An Eye for an Eye

When Patrick Paddy Hale left his native County Sligo in Ireland to volunteer in the Royal Air Force, he probably never imagined that duty would take him to a country some of whose inhabitants might regard him as a kind of latter-day Black and Tan sent by the British to frustrate a legitimate demand for self-determination. But Paddy Hale was ordered to Cyprus, where for 2 1/2 years he lived quietly off port with his wife. One day last May three Cypriot laborers came to the hut at Nicosia airport where Corporal Hale worked. They asked for water. A few seconds after taking the glass Hale preferred them, they fired a volley of shots through the window of the hut. Soldiers who heard the shots gave chase, caught two of the Cypriots, found their revolvers on the ground. The third Cypriot was later flushed out of an acacia tree by an R.A.F. helicopter. Paddy Hale was dead, a bullet through his head.

At their trial the three Cypriots denied carrying arms or killing Hale. But the evidence was against them. They were identified, the fingerprints of one of them corresponded to those on the water glass, the fatal bullet had been fired from one of their guns. Two of the accused, Michael Koutsoftas and Andreas Panayides, were sentenced to die; the third, an 18-year-old, was sent to jail for life. Field Marshal Sir John Harding, determined to crush the EOKA underground, rejected pleas for clemency.

Early one morning last week at Nicosia Central Prison, a low-walled building of yellow sandstone hidden among dusty eucalyptus trees, the nooses were hung, the traps set to deal out the stern punishment. With Koutsoftas and Panayides on the scaffold stood 23-year-old Stelios Mavrommatis, sentenced to death for shooting at two R.A.F. men (he did not hit them). Fearing a Cypriot demonstration, British troops set up radio posts and roadblocks to guard every approach to the prison. For most of the night there was only deathly quiet. Then, sometime before dawn, through the muffling thickness of the prison walls a macabre chant broke the silence. Some 170 political prisoners shouted in unison, "Eoka, Eoka," and "Down with Harding!" Prison stools slammed against stone walls. At the moment calculated for the hanging, someone cried out "Goodbye, Stelios, goodbye," and then the traps were sprung.

Panayides left a young wife, Koutsoftas a wife and three young children. All three executed men had brothers, sisters and parents. Moved from the prison area, bereaved relatives waited the night through together, a weatherbeaten group in dust-covered farming clothes, their faces molten with a mixture of sadness and indissoluble hatred. Far away in England, Mrs. Patrick Hale, with a six-month-old child in her arms and another on the way, came home.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.