No hangman for the revo.

"ABDULLAH counted from one to three. After he counted one to three, I witnessed rapid fire against the bodies that were against the wall. The firing went on for about ten minutes. The bodies fell, and after they fell on the concrete there was rapid firing again on the bodies. I noticed that the bodies were burst open. Fitzroy Bain's chest was open. Maurice Bishop's back, chest, and head burst open. Jacqueline Creft's hand was cut off completely and the bodies were lying in pieces and blood on the top square."

Such was the evidence of a Grenadian in the Maurice Bishop murder trial, the longest, bloodiest, and costliest in West Indian history. For not only was Premier Bishop marginalized alongside his ministers and pregnant mistress (pretty Jacky Creft, whose now-severed hand I had shaken), but so were a couple of hundred innocent Grenadian bystanders into whom squat Soviet BTR-60P carriers poured fire. "In pieces and blood," what was left of Maurice Bishop was shoveled into a dump truck and burnt.

Bishop took power in a 1979 coup that deposed Sir Eric Gairy. Spewing out anti-American spittle and inviting in the usual gang (Samora Machel, Winnie Mandela, Desi Bouterse, even dear old Angela Davis), Bishop cozied up to the man Norman Mailer called "the greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War," fatty Fidel, imprisoning and torturing political opponents, and eventually suppressing pretty much everything in sight. Under Bishop, Grenada voted Soviet in 92 per cent of the votes of the 1982 UN General Assembly. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan anticipated the Russians, and October 25 is now celebrated as national Thanksgiving Day on the island.

The men who murdered Maurice Bishop included his lumbering deputy, Bernard Coard, plus Coard's Jamaican wife (and Tia Maria heiress), Phyllis, and a cretinous general of a People's Revolutionary Army of field-marshals. Considered by this "Leninist" group to be a Caribbean Trotsky, Bishop was seized and shackled to a bed, alongside his paramour. Released by sympathizers, he led a march in green boxer shorts to the old fort above the capital chanting: "The masses! The masses!" (Where wert thou, Evelyn Waugh?) On October 19, 1983, Maurice was overkilled. A girl who helped bundle his butchered remains in a Cuban blanket was asked in court, "What did he look like?" Her answer, after some consideration, was: "Dead."

The assassins were apprehended, charged, and tried before a jury of their peers, including five women. Had they been "tried" under the Anti-Terrorism Act of their own People's Revolutionary Government, they would have received short shrift. Instead, they were accorded the courtesy of a Court of Inquiry, a nine-month long trial with free legal assistance, followed by years of appeals, whose expenses threatened to bankrupt little Grenada. The jury found the defendants guilty on all counts, except for one man, Raeburn Nelson, who was let off, apparently for declining to join the others in turning the courtroom into a Mad Hatter's revo party. The tactic of courtroom disruption ended when presiding judge Dennis Byron, from St. Kitts, donned the black cap and sentenced 14 to death by hanging. For it is an uncomfortable fact of life for liberals that though England outlawed capital punishment in the Sixties, when there was virtually none, her former Caribbean possessions restored it upon individuals independence.

In Grenada the endless appeals were brought to a summary end on the afternoon of July 11 when the Grenadian Court of Appeal, under Barbadian Sir Frederick Smith, upheld all the convictions and death sentences.

End of the road. Under Grenada's court system the attorney general could not allow any further appeals. But would the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, intercede to the Queen? Rumor has it that Her Majesty, carefully cased out in such matters beforehand, showed no sympathy for these bloody murderers. There seemed nothing to do but to hang them.

Thus--so the story goes and it is not substantiable--five were nominated by the cabinet to hang first. Of course, if five were hanged all had to be. At the dead of night the five (including Coard but not Phyllis) were prepared for the Richmond Hill gallows, having been shaved, weighed, and shackled, with straitjackets prepared, graves dug, and so forth. Frankly, I have not been able to find any evidence that this actually happened, and I attribute it to the overheated imagination of one of the island's weekly newspapers, whose editor is an anti-capital-punishment hothead. The five were supposedly given a last-minute reprieve (under what dispensation?).

The islanders were clearly for the elimination of the Coardites, effigies of whom were stabbed and hanged on Jou've (Jour Ouvert) during Carnival. Nevertheless neither Scoon nor Prime Minister Nicholas Brathwaite wanted to go down inhistory as a hangman, and both were obviously looking for every excuse not to be.

Such came a-plenty. From England the usual militants (Tony Benn, Anthony Gifford, Jeremy Corbyn) jammed the faxes with clemency petitions, while in America a small committee organized by Congressman Mervyn Dymally managed to get itself represented, on BBC as well as regional radio, as standing for the entire U.S. Congress. The civil-rights groups geared up. Jesse Jackson was said to be on his way, closely followed by Joe Kennedy, to say nothing of Amnesty International (of which I was a founder member when it was initiated for those who had committed no crime at all). The main beef of these groups was that the Grenadian murders had been political, and were therefore not subject to the capital penalty. This point had been raised years ago in the appeals and did not suffice. The murder of my old friend and wartime comrade Richard Sharples, governor of Bermuda, was palpably "political," but three men hanged for it. There are such political murderers on death row all over the Caribbean, so why didn't Amnesty International go after Barbados, Jamaica, or Trinidad? The answer is the political complexion of the Coard gang.

By the time Carnival closed, "Braff" had had enough. Leaving his house heavily guarded, and accompanied by his attorney general, he ran for it--to Antigua--leaving a tape to be played in his absence commuting the death sentences of all prisoners "on the Hill" to life imprisonment, including those who had nothing to do with Coard and Co. Brathwaite's speech was incredible, digging deep for justification for his action. We were told that somehow or another we were joining democracy by commuting death sentences; at another point we learnt that now that Communism was in retreat we should relieve the 14 assassins of the noose. As if a crime were not a crime.

What sickened the average Grenadian was chiefly the cowardice of Brathwaite. Let him characterize himself as he did in his commutation broadcast: "What appears to be a popular cry may not always be the best course for the country." That's telling 'em.

Mr. Wagner lived in Grenada through the Bishop coup, the Cuban interregnum, and the subsequent American intervention; his book Red Calypso (Regnery Gateway) describes these events.