the islands with the lowest rate in the region, according to the Caribbean Development Bank.

Politicians went ballistic. The islands' 13 elected lawmakers joined to draft a petition for Bourke's recall. Minister Oswald Skippings, Bourke's chief adversary, and Bourke's other foes rule the islands now, gathering recall petition signatures.

Asked about seeking independence, Skippings says, "I don't know . . . that that's the issue." Translation: The islands depend on Britain for a fifth of their $45 million budget.

No one calls Bourke governor any more, and he declined to be interviewed. "If they don't want us, we're not going to stay," vows Attorney General David Ballantyne. "No one wants to be the last vestige of a colonial empire."