ANTIGUAN Prime Minister Lester Bird last night swore on the Bible that he never had sex with — and didn’t even know — a teenager who claimed that she was his lover and ran drugs on his behalf.

His government already under pressure over allegations of corruption in management of the national health insurance scheme, Bird has in the past fortnight been citing a rearsguard action since the emergence of a video recording in which 14 year-old Monique Arua, a Guyanese, made the claims of the sexual liaison.

The recording was made with the support of the Observer Group (no relation to the Jamaica Observer) which operates the Daily Observer newspaper and Observer Radio, that are highly critical of the Bird administration.

Bird, 64, claiming slander and libel, has sued Arua, Samuel and Winston Derrick, the brothers who own the Observer Group, and journalist Julius Gittens and Betty Reid who conducted the interview.

Gittens, who was recently involved in a row with Bird, over the non-renewal of his work permit, had publicly disassociated himself from the distribution of the video, until further investigations were done into the allegations. However, he did not object to a journalistic inquiry.

But last night the prime minister took his case directly to his constituents in his St John’s Rural East Riding, just outside the capital St John’s, declaring his innocence of all the charges.

Holding a Bible aloft in his right hand, Bird declared, “I speak the truth, the absolute truth and nothing but the truth. I never saw, I never spoke to that young lady, that minor.”

Bird told the large crowd that he was not being like Bill Clinton, in reference to the former US president who told the American people that he never had sex with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

“I wanted you to stand by me. You can put your neck on the block,” he said.

Bird has asked Colin Werburton, a retired officer of Britain Midlands police, now an adviser to the Antiguan Constabulary, to investigate the allegations against him but has so far rejected the Opposition calls for a public inquiry.

“At the end of the day when the report comes out and shows that Lester Bird is innocent, we are not going to sue them, we are going to go after them,” said Bird of the Derricks and Observer Group.

While the Derricks have conceded being behind the recording after Arua came to them with the allegations, they have denied distribution of the tape. “There were copies made that we didn’t distribute,” Winston Derrick, a director of the group told the Jamaica Observer last night.

The copies that were done would have gone to legitimate sources such as Arua and her lawyers, he said. The original tape recording “is locked up in my vault”.

“I heard the PM’s call that there was a tape out there but we did not know it was the same tape,” said Derrick. “He was the one that brought it to the public’s domain.”

The controversy has spilled over into the Caribbean Media conference, the annual get-together of media managers and journalists taking place in this 108-square-mile Eastern Caribbean island. The Observer Group is the conference host and the meeting has been boycotted by the government-owned radio and television stations and newspaper as well as the Antigua Sun, a daily owned by Allan Stanford a Texas billionaire financier who has substantial interest in Antigua. Stanford is close to the Bird government. It was an unusually subdued Bird who addressed Thursday night’s meeting.

The quarrel between the Derricks and the Bird administration has been cast as a racial issue. The Derricks are mixed-race, light-complexioned Antiguans — a fact ironically alluded to by Asot Michael, Bird’s chief of staff, a light-skinned, straight-haired Antiguan of Arab ancestry. (The Michaels are a long-standing business family in Antigua.)

“Those white plantocrats can never represent you,” Michael declared, adding that the issue was essentially a struggle between “the descendants of slave owners and the sons and daughters of slaves”.

Molwyn Joseph, the tourism minister in Bird’s Cabinet, also sought to place the Derricks’ opposition to the ruling Labour Party within a racial framework. The ALP (like the JLP and the BITU in Jamaica) grew out of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, founded by Bird’s father, V C Bird Snr, in the aftermath of the 1938 labour upheavals in the Caribbean.

“What is at stake is not the Labour Party,” Joseph said. “What is at stake is the legacy and history of the country.” In a clear reference to the Derricks and Antigua’s overwhelmingly black population, he added, “If you are not holding a hoe, you are holding a whip.”

Bird, however, stayed away from the race and colour issue insisting only on his innocence and saying if anything was proved to the contrary, “you will never have to ask me to resign”.

His party, Bird said, was investigating the possibility of people in constituencies bringing a class action suit against the Derricks for damaging Antigua’s reputation. He likened the Opposition’s Baldwin Spencer to a scavenger who believes that he has carrion on which to swoop. He warned Spencer that “scavengers sometimes choke on their prey and you too are going to choke”.