Slight Relaxation

Greece may be unpopular with other European governments, but it has never been more popular with European and American travelers. After a downturn in tourism in the wake of the 1967 military takeover, a record 1.3 million visitors are expected to flock to Greece's shores this summer, a 24% increase over 1969. The surge has given new impetus to Greece's economic boom. According to official estimates in Athens, the nation's growth rate in 1970 will equal or surpass last year's impressive 8%. Partly in a mood of gathering confidence and partly in an effort to placate opinion abroad, the country's ruling colonels have now taken some measures to relax their dictatorship.

Last week the regime announced the imminent release of about 500 leftists who were arrested after the 1967 coup. Those to be released had demonstrated, said a government spokesman, a "spirit of cooperation." Since 332 prisoners were released in April, some 600 less cooperative leftists are still in prison; the figure is nevertheless below the number of persons jailed for political reasons during the last years of the conservative pre-junta Karamanlis regime.

Cats and Snakes. The regime is lifting some of the rigid restraints on the arts and letters. It has even permitted a modest amount of criticism, though journalists can still be tried and jailed for publishing "antinational propaganda." It is best to keep criticism obscure, as in the case of Eighteen Texts, a book recently published in Athens. Though Greece is not specifically mentioned, it is plainly the subject. The opening contribution, a poem by Nobel Prizewinner George Seferis, recounts an old Cypriot tale in which a bunch of cats (read colonels) wipe out an invasion of snakes (read Communists), only to wind up poisoned by snake venom. A second story alludes to a remark of Premier Papadopoulos that contemporary Greece is like a patient in a plaster cast, which will be removed only when the patient is politically cured. In the story, a pair of mad doctors are zealously outfitting a man in a plaster cast from head to toe: such is the colonels' cure.

Greece's growing mood of relaxation has raised the question of whether that junta may soon allow free elections and relax martial law. But Premier George Papadopoulos still refuses to set a date for elections. The Greeks have such a passionate interest in politics, explains Papadopoulos, that they would lose interest in everything else if national elections were announced. Therefore he prefers that they take an interest in other countries' elections. As for the continuation of martial law, Papadopoulos insists that "it is a mere shadow. But men are restrained by this mere shadow more than they would be by the whole normal legal structure."

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