Revenge of the revo.

Revenge of the Revo

ST. GEORGE'S, GRENADA--Why, to the ruin of its economy, has Grenada been dragging its feet over the execution of the convicted assassins of its erstwhile Communist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, whose action resulted in the longest and largest murder trial in Caribbean history, to say nothing of an American intervention?

After all, the criminal handling of the affair was impeccable. West Indian police have generally excellent records of apprehension and conviction. They do not seem to have been inhibited, at least in the "Lower" Caribbean, by that mitigation of deterrence we see in British and American law. Miranda rights are minimal. When a former Grenadian, now a British citizen, recently returned to his natal isle after allegedly murdering his London paramour, he was picked up in two days. When last June a ranking St. Vincentian police officer was seconded to Grenada to beef up the morale o fthe local force, and interpreted his mission as to shoot and kill both the Grenadian Commissioner of Police and a black American political officer, his life was ended in seconds flat. The British CID congratulated the Grenadian force, observing that the island's rate of homicide convictions was nearly 60 per cent as against 20 per cent in England. (The United States boasts a still lower conviction rate.)

On gaining independence every ex-British Caribbean possession reinstituted the capital penalty outlawed by England in the Sixties. In Grenada it is mandatory for murder. St. Vincent recently hanged on the same day a father and son found guilty of murder. In both Trinidad and Barbados the noose has lately ended the lives of rapists. So why has there been a nearly three-year delay of execution of the murderers of Maurice Bishop, his pregnant mistress, and his ministers and minions--in effect the murderers of an entire government?

A cynic might answer that, in common with New York's City Hall, Caribbean governments do tend to end up in jail. A former prime minister of Dominica has been inside for years, but the only total wipe-out comparable with Grenada's was that of a recent Turks and Caicos cabinet, for drug smuggling. Another tentative answer could be the importation via U.S. TV of Stateside attitudes to crime and punishment which virtually deny the existence of evil.

The facts of the Grenadian experience are these. After the intervention in October 1983 those suspected of the wholesale murder of the Bishop government, as well as of a large number of innocent civilian bystanders, were rounded up, charged, and tried on evidence. (It is perhaps incidentally ironic that the richest man in Grenada today, a multi-millionaire called Lynden Ramdhanny, was hastening to join his friend Comrade Bishop in the Old Fort and was lucky not to have died there, alongside Bishop and another friend, Norris bain.)

Regina versus Andy Mitchell et al. at first numbered twenty defendants. After many procrastinations 13 men and one woman (Phyllis Coard, wife of Bishop's deputy Bernard Coard and a Jamaican Tia Maria heiress) were found guilty of murder and/or conspiracy to murder by a local jury of seven men and five women; one man, Raeburn Nelson, was acquitted.

At the start there was great popular hostility to the accussed--I watched rocks hurled at them when they were brought into St. George's for the Court of Inquiry, subsequently removed to the Richmond Hill Prison for their own safety--but as the years passed this hostility declined to baffled apathy. Nonetheless, on the afternoon of December 4, 1986, Kittitian Judge Dennis Byron sentenced the 14 to death by hanging. Two former People's Revolutionary Army soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter and accorded sentences of 45 and thirty years each, not to run concurrently; this was presumably to avoid the generally lenient interpretation given a life sentence in the islands. Those sentenced in Grenada could then appeal. They have done so for over three years.

IN BRIEF, the filibuster put by the defense lawyers, all financed by the Grenadian taxpayer, turned into so much Alice-in-Wonderland law, far beyond the comprehension of the average cane-cutter or nutmeg-grower, not to mention the present author; it even exceeded that mounted for the assassins of Mrs. Gandhi. The accused did everything. They challenged the validity of the court; having created their own "revolutionary" legal system they ironically demanded not to be tried by it, and were not (had they been, they would all have been swinging long since). They fired their lawyers. They rehired their lawyers, turning the court-room into a Mad Hatter's Tea Party, jigging, expectorating, and chanting "CIA spies!", "This a Yankee court!", "Torturers," etc.

