THE NEW GREECE: PRELUDE TO FREEDOM?
Goldbloom, Maurice
August 12, 1974 The overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship was front-page news throughout the Western world. But in Greece, as in Spain, it was almost the only front-page news for many days...
...A similar situation exists in the Security Police and Gendarmerie...
...after some three weeks it was ordered for the Navy, but not for the other services...
...Several of the leading torturers in the Military Police and the Security Police were transferred out of those services and, after half a month of suspense, Ioannides himself was COMMENTS AND OPINIONS given six months' leave from active service "at his own request...
...And many of them were angry and ashamed because of the role that had been imposed on the armed forces in the suppression of the student revolt...
...But in Greece, as in Spain, it was almost the only front-page news for many days after it happened...
...And when a reader asked why this paper did not attack the Center Union leaders George Mavros and John Zigdis for trying to get other nations to cut off military aid to Greece, it replied that it only attacked those who were in a position to defend themselves...
...Several, from the right-wing National Radical Union (ERE), had been members of previous Karamanlis gov ernments...
...And interest payments on the billions of dollars the junta had borrowed at high rates in previous years added to the problem...
...But the divisions within the armed forces, which had led to his replacement, continued in a more acute form under his successors...
...There is some evidence suggesting that officers of this group had planned a coup to bring Karamanlis back last November, but that Ioannides had acted first, and that they had joined his coup so as to remain in a position to influence the course of events...
...If the government is to carry through the successful reestablishment of democratic insti tutions, and if those institutions are to be reasonably secure against another coup, a thoroughgoing purge of the armed forces and police is a matter of the highest priority...
...Even the Greek junta's most sanguine enemies, however, did not expect it to go the way of Portugal quite as quickly as it did...
...Many of them had gone along with the "Revolution" of April 21, 1967, because they assumed it was a traditionalist coup designed to prevent a sharp swing to the Left...
...But they objected to the subversion of military discipline that resulted when the colonels and majors who had carried out the coup gave orders to the generals...
...Here, in the Cyprus situation, and in the catastrophic state of the economy, lie the major obstacles to the restoration of Greek democracy...
...Pesmazoglou had become the recognized leader of the intellectual resistance to the junta, and went to the Cabinet directly from exile in a •small vil lage...
...the real rate was closer to 50 percent and perhaps higher...
...His successors, in the first few days following his overthrow last November, were hailed ecstatically by the great majority of the population...
...Under Papadopoulos it had the support of an estimated 8 percent of the population...
...The Military Police was reduced in numbers (though it still remains far more numerous than before 1967) and deprived of jurisdiction over civilians...
...Within this faction, further subdivisions existed...
...George Mavros, titular leader of the Center Union in Greece, became Deputy Pre mier and Foreign Minister, with the unenviable job of negotiating an end to the Cyprus con flict...
...The Greek commander of the Cyprus National Guard was replaced, but the other officers who conducted the coup against Makarios were left in place and probably will be until a Cyprus settlement is reached...
...The junta's adventure had left Greece the choice between a humiliating retreat and entering on an all-out war that would be predictably disastrous...
...General Davos, the commander of the Third Army, gave the government 24 hours to resign in favor of a political regime...
...It is obvious that the mere promise of veteran plotters to abstain from politics in the future has little value...
...Be that as it may, the overthrow of Papadopoulos left the two factions which had joined to accomplish it in a state of cold war with one another...
...So did George Mangakis, their fellow member of the resistance organization DemoCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS cratic Defense...
...And Turkey had almost three times the military strength of Greece, even without taking into account the demoralization of the Greek armed forces under the junta...
...If he could 472 have carried it off and united Cyprus to Greece, the achievement might have temporarily united the armed forces, if not the nation, behind him...
...August 12, 1974 The overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship was front-page news throughout the Western world...
...At the same time the income from invisibles, which had in any case never been adequate to cover even half the trade gap, was beginning to drop...
...Ioannides and his government yielded, President Gizikis called in a group of political leaders who advised him to ask former Premier Constantine Kara manlis to return from his exile in Paris and take over, and Gizikis acted on their advice...
...But it should have been clear from the beginning that the goals of the coup could not be obtained...
...The other main group consisted of traditionalist officers, mostly royalist...
...At this point, the traditionalist wing of the Army decided that it would neither put up with Ioannides any longer nor take on itself the responsibility for extricating Greece from the mess into which he had gotten it...
...They were unhappy when the sort of repressive measures, which they had approved against Left and Center, were turned against the political leaders and newspapers of the traditional Right...
...The weaknesses of the Greek dictatorship were obvious enough...
...they sought to ward off the evil omen by incanting assertions that "Greece is not Portugal" and "Those who would bring back the past should not take comfort in the events in Portugal...
...THE END OF THE DICTATORSHIP and the immediate release of all political prisoners give ample cause for rejoicing...
