Unhappy birthday
GREECE MICHAEL LLEWELLYN-SMITH
Athens—This Sunday, the first anniversary of the Greek coup d'iiat of 21 April, is also Eastern Qfthodox Easter, a coincidence which hg for some weeks now been the subject of speculation about what the junta can pull out of the hat to match the good news that Christ is Risen. Whatever the junta comes up with, it is certain to be a surprise.
Surprise is the new governmental technique, deployed with startling effect by ex-Colonel Papadopoulos a fortnight ago in Salonika when he announced the write-off of long-term agricul- tural debts. There had been some talk of such a measure last year, but the idea has been dropped. Papadopoulos said in Salonika, `My decision came as a surprise even to my Minister (of Agriculture, Mr Matthaiou]. He is here. He forgives me for taking him by surprise.' Asked whether he had plans for other equally radical measures, Papadopoulos replied, `I will give my usual answer. I have complete confidence in the element of surprise. I was taught it and I have lived it in my military life. Divisions have lost battles to platoons. Permit me to be a devoted exponent of the element of surprise, and be prepared to be surprised.' We are prepared all right. A Greek politician remarked drily that a successful military commander might be ex- pected to employ the element of surprise on his enemies, not his own side.
Mr Matthaiou buried himself in his office (next day's paper announced that the Minister of Agriculture would not be receiving the public for reasons of work) and came up with the details of the scheme in a week. The write-off mould apply to debts to the Agricultural Bank of up to 100,000 drachmas; - 643,884 rural families would benefit, and the total sum in- volved was over 7,000 million drachmas (£100 million).
The junta has thus come full circle. It spoke last April of checking the 'hydrocephalism of the big cities,' and immediately increased farmers' pensions. Since then other problems have helped to push the farmers out of sight. But it would be a mistake to see the latest move as part of a coherent policy either to reverse the drain from the land, or to inject some life into a sluggish economy by putting extra pur- chasing power in the hands of the farmers. The new Five Year Plan, on the contrary, aims at land consolidation and a more efkient use of scarce land resources by shifting 110.000 men out of the agricultural sector. The reasons for Papadopoulos's decision were more probably a spontaneous desire to astound, and a strong dislike for the urban Greeks, whom he regards as soft, idle and corrupt. 'You are the healthiest segment of the Greek people,' he told the farmers. 'You are not illiterate peasants. You are the clear brains and souls of the Nation ... Always act with confidence in yourselves, because you are cleaner than the inhabitants of the city—freer, at any rate, from the corro- sion of graft.'
Papadopoulos's speeches—he has made dozens in recent months, to the farmers, teachers, police, civil servants, scientists, etc.— show that for him the 'revolution' is a personal struggle against an invincible enemy, human I've told Ho that if they let us build a Hanoi Hilton, I'll meet them there at any time: nature. He utters the generalities which have been commonplace since long before the coup, about `structural reform' of the public services and the economy, but links them to the moral theme which is dear to him. The canker at the heart of the body politic, which Papadopoulos has set himself to cut out, he sees as caused by the moral weaknesses of the Greek individual, He is not alone in this attitude; in fact, in the combination of self-depreciation and fierce national pride, he is typically Greek. The differ- ence is that other men bewail the national fail- ings in cafes, while Papadopoulos has the power and the will to go on and on and on about them in public.
Papadopoulos wants to instil a sense of `responsibility' into the Greeks. He sees a utopia in which the state and the citizen are joined in intimate union. He told the farmers to sever the thread which binds them to the middleman. `The state is here to serve you. Here is no need of go-betweens between you and the state.' He took the example of an agricultural warden who neglects his duties in order to go to the cinema; the farmers criticise him, but do nothing about it. 'The fault does not lie with the warden. It lies with you. . . . In this little thing you did not have the courage to raise your voice in righteous claim to the state and to demand its intervention.' In words of a deep irony he drew the moral: 'If we are cowed by the fear of harmful consequences from denouncing a wrong, we shall never improve our conditions, because then . . . 'one half of us would have to watch the other half all the time, and the question would be: who is to watch the watchers?'
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That is pre- cisely the question.
Papadopoulos had a sad story to tell at a recent press conference: `the day before I last met you, gentlemen, I caught an officer of the military judiciary receiving the sum of 60,000 drachmas in his office in order to destroy the file of a case pending before the court martial. . . . I reached the point of wondering whether I would move the Greek people if I appeared before them as a new Gandhi and asked them to help in the achievement of the aims of the Revolution, and then at the successful comple- tion of the task committed suicide before them.' A question elicited the fact that this odd sugges- tion was rhetorical.
