Better News from Greece
There have been so many checks and disappointments in the course of the Greek civil war that the present tendency towards optimism must be qualified by the warning that everything may start all over again. All the same it does seem to be true that organised rebel resistance is at an end except in the area of the Grammos Mountains where they can still be directly supplied from across the border. It was therefore with good reason that Mr. Truman's seventh quarterly report to Congress on Greek aid was the most encouraging of the series. He was able to state that there had been a general improvement in the morale of the Greek people, and this is most noticeable in the steady tide of returning refugees who arc at last sufficiently confident to re-occupy their abandoned villages in the north. During the past three months about 250,000 of the 700,000 refugees have quitted the camps for their homes, and the stream back is still going on. The main factor in the rebels' discomfiture has undoubtedly been Marshal Tito's quarrel with the Kremlin, which now shows signs of reaching a new pitch of intensity. In spite of his ostracism by the Cominform, the Marshal obviously still regards himself as the predestined leader of all the Balkan peoples, and his brave boast that the peoples of Bulgaria and Albania would ultimately " extend their fraternal hand " to Yugoslavia was a more or less direct challenge to the present rulers of those two countries, since it was accompanied by the offer to help their subjects " to remove whatever individuals have so far put up obstacles to the creation and preservation of brotherly relations." If today relations in the Balkans are as little brotherly as they have ever been, it is as usual due to an overabundance of leaders who see themselves, and no one else, in the role of elder brother.
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