THE CHILDREN OF GREECE
Hourmouzios, like Mrs. Lambrides, has failed to find in the U.N. Committee's Report a single case of a parent whose child has been forcibly sent abroad. Further, his quotations, being incomplete, are completely misleading. Mr. Hourmouzios cites Chapter II, Section B, of the report to show that children have been removed from Greek villages. He omits to mention, however, that this section is not concerned with "forcible" removals, that being the subject of Chapter III. The only reference in Chapter II, Section B, to "forcible" removal is a reference to a list of names presented by Mr. Hourmouzios' Government "of some 1,000 Greek children who had allegedly been abducted." No further mention is made of this document and apparently its allegations were never substantiated by the Commission.
Mr. Hourmouzios cites Chapter III, Section A, of the report to show that "some children were taken from some villages without the consent of their parents." The actual evidence, however, consists in statements by" seventeen witnesses, most of them village mayors who had fled," and "a woman from the village of Lavara," saying that guerrillas had removed both adults and children from villages. No separation of adults and children is alleged, and no sending of the children abroad is alleged. The only case mentioned of alleged forcible seizing of children as such is a story told by one isolated woman (retold by Mr. Hourmouzios as if it was one of the Commission's findings), a rather tall story of twenty guerrillas being able to remove by force 150 children of all ages up to
eighteen from a single village. But even here there is no reference to sending the children abroad. Finally, Mr. Hourmouzios omits to mention the most significant passages from the summary of the reports of the, two observation groups concerned. "The summary report of Group 2 did not, however, establish the actual removal of children from its area to foreign countries." Group 6 concluded that "there is no evidence to indicate whether these children were abducted by force." (III.A.5.) Thus neither the observation groups nor the Commission as a whole found a single known case of a child forcibly taken from its parents and sent abroad. It is hard, therefore, to understand how certain people in Athens, London and Washington so readily assert that the opposite
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