...But after that, when it became evident that they brought not liberation but a still more merciless tyranny, they had far less popular support than even Papadopoulos had enjoyed...
...He embarked on an adventure abroad, the Cyprus coup...
...They were especially strong in the Navy and Air Force, where the higher level of education and technological skill required had made it impossible for the junta to purge the officer corps as thoroughly as it would have liked...
...The balance of trade for the first four months of 1974 showed a deficit of about $1 billion, twice the already astronomical figure for the previous year...
...The stronghold of the other group was the Third Army, with headquarters in Salonica...
...But it would have been superfluous to do so, since everyone got the point...
...One, led by Dimitrios Ioannides, the notorious torturer who headed the Military Police, were the true believers of the 1967 coup...
...Seven years of the junta have left an economy heavily burdened by debt and one-sided concession agreements with Greek and foreign firms, and a lost war to be liquidated...
...Under the rigid press censorship Greek newspapers could not, of course, suggest that developments in Portugal were relevant for Greece...
...It took only a couple of days for Karamanlis to organize a "transitional government of na tional unity...
...Xenophon Zolotas and John Pesmazoglou, who took the major economic portfolios of Coordination and Finance, had been governor and deputy governor of the Bank of Greece before 1967 and had resigned together shortly after the coup...
...his men ran the ministries without regard to their nominal heads...
...They have also _left a 30,000-strong force of military police, deeply implicated in the worst of the junta's crimes, and large numbers of officers in all branches of the armed services who gained their commissions as a reward for their loyalty to the dictatorship...
...notably, a group of younger officers took Colonel Muammar el Qadaffi of Libya as their model and hoped to institute a sort of military collectivism...
...IT WAS IN THESE CIRCUMSTANCES that loannides resorted to the classic stratagem of rulers beset by domestic problems with which they are unable to cope...
...Even the reinstatement of officers dismissed by the junta has lagged...
...if events in Greece were to parallel those in Portugal, the return to parliamentarianism would take half a century...
...Turkey had proved on previous occasions that it would fight rather than permit "Enosis," the union of Cyprus with Greece...
...But they were also strong in the upper ranks of the regular Army...
...When Turkey invaded Cyprus in force, the game was up...
...They opposed Papadopoulos beCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS cause of the pervasive corruption of his regime and even more because of his relaxation of its original rigidity...
...Chase was willing, but could not round up a syndicate...
...The cabinet ministers included a wide range of political views...
...Even if they mean it today, they can be expected to have second thoughts when the present wave of popular enthusiasm gives way to resentment at the foreign policy retreats and economic sacrifices that the present situation demands...
...A politically isolated Greece, condemned for its aggression against Cyprus by world public opinion and almost every capital except Washington, faced Turkish military power on a scale that made the position of the Greek forces on Cyprus untenable...
...And the sort of austerity program Greece might have to undertake could have precipitated the downfall of the regime...
...The junta's journalistic spokesmen could not ignore it...
...Official figures showed an inflation rate of some 32 percent for the past year, but these were almost certainly manipulated...
...Such an answer would have been unthinkable for any Greek-language paper in Athens...
...New loans, even with a friend at Chase Manhattan, were almost impossible to get...
...Ioannides controlled the Military Police and through it the Athens area and the central government...
...They resented the abolition of the monarchy in favor of a "republic" in which power was concentrated in the hands of the self-elected President Papadopoulos...
...To them, the student demonstrations, which reached their climax in the revolt of November 1973, were the result of his attempt to placate world public opinion and the Greek opposition by such measures as partial amnesties, a relaxation of press censorship, and promises of eventual elections...
...At the same time the Papadopoulos loyalists in the Army now constituted a separate oppositional tendency...
...Two of the Greek representatives to the Socialist International, George Mylonas and Haralambos Protopapas, joined the cabinet as ministers of Transport and Industry respec tively...
...His overthrow had been accomplished by a temporary alliance of two major groups of officers who opposed him for opposite reasons...
...They were upset by the popular hostility to the armed forces that had developed as a result of their identification with the dictatorship...
...Again, the junta after Papadopoulos depended on the armed forces as it had under Papadopoulos...
...As the Ioannides group showed its inability to handle the affairs of the country, tensions between the two factions increased...
...But Greece's road back to democracy is by no means assured: as Virgil pointed out, the way to Hell is much easier than the way back...
...Besides its general unpopularity and the instability of its base in the armed forces, the Ioannides junta also found its position undermined by the catastrophic deterioration in the economic situation...
...One sign of this was that the traditionalist right-wing newspaper Ellenikos Vorras was able, under the protection of the Third Army, to print material that could not appear in Athens...
...So far, the new government has taken action against the junta's key personnel in the civilian services, but it has made few similar moves in the armed forces and police...
Vol. 21 • September 1974 • No. 4