Their Jamaican lawyers, notably Howard Hamilton and Ian Ramsey, were encouraged from the sidelines by the customary white liberal pantheon, including Ramsey Clark, British MP Jeremy Corbyn (who circularized a vitriolic attack on the intervention from his vantage point i Islington), and Anthony Gifford, who has been disposing of fashionable anti-American filth on House of Lords notepaper for years, and who is now said to have been admitted to the Jamaican bar (verb. sap.). The latter pair head a British-based pressure group acronymized as CHRG (Committee for Human Rights in Grenada), fortifying themselves with a recent book by Phyllis Coard alleging every sort of mistreatment in prison.

Needless to say, Amnesty International was not far behind, accusing Greenadian prison guards of "savage beatings," and charging that one defendant (Andy Mitchell) had to be taken to hospital to have 15 stitches put in his scalp. He did. The laceration was caused by anti-revo prison inmates. They had also, apparently, made an attempt to drydrown Coard from a courtyard hydrant. Despite Amnnsty's charges, I have not been able to verify that they actually got inside the Richmond Hill Prison; I assume their reports are based on pro-MBPM (Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement) rumors. I should add that I was introduced on the island at this time by resident Westchester plutocrats, adn friends of the Cuban Ambassador Julian Torres Rizo (not to mention his mistress, the American Weather Underground member Gail Reed, still going strong), to that liberal legal eagle and defender of democracy, Leonard Boudin. He was the father of "Weatherwoman" Kathy Boudin who, like so many nineteenth-century Russian nihilists, got her bomb recipe wrong, blowing up the Greenwhich Village building belonging to her parents.

The appeals made by the Grenadian defendants are systematically bankrupting the country, whose taxpayers have to date forked out more than EC$15 million to transport, host, and pay some dozen Jamacian defense lawyers. These have been housed at a luxurious Grande Anse beech hotel, with the Grenadian government picking up the tab, rental cars and rum punches included. One of the Jamaican defense attorneys was actually given two years for contempt of court--but was allowed to litigate since his own sentence was also under appeal.

One last-ditch example of the forensic ingenuity of such attorneys was the challenge of Judge Byron's procedure in clearing the dock of the stamping, chanting accused and bringing them back individually for identification and questioning. They argued that since all defendants must be present at the examination of any one, then all should have been brought back forcibly into court, shackled and gagged. One does not have to guess at the reaction of the liberal press had Judge Byron used the gag. In fact, he allowed erstwhile Deputy Premier Bernard Coard to address the court for six days on end, excoriating America throughout them. For most of this time the jury took to copies of The Cricketer and old sewing magazines, since Coard had refused to take the oath; which, while it relieved him of cross-examination, also enjoined the jury to ignore everything he said. A debate then ensued as to whether the defendants had been expelled for misbehavior or contempt. Anyone could play.

Leslie Pierre, editor of The Grenadian Voice, for daring to publish which under Bishop had made him a three-year alumnus of a lightless prison cell, was no illusion about the errand of the defense in making democratic procedure look absurd, thereby revenging the revo. "It sticks out a mile," he wrote, "that what the defense has been tryign to achieve all along is to stretch the trial out as long as possible so that the period of state necessity [the constitutional justification for the trial] ... will look more and more ridiculous." Indeed, Pierre cited one defense lawyer jeering at him, in true Sharpton style, "Suppose the appeal went on for another five years, what would you people do about your court system?" The gibe had teeth, since Appeals Court President J. O. F. Haynes (from Guyana) died at the start of 1989 and the defense insisted that the whole abracadabra be begun again.

UNDER another judge it has indeed done so. For now elections are upon Grenada, with five or six parties contesting 15 seats as I write and uncertaitny around on all sides. In this climate it is unlikely that the West Indies will see 14 of its citizens executed in a morning, including the first woman hanged in their history of independence. The average man in the street, or bush, meanwhile, will feel increasingly convinced of Lord Halifax's dictum that "Whenever a knave is not punished an honest man is laughed at."

Mr. Wagner's new novel, the Red Crab, is published by Robert Hale of London.