So even the soldiers, today's guardians, can be corrupt. What did Papadopoulos expect? In any case, the Greeks have always been sus- picious of the 'state' and prepared to pay pro- fessionals to deal with it. In a time of general insecurity like the last year, the call for a change of attitudes is least likely to have effect. The goirernment's campaign against the middle- man has meant not that the ordinary citizen now brings his problems straight to the 'state,' but that he keeps quiet and tries to avoid contact with the state altogether. The quality of those who do raise their voices was aptly revealed in an announcement by Pattakos about certain signed accusations which had been sent to his department, referring to the activities of civil servants. On investigation, not only the charges but even the signatures turned out to be false. In future, said Pattakos, such denunciations, signed or not, would go straight into the waste paper basket. But what about the past twelve months?
It is an atmosphere in which the truth is in danger of disappearing, because the criteria for assessing it have been removed. One develops a permanent scepticism about what appears in the press, for fear of being taken in. It is preferable to believe nothing than every- thing. But there are still some things to believe. The government recently published in full, for instance, the International Red Cross report on conditions in the prison camps and hospitals. There was a reason for this at first sight surpris- ing course : it was hoped that the IRC report would be taken as a refutation of the charges of torture brought against the regime by Amnesty International and others. In fact the report does not invalidate other charges, which should be considered on their own merits. Nevertheless, it was encouraging that this soberly critical document was published; it found that while conditions and medical attention in the hospitals are satisfactory, the island camps are gravely inadequate : `Ghioura is clearly unsuitable for this sort of detention,' and neither of the two Leros camps is suitable for 'prolonged deten- tion.' The regime has acted on a few of the ntc's previous recommendations. It now remains to be seen whether it will act on the new practical suggestions for the reduction of overcrowding in the camps, the provision of decent reading matter, and the allowing of visits by members of prisoners' families.
The Greek people are at the moment being encouraged to help mould their future by taking part in a public debate on the new draft con- stitution, which was published in the press last month. Periodically the press publishes large forms entitled 'THE PEOPLE COMPOSE THE ARTICLES OF THE NEW CONSTITUTION.' Under the invitation 'Express your opinion freely,' a few articles from the new and the old, 1952, con- stitution are printed side by side. There follow the words 'My opinion is —,' and a few lines of dots for comments. These forms may be filled in, cut out and sent, postage free, to a 'Constitutional Committee' which will sort out the comments.
The idea is that this is an exercise in the education of the people in their rights and responsibilities. In reality one suspects that the constitution, which the government is going to revise later anyway 'in the spirit of the revo- lution,' has been thrown to the people, and especially to the press, as a sop. A free discus- iron of constitutional niceties, such as whether `Liberal' should be added to the definition `Royal Democracy,' is to compensate for lack of other freedoms. The tactic seems at first sight to have worked. Lawyers and even some ex- deputies have taken up the debate with glee in the columns of the press, making some sensible and many extremely silly suggestions. By the time the debate has finished and the participants have got their hatred for politicians out of their systems, anything the government proposes may well appear moderate by comparison. But it is in any case a false debate, although theoretically free, since it has been boycotted by Papandreou and Kanellopoulos, the leaders of the two major political parties. Their view is that, whether or not Greece needs a new constitution, it cannot accept a charter handed down by an uncon- stitutional regime.
It has been a sad year for Greece. The junta has removed or alienated far too many of the country's ablest men, such as the central bankers Xenophon Zolotas and John Pezmazoglu, at a time when Greece, after a fifteen year 'boom,' was facing acute political, social and economic problems. It has achieved price stability and a relative improvement in the balance of pay- ments at the cost of halving the country's growth rate. It now seems unable to counter- act the crisis of confidence among business and consumers, which is partly due to specific examples of government by hunch, but mainly to the simple fact of the existence of the junta and the consequent uncertainty over the future. It has promised to create a new responsibility in journalism and the public services. But respon- sibility is precisely what does not flourish under censorship. It is the day of the lunatic fringe. Eleftheros Kosmos printed recently the ravings of a general who wished to change by law all Slav or Turkish place names in Greece, and foreign surnames such as the Turkish —oglus. Estia spits venom daily at those it disapproves, the Swedes, the BBC, the socialists. In normal times it would be dismissed as an abusive, if sometimes amusing, rag. These days it is taken seriously. The junta is pretty well insulated from critical advice and warnings, and as the first year draws to an end the colonels .are congratulating them- selves. They have kept a tight grip on power, and maintained rather more cohesion than the Greek communist party, which is at present in- volved in one of its periodic bouts of fratricide. Next week they will be celebrating. A special series of coins is being struck to „mark the first anniversary. State monopoly matchboxes have just been equipped with the emblems of the regime, a dark soldier and a phoenix, on the label. And every newspaper now carries above the front page headline the words 'GREECE OF GREEK CHRISTIANS (George Papadopoulos).' That slogan anyway comes as no surprise.
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