Revival and Revenge

During his three-month stay on the small Aegean island of Kea, George Papadopoulos, former head of the Greek military dictatorship that was toppled last July, became obsessed with a fanciful scenario. "We will be granted amnesty," Papadopoulos would tell the four junta leaders who shared his exile. "We will stand for Parliament. We will be elected. And finally we shall rule again."

Last week a harsher reality intruded. Picked up by a torpedo boat, whose commander was one of the hundreds of officers sacked by Papadopoulos, the five were sped to the port of Piraeus. From there they were taken to Korydallos prison and placed behind bars, along with the sixth member of the junta's inner circle, former Brigadier General Dimitrios loannidis. All six await trial on charges of insurrection and high treason. If convicted, they face a maximum penalty of death by firing squad.

In moving to prosecute the six, Premier Constantine Caramanlis responded to growing pressure. Preoccupied with the Cyprus crisis, which brings demonstrators into the streets of Athens with increasing frequency, Caramanlis had been under attack for being too lenient in dealing with former junta members and their collaborators. More than 100,000 people, including civil servants, judges, generals and university professors, who were appointed by the junta during its repressive seven-year reign have been dismissed by the Caramanlis government, but only about 50 face criminal charges. Under a parliamentary bill passed unanimously earlier this month, more than 250 army officers plus 150 ministers and top civil servants could be brought to trial--including the present Foreign Minister, Dimitrios Bitsios. Fearing the political instability that such a massive purge might provoke, Caramanlis hopes to avoid wholesale prosecutions. But the mood of the people is plainly vengeful.

After the junta's iron-fisted rule, Greece is now savoring the political and cultural freedoms of a revived democracy. But the new-found liberties, rather than mellowing the desire for retribution, seem to have inflamed it. Released from rigid censorship, almost every art form has been used to launch direct or indirect attacks on the junta.

The French-Algerian film Z--based on the 1963 assassination of a popular left-wing member of the Greek Parliament and banned by the junta when it was released in 1969--is now being shown in Athens for the first time. In the past five weeks a record 500,000 have seen it. When the film's hero, a young, tenacious prosecutor, penetrates an official cover-up and indicts six police officials for complicity in the murder, the audience almost invariably responds with a frenzy that verges on blood lust.

Similar reactions are inspired by several theater groups that are staging venomous musical satires of the Papadopoulos regime and the American CIA, which is popularly regarded as having propped up the junta. The works of German Playwright Bertolt Brecht, many of them banned by the colonels for their Marxist themes, are also enjoying a revival. Bookstores are stocking titles like Carlos Marighella's manual The Urban Guerrilla; a large readership is virtually guaranteed for any work by or about Che Guevara.

Antijunta Sentiment. At the invitation of the Caramanlis government, former BBC Director-General Sir Hugh Greene is doing a survey of Greek television and recommending ways to move the medium away from the staple fare of junta days: reruns of U.S. situation comedies. The army still controls one of Greece's two channels, but Parliament is now debating legislation to release it from the military's grip.

So intense is antijunta sentiment that demonstrations calling for execution of "the six" are now almost a daily occurrence. But however shrill the public clamor may become, the Caramanlis government is determined to resist anything resembling a Jacobean bloodletting. Says Press Minister Panayiotis Lambrias: "Perhaps it is a natural phenomenon. We saw it in France after the second world war. We saw it in Germany . . . But we have to respect the rules of democracy. When there are arrests, they must be legal." Lambrias has ample reason to understand the appeal as well as the danger of wholesale reprisals. A former journalist, he was imprisoned and tortured by the junta's military police in 1968 before escaping to exile in London.

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